Episode 13: Are You Missing Funnel Growth Opportunity by not Doing This ONE Thing?
I want you to think about your morning habit. Do you rub your eyes right when you wake up? Do you brush your teeth before or after you shower? Do you hop on the scale as you walk into the bathroom? My habit is probably very much like yours. My alarm goes off, I groan, then roll over and check my phone.
Now, is this the ideal habit? Maybe not, but it’s hard to break.
I’ve been researching habits over the past few months, and it’s a big topic. Habits are part of our brain. Our brain was designed for habits and that’s why it’s so easy to turn left out of your neighborhood, toward your kids school, when you really mean to turn right. It’s a habit, and it doesn’t make you a dingbat, as my dad used to call me growing up, it makes us very normal.
And if we understand habits, we can harness their power to make our lives better. To make us healthier, to improve our relationships, to lose weight, or whatever it is that we want to do. A study out of Duke University found that more than 40% of the actions people perform each day aren’t actual decisions, but rather habits.
Since this is a podcast about sales, I’m going to focus on what we can do in our daily lives to improve our habits from a sales perspective.
First I want you to understand just how much habits are truly biology. It’s not just opinion or even research studies that show habits to be compelling. There are actual brain scans.
Lisa Allen was a participant in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. She was having a rough time, her husband had left her, she was broke, overweight, you get the picture. At rock bottom. So she set herself a goal. She wanted to get to Egypt and trek through the desert.
From this one decision, her habits changed drastically. She got fit, started eating healthy, and so on. But here’s where it gets interesting. They took brain scans of her each consistently, as she worked toward her goal and her habits started changing. The areas of her brain that craved food and booze were unchanged, but there was new activity in the brain where behavioral inhibition and self-discipline are housed. It had become more pronounced.
There’s a lot more detail on this study in the book the Power of Habit, if you want more details. But the bottom line is that habits are a function of the BRAIN. It’s physical, and because of the power of this, we can use habits to help us sell more.
How?
Think of things that you can do to increase your sales. What are some things that will have a direct impact:
Working longer hours – maybe that could work…but there is truth to the saying work smarter, not harder.
Up-selling your existing customers. Possibly. But you’re probably already bleeding that well dry.
Doing more cold-calling. You might be rolling your eyes. Yeah, yeah, you know should cold-call more. But you don’t have time. You have to get those expense reports done. Your boss needs your funnel updates. You KNOW you should be cold-calling more, but it’s a pain and creates more work. But think about it like this. Think about how many assigned accounts you have. Let’s say you have 200. And if you go through and count, let’s say 30 of them are really good customers that buy from you a lot. 20 are customers that buy from you, but don’t seem to have as much money. And you’re making a fine living off these 50 customers. In fact, you’re busy. So that means that 150 accounts belong to someone else. That’s a lot of opportunity. What if you could convert just a few of them this year? Just 2? How much would that increase your sales? You could go from being 115% to quota, which is great, to 200%. That’s a big difference. That’s worth exploring habits, right?
So how can we harness the power of habit for cold-calling?
Well, it depends on whether you’re an established sales rep, or a new one. It will look very different for each of these categories. Let’s talk about established reps first:
No one likes cold-calling. It’s painful. It’s so easy to prioritize everything else. We must make it a HABIT. Something you won’t talk yourself out of doing. So you can’t prioritize your laundry, friendly customer calls, or even expense reports over it. I recommend that you set yourself a recurring calendar invite for one hour per week to cold-call. Just start doing it. Week after week.
I recommend Wednesday mornings, as that is shown to be a very effective time to get in touch with customers, but it can be anytime that works for you. You might want to think about what time of day you’re at your best. If you’re a morning person, do morning for sure. Monday mornings are a bad idea, but pretty much any other morning is okay. If you’re not a morning person, move it back a bit. Find something you think you can stick with. At first, you might be tempted to brush it off. The cable company wants to come fix your cable box on Wednesday morning, so you allow it and figure you’ll get to it another time. But this doesn’t create a habit. Put the calendar invite into your computer, and hold that time sacred. Don’t let anything else interfere with your weekly prospecting. Even if you don’t feel like it. Even if you have a proposal that REALLY needs to go out. Even if people are calling you during that hour. Hold that hour sacred. Don’t let anything interfere with it.
Do the rest of your routine. Exercise, shower, drink your coffee, and then get to your desk on time for your hour.
Eventually, when you think of Wednesdays, you’ll think of it as your cold-calling day. Study after study shows that habits are choices that we make deliberately at some point, that eventually we stop thinking about and just continue doing.
As you’re making the calls, if you say something that makes someone laugh in a good way, or makes someone take your appointment, write it down. And try saying that on your next call. And your next. Take notes about what works, and eventually, you’ll not only be in a habit of making the calls, you’ll be in a habit of saying what works. For a period of time, I was making 50-100 calls per day, in an attempt to get insurance professionals to participate in a research study. It was grueling at times, but I found something that worked, and I was eventually saying the exact same thing to each person. And my success rate was extremely high. If I could just get them on the phone, I had a 75% chance of getting them to agree to participate. This was much higher than anyone else, and it was simply because I got myself into some routines that worked, and I stuck with them.
If you can get in the habit of doing one hour of calling each week, you should be able to make at least 20-30 calls during that hour, followed up by emails to each customer. Out of those 20-30 calls, let’s say your meeting success rate is 5%. Well, you should be able to book at least 1-2 new meetings each week from that hour. That’s 50-100 meetings that you would NOT have had if you didn’t make weekly prospecting a habit. So, out of those 50-100 meetings, what if you can convert just 2 of them over from your competition? And let’s say one of them is needing all new equipment. This is all money directly in your pocket, and let’s face it. Sales people are motivated by money. That’s just a fact, and it’s okay to admit it.
For new sales reps, you HAVE to cold-call. You can’t get out of it, and you probably don’t have that much else to do. But it’s still easy to prioritize other tasks ahead. Maybe you need to check things off your to-do list. Or maybe you need to learn a new system, so you find yourself doing all that and when Friday comes, you realize you haven’t been making as many calls as you should have.
So, similar to established reps, you need to create a habit. But this time, it’s not just once per week. It’s daily. Maybe several times per day. First, you need to figure out how many meetings you can handle. How far away are your customers? How big are your deals in comparison to your monthly or yearly quota?
Let’s say you establish that you can meet with 5 customers per week. You need to be making at least 100 calls per week to get you started. That’s a 5% success rate. As you do more, you may get better, but for now, let’s assume 5% success rate.
So, to make 100 calls per week, you need to average 20 per day. But I wouldn’t recommend you do Mondays, and Fridays aren’t ideal either, so let’s split that out to Tuesday – Thursday. Again, think about yourself. You need to be fresh and friendly on the phone. So pick at time. I recommend 9:00, but cater to your personal strengths. And again, set a calendar invite. You would probably need at least 1 and a half or two hours to get in all your calls. So, set aside 9-11 as your calling times. And again, just don’t let yourself get talked out of this. Do it. Every day. Sit down at your desk and come up with a routine.
Eventually you’ll start getting appointments and you can cut down your calling times, but for now, this is a must.
There is a lot more to learn about habits. As I said, it’s a HUGE topic, and can be used to create exercise habits, healthy eating habits, and so on. If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.
That’s it for now! Please make sure to connect with my on LinkedIn, and subscribe to my newsletter for all the updates!
Links:
MMS Consulting (My Consulting company)
Brightside Speakers (My agent)
