October 26, 2009

This question just keeps coming up: How many cold calls should each AE make each week? The answer is: It depends! It depends on the talents of each of your AEs. I'm a huge fan of the concepts in the book, "Soar With Your Strengths," by Donald O. Clifton and Paula Nelson. Their theory is that you play to your strengths and manage your weaknesses.

Your sales staff is a group of individuals with different strengths and weaknesses. If you have sellers who are great at transactional selling and simply can't do well on cold calls, why would you impose a "20 cold calls a week" rule on them? That's not to say you shouldn't push them to do more as they have time, but don't pull them away from what they do well just to satisfy an artificial rule made to show corporate you are doing something about the tough advertising climate.

Probably a better rule for them would be to impose a rule forcing them to make more face-to-face calls with their existing clients to mine already fertile ground. Work with these sellers to make those face-to-face calls more like a cold call, pushing something their clients would not normally buy. New revenue is new revenue no matter how you get it.

At the same time you need to push AEs with cold-call talent to increase their efforts.

You have done contests for new business and you should continue those contests, but how about a creative contest for the transactional people when they bring in new business from existing clients? I'm not talking about only contests on special sales, but any new, non-availed business from their transactional clients.

Don't take the lazy way out and demand the same number of cold-calls/face-to-face calls for all AEs. Be creative and push each person toward his/her strengths.