Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, I noticed I was late
Found my jacket grabbed my hat
Made my car in seconds flat
Arrived at the office and had a smoke
And somebody spoke and I went into a dream
Ah, I read the sales board today, oh boy
Four hundred copiers sold in one month
And though the copiers were kind of small
They had excellent spiffs for them all
Then, I woke up and it was the beginning of "Day 10".
I do love those lyrics for A Day in the Life" from the Beatles, and for some reason they were on my mind on my drive to my first appointment.
I was pretty excited about this appointment because it was net new prospect, I had cold called this location a few months ago, and this would be my third appointment.
Let me back track a bit, a few weeks ago, I had stopped in for my second visit with this client. After a few minutes I found that there was quite a bit of interest in a wide format scanner/printer. The client tasked me with a few items to research, the first was to give the client a list of the different type of substrates that the system could print on, and the second was some full color samples. I had emailed the list of substrates a few days before, and yesterday I called and left a message that I had the samples ready and would drop them off at 9AM. In addition I added this statement to the voice mail. "if tomorrow at 9AM is not good for you, please call me, otherwise I will be there at 9AM."
I've used this message on many occasions to schedule an appointment when I believe the client is too busy too call me back. I've even used this in the past to schedule a few on site demonstrations. Every now and then I'll get someone who didn't like the approach, but more often than not, the prospect is ready and waiting for me. In this case the prospect was there and acknowledged that he did get my message from yesterday.
After thirty minutes or so, an opportunity was created, the prospect wanted pricing, and I closed with. "I'll have that in a day or so and would it be ok to bring that to you next Tuesday at 9AM?" There was no way I was going to email the proposal, or leave with out setting another appointment. Thus, I was able to kill two birds with one stone.
I arrived back at the office about 11AM, did not do any cold calls while I was out, because I'm down to the last few days of the month and I need to make things happen. Making things happen was too follow up with all of my opportunities and to see who I could move forward to a closing appointment.
After lunch, I found out that my 4PM appointment was not going to be there. I had the entire afternoon to figure out who is going to fish or cut bait. Most of my opps fell into the cut bait category and I had to move them off to November. I was able to identify five accounts that had a chance to close before the end of the month. It's tough when you empty the pipeline in the previous quarter, you've just go to keep building prospect after prospect.
I did have one awesome call, even though this client moved the purchase time line out two additional weeks. I was able to find out my competitors, what models they were presenting along with the costs for the hardware and maintenance/supply agreements. I have enough ammo now that I think I have a better than average shot of closing this net new account also
From 3:30PM till 5PM, I made about 20 or so follow up calls, and developed my next list of prospects to call. End result of the day, one net new opp created and scheduled two additional appointments for next week.
BTW, I'm getting tired of this not having an order in 7 days!
Amount Sold Today = 0
Total Revenue to Date = $2K
New Opportunities Created Today= $11K
Total New Opportunities Created = $146
-=Good Selling=-
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