Contacts contacts contacts. Here are the numbers from the old McGraw Hill study. Ay least McGraw Hill gets credit for it. I have also seen it accredited to the National Association of Sales Executives. Whoever wrote it seems pretty accurate as far as my experience is concerned.
According to McGraw Hill:
- 48% of salespeople never follow up with a prospect
- 25% of sales people make a second contact
- 12% of sales people only make three contacts
- 10% of sales people make more than three contacts
- 2% of sales are made on the second contact
- 5% of sales are made on the third contact
- 10% of sales are made on the fourth contact
- 80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact
These numbers are important because if you’re in sales, or are managing producers, then you already know leads are your lifeline. The best leads come from referrals, but man cannot live on referrals alone, which means we have to utilize various marketing tactics to generate new and hopefully qualified leads and this cost money. So why is it that we tend to pick the “low hanging fruit” and throw the rest away, or procrastinate so long that we might as well have thrown them away?
When things are slow we have time to generate leads and then we become victims of our own success in that we are bogged down handling renewals and setting up new clients, so who has time to call a prospect who had marginal interest?
A solution could be to set up a contact regimen and have someone already on staff make scheduled calls to your database of warm leads to try and set appointments. The goal should be to build a database of x-dates prospects sorted by renewal date so that someone can systematically call and set new business appointments for you while you work your referral network and service your existing accounts. If you don’t have the talent in-house, outsource it. We would be happy to discuss it with you. The important thing is to make sure your agency is in the 10% of businesses who make more than three contacts.