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Experience is not a substitute for the pre-call plan

Written by: Todd Youngblood

Article Overview: Every now and then it's a good idea to re-visit one of those "everybody knows that" concepts and do a hard-nosed self-assessment regarding our personal sales performance. Always, always pre-plan every sales call, right?

Experience is not a substitute for the pre-call plan

Scheduling and getting a face-to-face call with a decision maker is a non-trivial exercise. Well executed calls on decision makers are the stuff of which sales "living legends" are made. Poorly executed sales calls (i.e., those that accomplish nothing and therefore waste a decision maker's time) are the main source of "former sales reps" now embarked on a new - less challenging/rewarding - career.

Those three facts, along with plain old common sense demand that we plan out every call beforehand. Here's one format that's simple and gets the job done:

• Who? Name, company and title of the callee
• What? The main topic of the call
• When? Obvious, but significant (First thing Monday morning requires a different approach than last thing Friday afternoon, for example)
• Where? Ditto (Customer's office or conference room? Your office or conference room? Neutral site?)
• Why? This is the biggie... What is your objective? What actions do you want the customer to take as a result of this call?
• How? One-on-one conversation? PowerPoint? Sales Aids? References?
• Major Points? What are the three to five major points that you must make?

Personally, I have the above outline saved in a Word document named "aashell.doc" in a folder called "CallPlans." Every time I plan a call, I pull it up, rename it something like "JoeCustomer0704.doc" and then type out and save my plan.

Also, as always, no best practice is worth beans without a metric or two to measure its and our own effectiveness. Classify your calls. For example:

• Doughnut Drop - Any call with a primary objective of "relationship-building"
• Routine Call - Calls that are necessary, important or required, but if screwed up, won't kill me
• Critical Call - I better be good on this call, or I'm in deep yogurt.

What % of your calls fall in each category? Is the trend what you'd like it to be?

One last thought; question really... How much planning time is appropriate for each type of call? A doughnut drop might not require any. (So tell me again why you're making that call in the first place?) A routine call might deserve a 1 to 1 ratio. That is, allocate one hour of planning time for a one-hour routine call. A critical call is probably at least 4 to 1. Four hours of planning for a one-hour call.

Yeah, I know. You already knew all of the above. But do you practice what you preach regarding pre-call planning?

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Article Tags: biggie, common sense, decision maker, decision makers, ditto, doughnut, first thing monday morning, friday afternoon, li li, living legends, main source, objective, rewarding career, sales aids, sales reps, strong one, trivial exercise, ul, word document, worth beans



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