This is arguably the hardest thing you will ask a salesperson to do, the part of the job they really hate. They normally have a planning day to make appointments, follow up quotes and catch up with any paper work.

The appointment making is the part where they come unstuck. You normally have the sales manager demanding X number of appointments per week as we all know all sales departments play the numbers games. The more people you call, the more appointments you make, the more quotes you will do, the more orders you will get. That part is only common sense. However by working smarter in marketing imagine you come into work on a morning and your inbox is full of requests from people who actually wanted to see you, your appointment planning becomes a lot easier.

Just to re-emphasize that point Let me run the following past you

You are a Sales manager and you request each of your sales team members to do 16 appointments per week. Now the Salesperson will know of 5 or 6 companies that they need to see in that week so they will ring up, hopefully get in touch with the person they need to see and make the appointment. They will do this to all six companies and if they are really lucky, make 6 appointments. General rule is they will make four and two call backs on the companies they could not appoint. You now have an experienced Sales person who still has 12 appointments to make and no idea where they will come from. So what do they do, they start cold calling, hoping beyond hope that they will manage to find 12 potentials with a need for their product and the budget to buy it. Desperation sets in because they want to keep you happy with the 16 calls you have targeted them to make. They will practically beg customers to let them visit even though they do not have an application or budget. The result is your Salespeople turn into talking brochure and they end up wasting both their time and the customers. Let me ask you a question. Do you know how much it cost’s to send a sales person on a visit? Multiply that figure by the number of appointments that are potentially talking brochure calls and multiply that by 38 weeks, you’ll be horrified at the wasted cost

To put a Sales person on the road we will use the figure of £100,000. This includes Salary, car, hotels, fuel and support staff. (Please enter your own figure)

If we use 38 weeks this will account for holidays, sales meetings and training So 16 appointments per week X 38 weeks equals 608 appointments per year The cost to put a sales person on the road in our example we have used £100,000

So the average cost per sales visit is £164.47

If in our example you are doing 12 calls per week that are none value added i.e. talking brochure you could be wasting

12 X 38 X £164.47 = £74,998.32

That's why you need first class marketing. I was once told "If you are bad at marketing you have to have a damned good sales team"

Alan Gray sales consultant http://www.issmarketing.com