Sales is not a numbers game, it’s a performance game. Sure, you definitely need to make enough contacts on a daily/weekly basis to get results. At the end of the day, however, it comes down to how well you perform the activities that are associated with making those contacts.
And I’m not just talking about phone calls.
Emails, texts, phone calls, handwritten notes — no matter what the medium — are activities needed to start and continue the conversion process.
Ultimately, your goal is to get in front of your prospects so you can earn their business and secure their listing.
As it stands, there are a lot of contact strategies you can use to make this face-to-face meeting a reality.
Some are better than others, but when you work all of them at their highest level, you can improve your contact ratios dramatically and impact your sales results significantly.
Here are some of the best ways to make contact with your leads.
Speed of Response
In the world of sales, nothing, and I mean NOTHING will impact your ability to contact prospects than your speed of response.
Loosely defined, speed of response means how fast you get to your leads - specifically those that you generate online or call into you - after they raise their hand showing any level of interest.
It’s important to note here that speed of response only matters when you have good contact information.
In a prior blog post, I talk about how there’s no such thing as a bad lead. In it, I clarify that a lead with no contact information is not really a lead at all.
It’s just a name on which you really can’t follow up at all - fast, slow or otherwise.
Just wanted to clear that up before I move on.
Now, where was I? Yes...speed of response.
The faster you call your leads, the more likely it is you’ll make contact with them.
In fact, the odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by over 10 times in just the first hour. This graphic shows us how waiting even an hour can hinder your efforts to reach someone significantly.
If you can’t make contact with your leads, your business can and will come to a screeching halt.
Knowing this, it’s crucial that you or your Inside Sales Agent ( ISA ) make a Herculean effort to contact every lead that comes in the door immediately.
The faster you respond, the faster you contact your prospects. Period.
The great news is that speed of response can also have a huge impact on your conversion rate, too.
Granted, responding in one minute is a high standard, but the outcome is so worth it.
If you can respond in even 5 minutes, you’ll get in contact with a significantly larger number of prospects and increase your conversion significantly as a result.
Force Multiplier Strategy
Force multiplication is the basic principle in active warfare that decidedly boosts the power of the “forces” that you put to work in overcoming an opponent.
For instance, a machine gun is a force multiplier for a rifle.
What’s even better, using multiple multipliers has an even bigger impact to the point that a smaller force can take on and even defeat a bigger force.
In the military, this would look like attacking the enemy by air, by sea, by land, etc.
In the world of contacting prospects, the force multiplier strategy is applied through the various methods of contact, i.e., touch points, that you can employ in trying to reach home sellers to convert them to appointments and then sales.
If you make calls, you’ll contact a certain population of your leads because some of them may never answer their phones or check voicemails regularly.
If you add text messaging, then you you increase the chance you’ll make contact with more of them.
If you add emails, then you increase your chance of contact even more.
There’s also direct mail, door knocking, contact via social media, video, radio, referrals, smoke signals, etc...all of them increase the incidence of contact.
The more touch points you access, the more prospects with whom you’ll make contact.
You simply can’t rely on phone and email as the sole means of reaching out to prospects if you want to make solid contact with them.
You must access every touch point as often as you can and automate as much of it as you can to increase your contact rates across the board.
Time of Day
The time of day that you call or email someone is equally as important as the frequency with which you attempt to contact them.
The data suggests that by making calls and sending emails at the right times of the day, your ability to contact prospects increases substantially, giving you way better results in your prospecting efforts.
Let’s look at the statistical data for phone and email separately.
Phone
The two best times of the day are 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. and then 8 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. As you can see, the likelihood of making a contact at times other than that drop dramatically at other times of the day.
Now, does this mean you shouldn’t attempt to make calls at other times of the day? No.
It simply means that you’ll have a much better chance of making contact with them if you call them during these two time frames.
My suggestion would be that you make these two times of the day sacred with respect to prospecting.
Same thing here; it’s better to send an email than to not send one.
That said, you’re going to get your email opened more if you send your emails at 6:00 a.m., 10 a.m., 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Again, automation would be super helpful in your email efforts, especially for the 6:00 a.m. slot.
Being strategic in your approach to contacting prospects is important as part of your overall conversion strategy.
Rather than calling when you can as often as you can, put a plan together and contact people with the intent of doing so when you are more likely to reach them.
Doing so will enhance your overall conversion results in a very positive manner.
A word of caution here: if you miss the optimal time to call and/or email on any given day, still make the calls and send the emails.
Taking action is better than doing nothing, for sure.