Greg's Right FIT #567–This week: Phone calls, Enlightening, Living

Quick notes to help you find new business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week.

In this issue: 

• Thoughts about Sales Phone Calls
• Being Human
• Random Stuff
• Back In The Day

Thoughts about

• Most B2B phone calls looking for appointments will end up in voicemail. It makes sense to practice. Try to keep the message under 30 seconds because statistically long voicemails get fewer callbacks.
• Calling a referral is more effective than making a cold call. How much more effective? According to sales rep surveys, it cuts the appointment failure rate in half. We don't spend nearly enough time asking for referrals.
• Managers and reps have different views on the effectiveness of sales training on prospecting calls. Part of the disconnect is the definition of terms. Incremental increases in organizational effectiveness feels bigger than individual progress.
• The number one way to limit rep turnover is providing inbound leads. Unfortunately, that's also the way to significantly reduce the number of outbound calls reps make. We're wired for shortcuts.

Being Human – Enlightening prospects

Fifteen years ago we were talking about when the internet was going to replace salespeople. Today it's when is AI going to replace salespeople, but my answer is the same, best explained by my 2x2 chart. The first sales jobs to go are in the lower left. Set budget, "simple" solution products. The last jobs to go will be the upper right, "complex" or custom solution products.

The reason is because products in the upper right need salespeople and marketers to "enlighten" prospects as to what's possible. Products in the lower left are known. We know how they work and how much we're willing to pay. Upper right solutions tend to elicit a, "I didn't know we could do that," response from prospects.

Keep this in mind when hiring salespeople. Especially if you're a startup. There are some established companies with very expensive products that do not require prospects to be enlightened. Simple and fixed budget don't automatically mean cheap. Look carefully at their market and their territory before making a decision.

Random Stuff

I watched a video of an AI robot cleaning someone's house. It seems like a good idea. It's the kind of inexact work this tech might be perfect for.

As part of my work I look at a lot of sales tools. Most of them AI adjacent these days. One my son introduced me to seemed like it might be helpful for lead generation, but wasn't. That's the way it is with a lot of these tools. As I wrote about in issue #44 and THBGTBG book, if you start with process and try to find tech to fit outcomes are good. If you start with the tech and re-engineer your process it leads to trouble.

This same entrepreneur launched a new version of his tool under a new name and I was a beta tester. It's an MCP you can hook into Claude and I am finding it useful. It takes a piece of my client's sales prospecting and automates it. It is saving their reps hours in a week so they can make more calls.

If you heard the news about a terrible plane crash in Florida a few weeks ago you heard this entrepreneur 's name. He and his family were in the plane and died. He was 44 and the kids were under 5. A terrible tragedy for everyone on board.

Unrelated, I saw a quote this morning attributed to Charles De Gaulle, "The graveyards are full of indispensable men." It's true. We're only here for a short time. If we knew how long it was going to be, what would we be doing differently right now?

Morbid thoughts, I know.

(It's probably because I killed another character in my murder mystery this morning. Had to be done. Loose ends are easy to tie up in a murder mystery.)

Back in the Day

What I was thinking about last year, five years ago, and ten years ago.

• Last Year: Right FIT #515 – I put up those old party pics and sent them around to friends. Those kids in the pics are close in age to my grandchild than I am! Man, time flies. Wouldn't want to go back and do it again though! (well, maybe some things. . .but not the whole thing!)
• Five Years Ago: Right FIT #306 – I moved hosting companies a few times in the last ten years and some of the archived newsletters are missing the pictures. Not to complain, but man, whoever organized my image files needs to find new work. Maybe the AI could do something about that.
• Ten Years Ago: Right FIT #44 – Great joke from my wife's grandfather. A surgeon with a dry, dry sense of humor. Happy belated Veterans Day to the Veterans.