In MSP sales, it’s well known that cold calling is much harder during the summer months, when vacations create scheduling conflicts everywhere. However, that should not stop your MSP from making this useful strategy as effective as it can be.
While I personally take most of the summer off to spend with my children, my company still runs at full steam ahead. We do not stop calling in the summer for a very important reason.
For every month you or your team isn’t calling, you’ll lose one full quarter of follow up activity. Meaning you’ll have no “He’ll be back on July 7, call him then” type activities to follow up on. You’ll also likely drop your scheduled to-dos when you fall out of your calling rhythm.
If you have taken any of our cold calling courses, you will already know that our best practices around cold calling include developing your own personal process and commitment to consistent outbound calling. You identify a time that you will use for your “new outbound” activities, and you identify a separate time for your “follow up outbound” activities.
Put yourself in the right place at the right time
During “cold calling time”, which is set in stone on your calendar and honored like a commitment to a valued client, you will conduct all of your new “cold” outbound activities. During your “follow up” time, you will send and reply to email requests, write thank you notes to people who have given you referrals, and make follow up calls to prospects you are already engaged with. This is how you establish consistency in cold calling process, and how you eventually win new business. So much of cold calling is being in the right place at the right time.
The biggest component to successful outbound is identifying that right time. If you stop your outbound rhythm, I can guarantee you the next thing to go will be your follow up rhythm, which means you’ll miss important call backs. If your competitor is prospecting this summer, and you miss your committed follow up activity due to complacency or a false belief that nobody works during the summer, or because you just felt like ditching work early to drink a beer on the patio – your next quarter will suffer, and so will your year end.
If you have added prospecting to your outbound strategy, you should have created a forecast and sales goal along with it. Let’s say 100 conversations leads to one meeting, and it takes 500 calls to have 100 conversations, and three meetings equals one new MRR deal. Can you afford to skip ANY of your outbound activity and still hit your sales goal for the quarter, or for the year?
Take advantage of the opportunity
While your competitors are golfing, relaxing or just plain ignoring cold calling as “dead” or a “waste of time,” you will be keeping your commitments to your prospects, checking in and staying top-of-mind, and identifying when the best time to reach decision makers will be. You’ll be gathering new data on every call.
You don’t need to talk to a decision maker to learn how many computers they have, how they receive IT support, who they work with now, and when their contract may be up for renewal. You can speak to anyone about these things, and begin developing relationships with champions (the controller or office manager) and influencers (receptionists, support team members, sale reps).
Remember, not all CEOs spend all summer golfing or surfing with their kids. If you haven’t already started a cold calling initiative, and you are a business owner or leader considering it, this will be the one time I will tell you to wait until fall – but only if you live in a seasonal area (meaning, if the weather where you live is consistently temperate you can begin cold calling whenever you want). One or two hours of outbound a day during the summer with no clean data and no follow up activities scheduled won’t be the best use of your time.
If you’re going to hire a new cold caller, summer is a great time to get that person in, trained to your corporate culture, educated on all of your offerings, and have them begin sorting out your new list. Get that list cleaned up and functional before the fall, so they can hit the ground running and start prospecting successfully with no wasted dials in September.
As always, we would love to help you prospect better, get more appointments, and close more deals. If the idea of doing it yourself doesn’t appeal, we’re here to support you! We’ll teach you how to prospect, we’ll teach your team how to prospect, we can create your entire prospecting process for you, or we can just take the whole thing off your plate so you can dedicate yourself to running your business, focusing on innovation and growth, or just go surfing with your kids in Cabo this summer (like myself).
See you in the fall! Happy Selling!
Photo: Berkomaster / Shutterstock
