Why Are Sales Calls Harder?
Does it ever happen to you to feel like you are chasing people all day long? Welcome to the club! This is a very common sensation that applies across any discipline, and it is particularly impactful for Sales-related roles, which require a high degree of quality communication.
Why are Sales professionals experiencing this ever increasing difficulty to get in contact with somebody through a traditional call?
In this article, I will share with you my point of view on the reasons behind this issue.
In the past 12 years, I have been lucky to closely work with successful Sales professionals, and I have been able to observe how their days are impacted by the need for communicating with other people, in order to fulfill their duties. Given my Product Management soul, I could not help myself and I started envisioning a “coarse” taxonomy to help me categorize the relevant personas and their problems:
Hunter or Inside Sales Representative (ISV)
Although the ISV and the Hunter are different roles, from the communication perspective, they have similar needs: calling outbound, whether from a desk or on the go, to generate deals, populate the Sales pipeline and often advance such deals throughout the entire process.
Despite the industry moving from cold-calling to pre-heated calling, with the latter offering better performance, various recent studies seem to converge on an average 1–3% success rate. Why is it so low?
Account Manager (AM)
Establishing a healthy trustworthy relationship with a customer is key to longevity and ultimately success. It is fundamental for a customer to feel important (in fact she/he is!), and the AM is often striving to fulfill her/his requests as soon as possible. Often, especially for complex enterprise products, finding the right information to promptly answer an inquiry may be stressful and time consuming, given the need to involve multiple internal actors from different business units, almost always not feeling the same AM urgency.
For the AM, calling is the fastest way to retrieve the much needed information, and, in case of urgency, it is the first action that she/he takes. The problem is the receiver of the call who does not answer, and the AM is forced to fall back on asynchronous time-consuming messaging. Why is it so hard to get a colleague on a call?
Sales Leader
I intentionally kept this category very broad. Any leader who runs a Sales organization (typically, a high-pressure/high-intensity job) needs to frequently contact the various professionals working for her/him, as well as key customers and other internal stakeholders. I have met Sales Managers keeping a 20-item long daily “to-call” list; at the end of a day chasing people and leaving Voicemail messages, only half of the calls on that list are marked as done, and the remaining 10+ items roll over to the following day. Why isn’t your team answering your calls?
Please, note that for simplicity I haven’t included other Sales-related roles like Sales Engineers, Solution Architects, etc.; however, they experience very similar calling issues.
The Speeding Paradox
The ever-increasing pace of our society imposes speed and reactivity, especially in a highly competitive Sales environment; however, strangely enough, among all the currently available productivity tools, the emerging winners are the ones promoting asynchronous communication, e.g. messaging apps, and synchronous scheduled communication, e.g. meeting apps.
These emerging trends appear counterintuitive when we think about how much more we could achieve, in the short-term, by calling someone, especially if the other party picks up the phone and talks to us for as much as needed. Wait a second… Isn’t this what happened 30 years ago, when people used to stop what they were doing to rush to the phone not to miss a call?
So, how did we get where we are today? Why is calling someone so much harder?
The Answer is to be found in Technological and Cultural Evolution
There are several social phenomena that contribute to the current status:
Spam Calls
Do you answer calls from unknown caller IDs or numbers you don’t know?
Receiving 3 or more unsolicited calls per day became the norm in the last few years. In 2020, Americans received 46 Billion robocalls, about half of them were scams; and that’s only one type of unsolicited call.
As a consequence of this bombardment, exhausted users turn their phone silent during most of the day, unless they are waiting for an important call. Clearly, with less users noticing calls, the chances of getting your Sales call answered are lower.
Call Blocking Filters
When you see a visible unknown number calling you without leaving a Voicemail message, the assumption is that it is a spam call, and, therefore, the number is often added to the blacklist without further investigation, inevitably reducing the success rate of Sales calls.
Focus on Personal Productivity
Fast pace and competitiveness are common traits of modern companies; there is a strong collective belief that planning will lead to better overall productivity; as a consequence, many people overplan their lives. Calendars are becoming increasingly cluttered, at the point of having triple or quadruple bookings for the same time slot. The busier the “planned life”, the less room for impromptu conversations, the more the need for planning conversations (more calendar events): it’s a vicious circle.
While, on the one hand, this dynamic probably improves personal productivity in exchange for an onerous time investment in planning your life, on the other hand, it hinders the performance of a team facing high pressure situations, where timely conversations allow you to win a deal, or preempt your unsatisfied customer to shop around for a more responsive vendor.
Too Many Communication Channels
Until two decades ago, the only remote collaboration tool we had at our disposal was a landline or cellular phone. Despite their limitations, phones were our only option, and often a display of social status.
With smartphones and large broadband coverage came many more opportunities for richer ubiquitous productivity. At the same time, the myriad of communication apps made it very hard to predict the best channel to get in contact with someone, especially when the person to call is not a close friend or a family member.
Some of these collaboration-oriented apps provide integrated presence, which is a huge advantage versus traditional calling. After adding a number to Contacts, more and more people find out that the added person uses an app like WhatsApp and has been active recently; that information alone provides a great affordance to initiate a text-based conversation through that channel, rather than taking a leap of faith and “forcing” someone to talk through an unlikely-answered traditional call.
What’s in the Future?
Let’s start with a certainty: today, the way Sales activities are organized and carried out is suboptimal, and there is still a ton of room for improvement.
My prediction for the next 10 years is that more people will finally sense the current inefficiencies, and a new wave of startups will profoundly change the communication paradigm. The planning-related inefficiencies will be overcome by intelligent solutions that will orchestrate your days and will foster the right interactions with the right people at the right time for the right duration.
In terms of Sales tools, this will translate into accurate predictions that will maximize the chance of carrying out a successful intro call with a precisely identified prospect. Don’t get me wrong, these tools already exist; they will become mainstream and much more accurate thanks to a wider variety of data points and intelligent algorithms.
In the context of Sales-related collaboration, AMs will be able to promptly get the information they need to fulfill customer inquiries without having to chase people. This will translate into:
- Increased overall sales throughput (e.g., faster RFI/RFQ responses shorten the Sales cycle)
- Establish and nurture more customer relationships in the same amount of time
- Avoid spending a huge amount of time writing professional emails and texts, as opposed to more informal relationship-bonding talks.
In the future of Sales organizations there is a return to impromptu enabled by Artificial Intelligence, that will finally alleviate the trade-off between personal and team productivity, and will lead to unprecedented Sales throughput.
If you liked this discussion, please, hit “Applaud”, leave a comment, follow me and stay tuned for more productivity insights!
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About this Article
This is the first article of a series called Unveiling Potential Productivity, which aims at discovering opportunities to boost both personal and collective productivity by innovating workflows through technology and sometimes by changing imperfect well-rooted behaviors and beliefs.
To achieve our goal, we will analyze the sociological and technological paths that brought our society where it is today, shaping our culture, belief system and mainstream trends.
Is the pair of glasses through which we filter and interpret the reality letting us see all the phenomena that matter around us? Are Machine Learning, Blockchain or any other buzzword technologies the solution to all our problems? Are there any opportunities we don’t see today that have the potential to reshape the next 10+ years?
If you are expecting deterministic answers to the above questions, you won’t find them here! You’ll find more and more questions, problems to be solved, ideas, bold predictions, possible solutions to be explored and validated. The very moment we deem a solution as “optimal”, we annihilate our ability to make it better. For that reason, through the discussions of this series, we want to keep the innovation engine roaring, boost its Revolutions Per Minute (RPM), and never turn the key counterclockwise.
