If you make 20 calls a day, you will have dialed 100 numbers in the course of a week. In a month with four weeks, you will have dialed 400 numbers, even if it would be an enormous mistake to dial 400 numbers once, believing that you are prospecting. Over the course of a year, 220 working days, you will dial the phone 4,400 times. Your results will follow your effort.
Speed to Result
To make a point, imagine that dialing the phone 4,400 times is what is necessary for you to hit your goals and max out your compensation plan. You would know what you need to do, and you might be willing to put forth the effort necessary to achieve that goal and that level of income—even if most would not, as only a few are genuinely money motivated.
If 4,400 calls guaranteed your goals, you would not have to make those calls over the course of a year. If you wanted to, you could make 40 dials a day, compressing the time it takes you to reach your goals to half the time it might have taken. You could pull the results you want forward in time, creating opportunities faster, and producing the results you want sooner.
The results you produce are in part the result of your effectiveness and in part the result of your effort. While both your effectiveness and your effort act as a governor on your results, your effort is a variable that is within your control. You can pull the results you want forward in time by increasing the effort, the energy, and the focus you invest in pursuing those results.
You Determine the Time
All things being equal, dialing the phone 80 times a day would allow you to dial the 4,4400 numbers in just 55 days. And 55 dials reduces the time to 80 working days.
There is no good reason to dial the phone 20 times a day, and an especially bad reason to do so is that your sales manager requires you to do so. That goal is entirely arbitrary, having nothing whatsoever to with what is reasonable, what you are capable of, or the results you are pursuing. The goal is there only because your company wants some level of activity—and mostly because they fear you will respond negatively to a higher number.
You can give 20 dials to your company if you want to, but a better way to think about your effort is determining what number you want for yourself.
- Are you the kind of person that is going to let someone else set an arbitrary goal or requirement when that number is not going to provide you with what you want?
- Are you the kind of person who does the minimal work necessary, accepting an average result. Are you the kind that scrapes by instead of what you are truly capable of?
You don’t have to wait to produce the results you want when your effort would allow you to have the result sooner. You don’t have to do what is acceptable when it isn’t acceptable to you, and when it isn’t going to serve you. There is never to base your standard on what other people accept. You don’t have to be one of the people that produce average results by doing what most people do and settling for what they accept.
If the number of calls bothers you, let me remind you that you don’t work in a coal mine, and you are not bailing hay in the hot, summer sun. It’s unlikely you will ever develop a blister or a callus on your dialing finger.
The difference between the top performers and the average is that top performers produce greater results in the same time. A large part of the variable that closes that gap is your effort.
.jpg?width=768&height=994&name=salescall-planner-ebook-v3-1-cover%20(1).jpg)
