By Troy Harrison Right now, most companies have already developed their sales forecast for 2024. Many of them will be fatally flawed, because they only take into account changes in their own marketplace and offerings, but not changes in the sales profession itself. That’s what I’m here to talk about today. I’ve talked about the changes in selling. I’ve done a webinar on what I see as the top four trends in selling. Now, I’m going to humble myself just a tad.
I don’t have all the answers. I have most of them, and I’m learning more all the time, but I don’t have all of them. What made me realize this was an experience I had a few days ago. At the request of one of my clients, I put together a recommended prospecting blueprint for his new sales hires (and no, you can’t have it unless you’re a coaching client of mine). That used to be an easy task. It’s not anymore, because prospecting, like many aspects of our great profession, is something of a moving target right now, along with others. What I’m about to tell you about sales in 2024 is done with the knowledge that I don’t have every answer – but anyone who tells you that they do is full of it.
Big Change #1: Prospecting must evolve. Prospecting used to be very linear. You dialed the phone from a quality database X amount of times. You would get a contact (a voice to voice conversation with your target decision maker) about 1/3 of those dials. A good prospecting talk-track would get you an appointment on about 1/3 of your contacts. So, you’re getting an appointment on about every 9th dial. A salesperson can dial the phone about 20 times an hour, so an hour gets you 2-3 fresh appointments. That was pretty nice.
Now, as I’ve noted before, the contact to dial ratio is about 1/8, and everything else flows from there. Contact to appointment ratios are about ¼, which in my opinion is because people get so many messages that they are more skeptical.
