Searching for Opportunity

Hi,

First off, if you're numbers are steadily increasing, it seems you must be doing something right. Focus on that while you hone your skills and build new ones. Congrats!

If you desire to improve on your cold calling Claude Whitacre, John Durham & Jason Kanigan are very, very good at this & have lots of sales experience. I hope that they see this and comment on this thread. They all are pretty prolific posters here in this forum.

As far as volume, I'd say that hiring reps would be your best bet. That being said, I'd say it would be best if you have a script that you can hand to them, or are have enough experience with what works to train them. Of course, you want to hire people with some experience in sales, but still, it's your business so you definitely want to guide them here. John Durham also has said something to this effect: you want people that aren't afraid to leap in and make calls. People who don't have that self-propelling drive or who think too much and take no or little action, no matter how much they may know, won't get you anywhere. That's part of the reason I say that you'll want to train them. If you know what works & can train them & provide them with effective scripts, you really can take someone with little sales experience and they could produce very well for you.

As far buying lists, I have no experience there myself, but know from plenty of people that have that this can be hit or miss. You'd need a highly targeted list and then you'd want them to be No-Call compliant, up-to-date as well. The source matters here. It can also be expensive, depending. John Durham ran at least one call center at one point, and could shed alot of light on this.

Another idea might be to use a reputable lead generation software to gather leads and then either call, email, direct mail them yourself, or again, once you have a system that is being at least somewhat effective for you, hire others to work those leads. Gather X number of leads, and divide the list among your people to contact.

People here on the forum have had great experiences with direct mail like Bob Ross. You say you have a decent marketing budget, so that might be an option for you. Send mail pieces that will get noticed to targeted businesses.

I could type a ton more, but I'll let that simmer for now. Lol

Tracy

P.S.- Here is an informational post by another Offline warrior discussing something similar:

http://www.warriorforum.com/offline-...rop-cards.html

What about hiring a tele-marketer to set the appointment so that you can go out on more qualified leads. Right now you are sifting through to find the right ones. If you've got someone doing some preliminary sifting your time would be better spent.

This right here is the crux of the problem. You are only one man, which means you can only do so much.

And what you are facing is what every good salesperson faces and that is how do you balance your time between generating new business, and fulfilling current business.

Improving your cold calling can help in this situation. For example, by improving your skills you can make less calls and still get the same amount of sales.

This can possibly free up time for you for client fulfillment.

That is one solution.

Another thing and I think it is the ideal thing to do, is to start using better lead generation strategies (or maybe better is not the word) more passive lead generation strategies? (not sure if that's the right word)

For example, you can setup a site and take the time to get it ranked on page 1 of Google with the goal of it generating leads for you.

Then what you could do say after 2-3 months when you know how many leads you get on average from that site, is to look at the time spent cold calling and eliminate some of that time.

What I mean by this is if that site is generating an average of 10 sales per month then you can look at your cold calling numbers and if you know that you need to make 500 calls to make those 10 sales, well you can eliminate those 500 calls because you don't need to make them as you are already covering those sales with your site.

This will free up that time you originally used for those 500 calls, and now you can use that time for client fulfillment.

And what you might notice start to happen is because you are spending more time on client fulfillment your referrals will potentially go up, and let's say because of that you start generating 10 referrals per month. Well then you can eliminate another 500 calls that you no longer have to make and free up even more time either for more client fulfillment or better lead generation strategies.

So my point is what you are doing is you are starting to create more lead generation strategies that are more efficient or take less time on your part to generate the same amount of leads and sales or even more. And to take the time that you were using cold calling and use that instead for client fulfillment or the creation of these newer lead generation strategies.

Just thought of one more thing.

You can convince your boss to give you a promotion to manager, and allow you to hire a team who you can teach what you have been doing to, so they hopefully can get the same results you were getting.

So you would then have 3,4, or 5 people doing what you did.

Lloyd,

It sounds like you are in a great position to grow in your position with management that is giving you a marketing budget to work with. Having said that it also sounds like you are not getting much leading from the higher up which leads me to believe they have no system in place for your position.

This can be very exciting for you but don't allow yourself to be taken advantage of either. By that I mean make sure you protect yourself and if your the one who is developing all the sales pitch and material, etc. see that you are compensated for that in some way... at least in security. You may develop a great sales program complete with lead generation and everything then start teaching that to others to duplicate when all of a sudden they may hire someone else who sells the boss on the idea that they would be a better sales manager than yourself. I hate to sound totally negative just saying that if you are the one responsible for building their sales program make sure you are taken care of for that in the long run as well as the short run!

As far as your question about referrals.... simple... just ask for them!!! If possible have your client call them while you are there. If that doesn't work out I have had great success having them write a little note on the back of my business card to them that I simply hand to them when I go there.

Use the budget they give you though and try various ways to market.... test, test and keep testing to find out what works and the best way of doing it all.

Hope that helps and if I could be of further assistance just let me know.

Ed