Call Metrics- Old School Vs. New School

Sales teams are often measured by complex metric systems designed to shed light on both team productivity and overall results. This criteria often includes daily call quantity, duration of calls, appointments set, and other micro-measurements.
The logic associated with this ideology is consistent high call activity leads to more meaningful conversations,increased appointment setting rates and more closed deals. In the past, this model was functional when executing a B2B prospecting campaign....Not so much the case in today's 2.0 environment.

Gone are the days of ripping through a random list of prospects with little to no knowledge of whom the prospects is, what they do, how decisions are made and what push button issues are important to the decision committee.

High level performance in today's "new school" world is far more a result of careful deliberation and efficiency!

Deliberation requires deep mining each call via social media networks,blogs, connections on linked'In, Jigsaw, and the like,for information that builds a case to support a solution. Dialing for dollars and hourly call metric reports are less relevant than in the past! The rep who diligently plots and plans their calls will be the rep exceeding quota. (90-100 high quality dials will net greater results than 150 unqualified low quality dials).

Efficiency requires following the old adage " working smarter not harder". According to the The Insidesales/M.I.T. study,
rather than dialing during low production calling hours (11AM-4PM), reps should be allocating valuable "pay time" call hours to time blocks that yield the best contact results (8Am-10Am & 4-6PM). The remaining hours spent on prospect nurturing, phone/face to face appointments, presentations and administration tasks.

A stalled economy, greater access to more information for decision makers and multi-tiered buying committees have all contributed to the lengthening of sales cycles. The result? Sales organizations must quickly adapt,access and implement multi-media prospecting methods to fully engage decision makers and close more business.