To improve prospecting performance, you must take simple three steps.

Your Sales Reps cannot 'wing it and win'. They need a plan - a Best Practice - for the ideal pursuit of the targets on their lists. They need to know how you want them to spend their basic resource - dials - to achieve the greatest return on their time and effort. This is their road-map to success.

Klpz can handle any Best Practice for cold calling or warm calling (marketing leads, networking and referrals.)

Notes

The first step in your Best Practice does not have to be a dial. The pursuit of a target can start in a variety of ways.

Starting with a letter works best when you can make the first call about the time it arrives. Klpz helps Sales Reps execute a Best Practice with this level of precision.
Starting with a canvass visit can make the follow-up calls more efficient since you have confirmed the Decision Maker and the call does not seem so cold.
Starting with an email looks a lot like SPAM, so be careful with that strategy.

Leaving voice-mails work. We can show you the math, but they must be well crafted and personally delivered.

ConnectWise or Autotask user? Ask about our pre-packaged Best Practices for MSPs.

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For details about how the Proof of Prospecting program guides you through all three steps, go to Editions and Fees

Proof of Prospecting will help you design as many Best Practices as you need. A Best Practice is defined by answering these four questions

1	How many times will you call someone over the next few weeks before you have called them enough? You have to decide how many times in a row is enough. You have lots of folks to call, so you don't want to spend too much time on any one target. Three to 5 attempts is typical, depending on where the list came from.
2	How often will you make those calls? Call every day and you are stalking. Every two weeks and targets don't remember any of your calls. For most prospectors, a call every week is a nice, professional pace.
3	If you don't reach them, do you leave a voicemail? If you have their email address, when to send an email? After the voicemail? Leaving voicemails and sending emails is a topic of debate. Most sales trainers and consultants recommend it, since targets do call back and even a small percentage of callbacks will have dramatic impact on your performance numbers.
4	If you don't reach your target after the pre-defined number of attempts, do you put them away and start another pursuit in a few months? If so, how long before you start that next pursuit? If your product needs a business development model, a pursuit every six months is a popular pace. If you need a 'drive by shooter' model, you would call targets once or twice and move on.

These questions design the Best Practice for the immediate pursuit.

There is another Best Practice, however. The long term Best Practice for business development over time. This is also known as Territory Development.

In the history of most businesses, Sales Reps have come and gone; but, Territories are forever. It is strategic to nurture Territories so that new Sales Reps don't have to start from scratch. Each Territory would have been purged of non-qualified targets by previous Sales Reps.

This chart depicts a Territory Development plan where Cold and Warm targets are pursued.

Depending on the outcome of the pursuit - No contact, Conversation Only, or Appointment - the target is either 1) declared a Success, 2) ReCycled for another pursuit or 3) Removed.

There is a special Follow-up Best Practice for recycled targets who you spoke with. The Best Practice for Follow-up uses voicemails and emails to reflect that you have already spoken with the target.

Click here for a white paper on this topic - List and Territory Building Approach

Video email available for Klpz Corporate users

For Klpz Corporate customers, an optional video email is available. For many products, video is a great way to deliver your message. A video can create curiosity and motivate a suspect to speak with the sales person. The Klpz video email option can be part of any step in a Best Practice.

When the suspect clicks on a link in the email, a web page containing a video and a reply panel is streamed to the suspect.

To see an example of how a Klpz video email can be used to tell a story, click the thumbnail.

Go to Editions and Fees for details about the Proof of Prospecting program

For MyKlpz Version users, pre-designed Best Practices are pre-loaded.

For Klpz Corporate users, Contact Science provides documentation and consulting during the Proof of Prospecting program and will directly assist you in creating custom Best Practices.

Once you have designed the ideal Best Practices, you must make them fast and easy to operate. The patented Klpz software is so easy to use we recommend watching a sample Klpz Class before you go any further. In just a few minutes you can experience firsthand how Klpz can double the performance of most sales folks, no matter how many targets they are pursuing at one time.

Notes

Results in one week. With a precise prospecting process that is quick and easy to learn, Sales Reps become more productive quickly. ROI occurs quickly, too.

Get more for your list dollar. We are not in the list business, but we see how lists are used.

For telephone prospecting, here are some insights into lists for your Sales Rep.

As a rule of thumb, if your Sales Rep is pursuing 100 targets a week and is following a popular cold calling Best Practice, they can pursue around 1000 targets a year.
Sales Reps with local territories can create a terrific list with Canvas Visits. Even if they do not meet the Decision Maker, they can get a business card and leave a message that they will be calling. Plus, 'cold calling' that Decision Maker is a lot easier, because the Sales Rep has been in their offices.
If you purchase lists for telephone prospecting, buy them monthly and in just the quantities you need. They will be fresher and performance ratios will be better.

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For details about how the Proof of Prospecting program guides you through all three steps, go to Editions and Fees

Click here to take a sample Klpz Class. (Takes 8 minutes.) With Proof of Prospecting, Sales Reps learn that consistent prospecting is worthwhile; and it is easy to do week after week.

The Klpz learning curve is short. For most users, the eLearning suite is all you need to become efficient; the basics are covered in easy to follow, self-directed web-based courses.

For Klpz Corporate customers, the Power Start program gets everyone off to a fast start - shortens the learning curve and improves activity levels immediately.

Plus, we will provide you with basic process documentation (that you can customize) so that this business process has your 'rules of the road' in writing as a reference and as a coaching guide. Specifically, you will receive

A Prospector's Handbook to document the ins and outs of your specific program
A Manager's Handbook as a road-map for sales meetings and personal reviews

Irrational thinking and the Root Problem this implementation addresses

The root problem is not that sales people 'resist and avoid' prospecting (they do and it is a real problem.) However, this lack of adoption is the effect, not the cause. The root problem is that management has not focused the team on what they really want done, nor enabled them to do it easily and productively. There is nothing of value for a sales person to adopt.

Currently, most sales people are given a skills class only. We provide zero guidance on pursuit planning. We provided zero tools to efficiently manage those non-existent pursuit plans. Yet, we expect the team to successfully pursue the 100's of targets needed to generate the weekly number of appointments needed. This is not rational thinking.

The team is given a CRM as automation, which is actually counterproductive for this process. This is not rational. We cannot motivate the team to adopt our CRM for an even simpler task - keeping the pipeline updated. Do we really think the team will adopt it for telephone prospecting? (See The Klpz Advantage to learn more about this dynamic.)

And, the last irrational act (the elephant in the sales bullpen) is pretending our reports on prospecting activity are useful. They are not credible and everyone knows it.

As management, we must stop holding the sales person entirely, and solely, accountable - we must step up and implement a real business process.

Go to Editions and Fees for details about the Proof of Prospecting program

Tip #1 - 'Ruthlessly qualify' targets when you prospect. You have a fixed number of targets you can reach out to each year and probably have more names to choose from than you can ever get to, so don't keep a target that doesn't fit.

Tip #2 - At the end of a conversation where you cannot set an appointment, ask the target when would be a better time to call. Targets most often say 'not now.' They rarely say 'never.' Don't automatically assume they will never set an appointment with you just because they did not grant one on your first try.

Peter Drucker famously said 'What's measured, improves.' In 'dialing for dollars' this means that if you know your team's 'numbers' you can coach smarter and help them win more often. Plus, having accurate metrics allow you to provide a new sales rep with performance benchmarks to hit on their road to success. And then, to sustain that level of performance.

Notes

Example of sustainability. Our customer increased the rate of initial appointments set by 600% and has maintained that increased rate since October of 2011.

Plan your week around prospecting. Sales Reps will never succeed if they don't schedule call blocks in advance.

A good way to start your new program is to mandate the times the Sales Reps will make calls.

Put prospecting back in sales meetings. If prospecting should be 30% of a Sales Rep's week, spend 30% of each sales meeting talking about it. Meaningful meetings are easier to do once you have a real process with accurate metrics to put accountability into the discussion.

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For details about how the Proof of Prospecting program guides you through all three steps, go to Editions and Fees

Metrics to win by - accurate and automatic. Proof of Prospecting will show you how metrics can be used to diagnose shortcomings and continuously improve performance.

The core measurements of any process are efficiency and effectiveness. For the process of telephone prospecting, those are defined as follows:

Efficiency is the ability to generate conversations with decision makers. It is measured by the ratio of conversations generated to dials made.
Effectiveness is the ability to convert those conversations into appointments. It is measured by the ratio of appointments set to conversations generated

Dials #	Convs. #	Appts. #	Convs. to Dials	Appts. to Convs.
31	4	2	12%	50%

Both of these metrics are captured in a single, simple, credible Call Block report. Here is a snapshot from a report that displays the two ratios.

Klpz provides multiple reports to measure (and analyze) many aspects needed to continuously improve your business process. The reports are real-time and do not require any data input from the sales person.

Contact Science provides calculators (all free, plus instructions on using them) for managers to model the impact on changes they could make to the various components of their Best Practice. Klpz provides metrics to validate those calculations.

For Klpz Corporate customers, the Proof of Prospecting program includes training for Managers on how to manage with metrics. Managers learn to use Klpz reports to analyze performance and determine the right 'next steps' to improve performance.

These are web based and instructor led by trainers who are knowledgeable about the metrics side of telephone prospecting. For instance, do you know who much resource is wasted calling a bad list? Don't manage a process this critical in the dark.

Go to Editions and Fees for details about the Proof of Prospecting program

Being quick and easy to use provides value to the caller. Capturing metrics for automatic reporting provides value to the process.

Neither the Independent Professional nor the Sales Manager have ever been able to capture prospecting metrics accurately. And, they are vital. The greatest leverage to the top line is the first half of the sales cycle - telephone prospecting to fill the pipeline.

Without accurate metrics, we cannot improve results. Without accurate metrics, there is no accountablity. Without the ability to hold someone (including ourselves) accountable for results, we are delegating the success of our new customer acquisiton plan to destiny. If telephone prosepcting controls your destiny, use Klpz to control your telephone prospecting.

Take the three steps