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Voice Nurture Outperforms Email Nurture By 53 to 1?!!

“Hey Chad, John Jackson here.  Did I catch you at an ok time?”

ANSWER: “Hey John, we’re still not ready yet, but check back with me in a quarter.”

This all too familiar cat and mouse game is very often dropped mid-stream because of math.  It takes a sales person on average 23 attempts to have a single phone conversation.  So for most sales professionals, engaging quarterly with 600+ prospects by phone would require 13,800 dial attempts.  Not John Jackson, John relies on an automated voice nurture system that takes the problem of getting these prospects on the phone and makes it go away!  By automating the timing of the dial (quarterly), and reducing the time it takes to get the prospect back on the phone from 1 hour to 2-3 minutes,  and automating what to say on the next call attempt, John is equipped to the max to run a bigger pipeline, and voice nurture his pipeline every single quarter.

After 5 quarters in a row getting this same call from John Jackson, I finally had a budget, authority, a need, and oh yeah the TIMING was finally right.   For those in sales, yes, that’s BANT.  John had uncovered a BANT qualified opportunity.  And I signed up within a few weeks for a $25,000 investment.

Where many sales leaders (and sales reps) get it wrong is that they are instructing their sellers to go find BANT qualified opportunities.  According to the Corporate Executive Board, on average, only 3% of possible qualified buyers are BANT ready to buy in a given month.  However, up to 36% of those people could be ready within a 12 month period (since most products have a 3 year replacement cycle).

Here’s the math of a Voice Nurture Program (and John Jackson’s conversion metrics from January 1, 2014 to March 23, 2015):

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  • When John Jackson, Director of Sales calls you for the very first time, 9% of the time you become interested and talk to John Jackson about how he can help you grow your business.
  • When John Jackson talks to you on conversations 2 – 4, 14% of the time, you accept John’s invitation to meet with you.
  • The biggest difference between John Jackson, and everyone else… is that on conversation 5 and later, 26% of the time, you accept John’s invitation to meet with you.

And… once you talk to John Jackson after the 5th conversation and beyond, almost 50% of the time you buy something from John Jackson.  Whoever said that sales is moving to online purchases, you don’t know JACK…SON!

The results of automated voice nurture?

  • 29,647 dials
  • 1,289 conversations
  • 162 meetings
  • 3 opt outs
  • Opportunities created: 384 ($7.65M)
  • Opportunities won: 106 ($3.2M)

How does this compare to an email nurture program with a quarterly email drip?  Marketing happened to run a drip campaign for John Jackson during the same period of time…

The results:

  • 23,700 emails sent
  • 1,800 opens
  • 119 clicks
  • 52 opt-outs
  • 10 – 12 conversations
  • Opportunities created: 5 ($128,000)
  • Opportunities won: 2 ($15,000)

So… what is all the hype about 1:1 email marketing solutions for sales professionals?  

flying-pigWith the risk of causing a lot of contreversy, there are two kinds of people in sales; “Conversation pigs” and “Conversation weasels”.  The conversation pigs love to talk to prospects, and they are great at it.  These are the kind of sales people that books are written about – “The Greatest Salesman In the World“, by Og Mandino, one of the best sales books of all time shares the secrets of the 10 scrolls.  Notice how they describe conversation pigs, not weasels!

Scroll #3: I will persist until I succeed.  It doesn’t say, I will persistently send annoying product centric emails that will be reported as SPAM!

Scroll #4: I am nature’s greatest miracle.  The difference between John Jackson, and the “average rep” is that John really believes in his heart that he can help other people.  And he does every single day!

Scroll #5: I will live this day as if it were my last.  If you had a day to live, would you send out a bunch of emails?  Or would you want to talk to your loved ones for the last time?  People buy from people.

Scroll # 8: Today I will multiply my value a hundredfold.  This is where John Jackson and countless others have discovered how automated voice nurturing their prospects leads to 53X better performance than email nurture.  29,647 dials would take a typical Director of sales 988 days, or nearly 4 years of effort.  It took John Jackson 1 year.

Want to know how John Jackson “multiplies his value by a hundredfold?”  ANSWER: We do it for him!  When we deployed OutboundOnDemand in 2014 and paired John Jackson up with a Lead Generation Representative who is tasked to do 1,000 dials/day, and create voice nurture relationships over time for John, John gets a 4X multiplier on his own dials and a 20X multiplier on the dials that the Lead Generation Rep does for him.

Scroll #9: I will act now.  Weasels wait, pigs dig in and get dirty!  We send out a weekly newsletter to our customers and top prospective customers.  Every week another dozen or so opt out of the newsletter.  Occasionally we get a reply asking for a sales person to reach out.  This week, a customer called me out, and said “Chad, are you a conversation weasel?”  I was taken aback, and so immediately I logged into ConnectAndSell, clicked GO and talked to 5 prospects in < 25 minutes, scheduled 2 meetings, and realized that it’s easy for even the best of us to become conversation weasels.  Which is why Aaron Ross, Author of Predictable Revenue is right to encourage specialization.  This is also why Kyle Porter, kid genius, created a Sales Development Rep team whose purpose it is to make calls and talk to prospects.  It’s important that whomever in your company is designated to drive conversations, make sure they like talking to prospects, make sure they are powered with automation technology to enable conversations, NOT DIALS, and make sure that you have someone there to monitor, coach, and course correct when needed.

Conclusion: When I see InsideSales.com raise another $60M at a valuation of $1.5B, I applaud them… and I realize the power of ConnectAndSell and OutboundOnDemand because these other dialers rely on manual, human dialing.  ConnectAndSell solves the same basic problems of 1) insuring that leads are called in < 5 minutes with Lead Injection, 2) insuring leads are called consistently (more dials, mean more leads can actually be spoken with), 3) helping the customer determine which leads to prioritize (SalesPredict launched earlier this year), and 4) brings a way to deliver 1000 dials/day instead of the typical 56 dials/day that The Bridge Group, TOPO, and other 3rd party analysts report to be the standard.

What I am NOT saying in this post: I am NOT saying that email nurture is a bad idea.  Quite the contrary!  Our friends at CSO Insights Barry Trailer, Jim Dickie, and Pat Lynch will tell you that when you TALK, then SEND an email, it’s 200 – 500% more likely to get opened!  Some prospects prefer to respond to a phone call.  Some prospects prefer to respond to an email.  NO prospects that I am aware of BUY from an email.  They buy from people.  The numbers don’t lie – they tell the same story that Og Mandino tells… that to be the Greatest Salesman in the World, like our Founder, Shawn McLaren, who has had more ConnectAndSell conversations than anyone on the planet earth, Conversations Matter!