Recently, I attended a workshop on Building a Predictable Sales Pipeline by Heinz Marketing. The focus was enablement strategies and tactics to increase your confidence in hitting your number month-after-month. The speaker was Matt Heinz who has over 20 years of marketing and sales experience translating strategy into execution and building a framework that allows your company to generate a net-new sales pipeline with predictability and at scale.
During the workshop, one of my questions was in a “boiler sales room” how many prospects does a sales person have to reach out to every single day, Matt’s response was 130-200 but you can’t have productive conversations. Since I’m not interested in creating a sales boiler room, I asked, what is a reasonable number of people that a sales person should be reaching out to on a daily basis? Matt said, that 40-50 people is considered to be reasonable.
This is the first time that I’ve heard anyone say a specific number. It’s 40 per day.
After hearing that number 40, I decided to start asking questions to sales people that call me. My question to a sale representatives at Outreach.io and to SalesForce.com was how many people do you reach out to regularly? They said about 40 people. They are also said that they are looking for seven (7) meaningful prospects each day of those 40. Meaningful is defined as someone that is genuinely interested in solving their problem with our solution. I also started to research the number 40 and found this: “The average sales rep makes 52 calls every day.” — The Bridge Group
If you expect your sales people to reach out to 40 people per day, you’re going to need to have a good process. That means you’ve defined things well and you have a good sales sequence. Without a sequence that the team can follow, you’re going to end up with randomness, uneven results, and something that isn’t predictable at all. Sales sequence steps are things like 1) phone call. 2) voice mail. 3) email. 4) social media channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. 5) newsletters. 6) invitations to events. How many steps are in your sales sequence?
There’s a lot more which was covered by Matt and I’ll continue to blog more about that but I wanted to first touch on the number of prospects that your sales and business development people are reaching out to every day.
