How Many Dials Per Day Get the Best Sales Results?

The following is a guest post by Michael Pedone, CEO/FOUNDER of SalesBuzz.com.

Sales Question:

How Many Dials Per Day get the Best Sales Results?

I’ve written about this numerous times in the past and my answer is still the same. I’ve been most successful when consistently making:

60-dials and/or 3-hours of talk time per day.

Now before anyone throws a fit over those numbers one way or the other, take the time to hear what I’m about to say…

The person that taught me this rule of 60-dials and/or 3 hours of talk time was someone that started at the bottom rung of the corporate ladder and worked his way up to becoming the President of a 30-million dollar a year business.

When he hired me, he freely gave me one of his best secrets to success (he actually gave the “secret” to everyone, but to be blunt, I was the only one that listened and WANTED to follow that formula – everyone else resisted and made excuses to try and justify why they didn’t hit those numbers – I always outsold the rest of the team).

Sales people today are being lied to and misled.

They are being told to “not make cold calls” and being told to make “warm calls by researching a prospect first.” Well, I have news for you – if you’re spending more than 5 minutes researching a prospect’s background, you’re most likely suffering from call reluctance.

I’m all for research, but I know exactly what to look for in a prospect. The basics are simple:

• Vertical – Is the company in a space that your product / service excels in.
• Title – Does the person I’m about to call at least have the Title of someone who is normally involved in the decision making process for what I offer.

That’s about all 99% of sales people out there need to know before they pick up the phone.

Most sales people today spend way too much time researching, and then they invest hours trying to craft the perfect email, only to have it deleted by the prospect seconds after it was sent.

The Brian Tracy Rule

One of the things I learned from Brian Tracy is to do the tasks that will make you the most amount of money. If you are going to do EXTRA research (and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, I’m saying you don’t have to do as much as you’ve been told), make sure you do your EXTRA research during NON-CALLING hours.

If you want to do additional research on your leads, be disciplined enough to do it during non-calling hours. Researching from 7am till 8am is fine – you most likely don’t want to call your prospects at 7am anyway. But researching during prime calling time is NOT effective time management.

Structure Your Day

The formula that I’ve found to work best is this:

• Commit to making 40-dials before Noon
• Make 20-dials from 1pm till 5pm.

Making 40-dials before Noon will:

• Set you up nicely for afternoon callbacks
• And it will take a lot of pressure off YOU because now you only need to make 20-dials between 1 pm and 5 pm.

Do Call Backs Count as a Dial?

YES! So if you make 35-dials before Noon plus get 5 call backs, that’s 40 calls.

What About the 100-Dials Per Day Mantra?

If you’re making 100+ dials per day, you aren’t having any meaningful conversations. And if that’s the case, your Opening Value Statement and your Engagement Questions are the problem. Fix those and you’ll start having more conversations that lead to a fatter pipeline.

Some days you may only be able to make 30 calls or so but your talk time will be in the 3+ hours range and that is totally fine! Other days you may make 62 calls but only have 90-minutes talk time. It will all balance out if you use those two metrics.

And as my Mentor once said “Give me 3-hours of legitimate talk time, I won’t care what you do with the rest of your day.”