50 accounts......
If I draw a line in the sand and tell you best sales rep
they can only have 50 current and prospective referral
sources...what will they say?
If you haven't
asked your top people this question....their answer
may surprise you.
Part of the Sales Coaching Intensive process (where I
work one on one with homecare sales reps for 6
weeks) is whittling down a rep's current and
prospective account list to about 50. There are times
where the list might be smaller, say 35, and a few
times where it could climb as high as 60 or so. 50, as
it turns out, is usually just about the right number.
Why, you ask?
Simple. Our business is
based upon building relationships....in fact we're really
in the business of SELLING relationships. My
relationship is more valuable than Company X's
because we provide _________ (fill in the blank).
It's pretty challenging to build great and valuable
relationships when you have 100 or more accounts to
visit each month. You simply don't get enough time in
any one account to provide much value. I have a client
in Texas that had their reps making upwards of 500
sales calls every month. One rep was making (on
average) over 600! The "shotgun approach" was to
see as many different people as possible every week
in order to increase our odds of being in the right
place at the right time when a referral was about to be
made.
That's one approach. I'd rather invest in building a
quality relationship so that EVERY time a referral was
made, my agency was on the "top of mind" of my
referral source, whether I was there or not.
One of my sales coaching clients in this Texas agency
was really struggling. She easily had over 200
accounts that she was expected to see. Being early in
her sales career, she was limping along never getting
more than 7 referrals in any one month. Performance
like that causes people to lose jobs. Lo and behold,
once we focused her on 50 of her BEST opportunities
and tweaked her presentation a bit, she scored 20
referrals in October and had 22 before Thanksgiving
in November!
All due to one important, non-negotiable
thing.......
Focus
Your top people already know that running here and
there is not really selling......it's visiting. If you pull back
some accounts from them and let them truly FOCUS
on learning their best referrers and prospects, you'll
likely be pleasantly surprised by the outcome. More
referrals, better relationships, more job satisfaction,
better name in the community. All because you didn't
ask them to do more....you asked them to do less.
It's a major leap of faith for many sales mangers and
salespeople to use this approach. The "land grab"
mentality of most salespeople says that the more
accounts I have, the more chances I have for
someone to call in a referral. The corollary of that is,
the more accounts you have, the less time you get to
spend with them, thus allowing your competitors to
build great relationships with them, thus actually
REDUCING the number of referrals you're likely to get.
If you're not convinced, use this approach with only
one of your reps. Have them truly focus on only the
best referral sources (and non referring prospects) in
their territory and let the rest go. Let your competition
chase down that Doc's office that gives only 1 referral
every 3 months......because the time you save on that
call can be used to strengthen a great relationship
with someone that can truly help you build your
agency.
50.......that's the challenge.
Are you up for it?
