I had lunch recently with the President of a large fabrication company who is a personal friend of mine. He told me over the last 6 months that he had secretly conducted research on sales professionals. He wasn’t conducting sales research on his sales force, but research on all the salespersons outside of his company who were trying to contact him.

I’ve never heard of any other executive doing this. I was fascinated.

His Plan
He decided that for about a 6-month period he was going to take every call from any salesperson who called. He routinely gets dozens of prospecting calls each day.

He had built a highly sophisticated defense system to avoid these kinds of calls and he simply turned it off for 6 months. He instructed his assistants to let all calls through. In short, whenever his phone rang, he answered it.

His first rule was that all callers had to pique his interest in 90 seconds or less or the call was over. If the sales professional was particularly effective, he would agree to an appointment.

If an appointment was made, his second rule was to inform callers that he was seeing them because they sounded interesting. He also let them know that he was most likely not a good prospect for their products or services.

The Why
When I asked him why he did this, he confessed it was for selfish reasons. He knew the results would be anecdotal, but it would give him a feel for what worked and didn’t work when salespeople are trying to develop new business. Maybe some of these experiences could be applied to his sales team. He also was interested in meeting the people behind these calls.

The Results
The following is some of the knowledge he gained in his 6-month test. A detailed analysis of these results is for another sales tips blog post. These are listed in no particular order.

1. Most of the salespersons viewed him as the only decision maker in any purchase.
2. The President has formed significant relationships (business and personal) with some of the salespersons.
3. He observed a broad variance in sales techniques and abilities.
4. All of the callers seemed anxious to meet with him even before qualifying him over the phone.
5. Very few callers asked about the competition.
6. Purchase time frame was rarely brought up.
7. He has not purchased anything from any of these sales professionals.

Sales Tips Wrap Up
If I take the 7 points above in combination with the myriad of other details he told me, I feel confident in coming to the 3 following general conclusions regarding this unique experiment.

• The callers were primarily interested in getting an appointment with an apparent decision maker, and not much else.
• The salespersons who met with this President have not leveraged their relationships very effectively.
• The sales professionals were indifferent to, or didn’t know how to, qualify a prospect.

Unfortunately, none of what he discovered was really much of a surprise to me. I think he saw nothing more than a representative sampling of an average sales professional. He saw the middle of the bell curve. The left tip of the bell curve usually doesn’t prospect because of lack of motivation and the right tip doesn’t have to prospect (at least by phone) because of their networking skills.

©2010 Scott R. Sheaffer

Related posts:

1. Rushing Sales Calls and Cigarettes
2. A Question That Gets Even The Grouchiest Prospect Talking
3. Start Early In The Sales Process To Remove Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt

Tags: Prospecting, prospects, salespeople, skills

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