The following appears on print4payHotel.com, by Art Post

Is it unreasonable to ask for ten calls per hour from a rep dedicated to setting a net new appointment?  Dang, ten calls an hour is sweet music to my years!  Just think that five hours of work will produce 50 calls and if you do this three times a week you’ll have 150 calls and still have 25 hours (that’s of you only work 40 hours a week) left in the week to travel to accounts, follow up with accounts, research, emails, mailers, educate and meet with prospects.

I have no clue what the industry average is for calls to appointments and frankly I don’t care. I just make the calls and it seems that when I make the calls I can average 5 net new appointments per week. That’s on top of the other appointments that I’ve made that can come from a variety of sources like leads (they few that I get), follow ups, or that rare occasion when someone calls in.

When I look at a months worth of work I can have up to 20 appointments.  Out of those 20 appointments I can close 2 or maybe 3 of those the month that I call, I will lose some, some will not be interested and some will go on the back burner and a few may take longer than 30 days to mature.

The amount of calls that you make directly impacts how many appointments you can make in the week and month along with how many orders you can write. Those 2.5 deals that I close each month could go down to 1.75  if I only make 75 calls per week, and 40 calls a week would not even eek out an order for that month.

Having a dedicated call plan in place where we’ll have 5 hours of calls for 3 days a week for calling for new business. I will try not to set any appointments for those blocks of hours, however sometimes the plan will go awry and you’ll have to change things up. But you pencil yourself in for another call block.

I’m 33 years in down the street sales and you can’t rely on others to feed you leads, you’ve got to work hard and work many vertical markets and touch as many prospects as possible. Prospecting is like a dog looking for a bone, he’s not going to give up until he finds it and after he finds it, he’s right back to looking for another bone!

Oh, I forgot the real reason you need to make 150 calls a week is…. if you’re not making the 150 calls a week, then your competitors are.

-=Good Selling=-