Unattended even the most beautiful garden will look bad, eventually

The latest issue of A Chip off the Block is The Garden Edition and talks about  The Top 10 Things Sales Taught Me About Gardening here is my TeleSales Twist on Point #1.

Unattended even the most beautiful garden will look bad eventually

In sales; we spend lots of time, energy, and effort earning someone’s business. It always amazes me that once that part is done, many salespeople – exhale – and think they are done. What they end up with is a jungle like mess in their account base. Weeds taking up time that could be spent on flowers. Flowers without water drying up. You get the picture.

This is what the unattended garden at my house looked like.  You can tell at some point a lot of attention was paid (those rocks didn’t move themselves) to make it beautiful. The gardener consensus is that it was left on its own for about 5-years to get this way.

In telesales – it doesn’t take 5-years for your account base to end up looking like a patch of weeds, months will do it.

Here are the telesales inactivity or inattention that will create quite a mess:

• single point of contact – how many accounts are you working where you have ONE person who talks with you?

  It doesn’t matter if that person makes decisions – you need a lot more depth in every account to keep your garden growing. Here is another one of my three… at minimum: your main guy/girl, their boss, and someone in purchasing. PLUS depending on what you sell there may be multiple people who qualify as influencers &/or decision makers on your product set.

• rescheduling instead of calling – you know those reminders that you forward because the thought of calling makes you roll your eyes!

  Take a moment today and call all the people you’ve been avoiding lately, it doesn’t matter why – create a solid business reason for them to talk with you (need help with that? turn to Craig Elias) and make the call.

•  holding on to weeds – I don’t care if it was the best qualified lead you’ve ever received; if the contacts aren’t accessible THROW THEM IN THE COMPOST HEAP

  If you’ve used telephone, email, and snail mail over 10 times, in a month or two – to multiple contacts and no one is talking with you. Close all your reminders out, take your name off the account, and move on!

What are your ways of leaving accounts unattended? Make a comment to help everyone avoid mistakes.