Sales Campaign Strategy: The CLOSERS Model
I want to introduce to you what we call the CLOSERS model. This model is basically a seven-ingredient menu for the elements that make up a strong inside sales campaign. We use this system for our consulting model.
C is campaign.
L is lists and leads.
O is offers.
S is skill.
E is effort.
R is reporting or results.
S is systems.
We used this model to help one of our clients, and the very first thing we did was benchmark. On the CLOSERS model, where does benchmarking fit in? Where is counting the numbers? Reports. We got them on the dialer: that’s a system. We created benchmark reports, then we had them move from 20 to 170 calls a day. Where’s that? Effort.
The bottom end of the CLOSERS model is pretty much sales operations. Sales ops does this. They do a few more things like compensation, which when I consult is always the first place I go. Are they aligned in their pay plan with what they’re being asked to do? Then we have territory management. That’s pretty much it. That’s what sales ops does.
Originally, this client wanted to focus on skill. That’s what sales training does. Time and time again when I go out to an organization and they have a sales training group consulting with them, I ask, “What is the real net increase of productivity you got by spending this money?” It almost always comes in at 20 percent to 25 percent. I can pretty much guarantee a company that doesn’t have a sales training methodology they’ll get a 20 percent to 25 percent boost if they’ll just use one.
There are some better than others. There’s SPIN, strategic selling, solution selling, Griffin Hill, which we use internally and we love, and conceptual selling. They’re all fairly similar. There are a few outliers that come along like the Challenger Sale that completely change things. But it boils down to skill. The skill isn’t just what you say. It’s also what you do and what you write in emails. A skill is just as much how well we write an email as what we say over the phone. Do we respond quickly and persistently to leads? Skill has lots of elements. It’s what the human being does to change the equation.
Here’s what we did to change this equation. We tested all different kinds of levels of effort. We went as high as 350 calls a day per rep, which freaked everybody out because they weren’t getting that in a couple of weeks, but the numbers didn’t go up. In fact, 170 calls a day was about the sweet spot at the time. We ended up staying there. But by working on some of the other elements, we got them to 6.5 leads a day. That’s a 13x improvement. We went from working hard to working smart.
Free eBook: 31 Inside Sales Must Haves
Gain access to 31 inside sales tips to help drive leads, appointments and sales.
Related Posts
Posted in Sales Operations