Breakthrough Idea at Leading Training Company

By Ken Krogue, VP Sales and Marketing - InsideSales.com

In 1993 I was hired by Jim Ritchie, the Senior Vice President of Sales and Training, at Franklin Quest (now called Franklin Covey™) to see if time management training could be sold over the phone. I told him I would stay five years or until we did 1 million in sales in a month.

I was hired as Inside Sales Manager and started with the two very best customer service agents from the call center. We dialed like crazy and made contact 1 out of 4 calls. Though a 25% contact ratio is by industry standards successful, I asked myself, "Can we progress a sale on those other 3 calls? Even if we only talk to the receptionist?"

The answer was YES. And we did it with a fax machine.

We asked permission and faxed seminar invitations when decision makers were unavailable. Then we called back within 2-3 days and went for the close. We designed several compelling faxes and tested every possible aspect of what affected response rates. We used the Faxability™ network software from our PCs.

We called the system Call->Fax->Call and the results were incredible:

We experienced a synergy between the two mediums that was larger than the sum of the parts. Just for fun we tried Call->Mail->Call but the results were much less, and took much longer to develop. We then mailed the same piece as we were faxing and response was .3%. We made great offers, used compelling or humorous headlines, and sent a new fax each month. Response rates went up but leveled off after the 5th fax. If people called and didn't want a fax, we took their names off. If we were late faxing, others called and wondered where their fax was. It was working.

I decided to challenge my salespeople and prove the Call->Fax->Call concept once and for all.

I told my people that I would make more dials and sales in a day than they would, and I would never speak with a decision maker. And the loser would dance the hula in every lunchroom in the three largest buildings on campus. By then I had over 15 great salespeople. Our support staff brought lunch right to our desks and we strapped in.

Dialing by hand I logged the following:

• 7 hours, 45 minutes of dialing
• 460 calls
• 298 permissions gathered and faxes sent
• 11 sales called in during the next week

My best salesperson made 7 sales. But I still had to dance; one salesperson made 461 dials.

Just to see what would happen, I sent the exact same fax to the same people 6 weeks later… 8 more sales rolled in.

That gave us another idea. What if we kept permissions in a database? After two years we had salespeople with thousands of fax numbers in every territory. Reps could fill half their quota without making a call.

The Inside Sales Department grew 150% for four straight years in the company that was the second-fastest growing small business in America in 1994. In March of 1997, we did our first million-dollar month with 70 salespeople. I was getting intrigued with telephony and the Internet. So as promised, I quit the next day.