Larry Weidel explains how sales professionals can boost production by scheduling selling time in clear blocks and setting multiple appointments per block. He recommends the rule of three: schedule three appointments to expect one to show, and four appointments typically yields two yeses. Control your schedule or it controls you.
Let's talk about becoming a pro on scheduling and learn how to schedule for success. We're going to talk about something right now that if you don't get this right, you're going to dumb yourself to death every day of your life. And these are like hidden secrets. And for every, look at it this way, for every period of time you have, like, this is a block of time. This could be morning, it could be afternoon, it could be evening, it could be the first half of the morning. But for every period of time, every block of time in which during from start to finish, you know, 8 to 12 or 8 to 10, you know, depending on when you're supposed to make, like, I need to make a sale during this period of time. If you want to have a successful schedule, you need to be producing. And so if you're going to be producing, break down your schedule. It's got to happen during time blocks. You got to make each time block pay. Correct. Rather than a hope. I hope a hope. And I'm going to shuffle some papers. No, you want to produce, you've got to have your time blocks clearly defined during the week. You have, you know, let's just look at the week over here. You got your Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, forget Saturday, go ahead, work Saturday, the weekends if you want to. But you've got all of this precious time during the week. Some of it's going to be with training sessions here and this, that and the other. But you've got all of this time. When are you going to sell? Where are these blocks of time that you're going to cram your activity where you're going to be in front of people and you've got to set appointments, you've got to put appointments in the those blocks and you want to see how many sales do I want to kick out in a week. You got to be organized. And so I don't know if this is going to be from 8 in the morning till 8 at night. If I somewhere in there, 12 hours to get a sale, whatever you devote to making a sale and how much you expect as a salesperson. See, when you're in sales, usually in commission, full commission, and it's a matter of how much you can cram in. The more you cram in, the more activity, the more results, which is production, and then the more income. So it's up to you. Be as lazy as you want to be. But if you want to be a pro, a highly paid pro, you want to make, I mean, you want to be closing sales time and time again during the week. And that can happen. But you've got to, you know, the choice is, are you going to control your schedule or are you going to let your schedule control you and kind of drift and just go along with what happens? Well, you want to be in control of your schedule if you're going to be a pro. Now, there's one little lesson. There's one fact you better know. This is reality. This is one of the hidden laws. It's like in baseball. It's not written in law, it's not in physics. There's no rule of nature. But if in baseball, if you go to the plate and get a hit one out of three times, if you bat.333, you're going to be one of the top hitters in the league because very few people hit at that ratio. You're going to be probably a starter and a solid player. If you get a hit one out of four times or a little bit better than that, there's a lot. Those are ratios. And so what are the ratios of appointments? What's the scheduling ratio of all time? What are these ratios? Well, I promise you, you're not going to get 100% turnout on your appointment. So what are your ratios? You can expect. You can expect this. It's called the rule of three. And the rule of three goes like this. For every appointment you make now, you may get better and you may get where you're almost 100%, but you ain't going to be like that for a while. So here's the safest way for you to approach. You approach. It's like if I. For every one I want, I've got to set three. Set three to get one. If you set one, get one. If you set one,. What do you get? Nothing. If you have one appointment set for this block of time, let's say it's an evening or it's a morning or afternoon. If you only have one appointment set during that block of time for some reason, you're not going to get a sale. You're going to get a big goose egg. I don't know why. Law of nature. The person may cancel. Usually they'll cancel. That's the thing about appointments, is they cancel. And it's not that people are perverse, but things come up in their schedule and they've got to readjust. And so there you are. If you have one appointment, you've got egg in your face and you got nothing to do. And you can make excuses, but you're not going to get paid. So if you like getting zero income for the afternoon, great. But if you want to get paid, let's see. Okay, let's go. If you set two, what happens? If you set two, you get a maybe sometimes. If you set two, you'll get. You will get a sale, but not always. It's a plus or minus thing. 50. 50. But the thing is, if you have three and, and, and you may not get it because they don't even show up. Both of them may not be there because they have to show up for you to get them. Now, if you go down here and you set three, though, you will definitely get one appointment. I mean, one appointment and one successful result. But now, if you go down here, here's the magic of taking it an extra step. If you go down and you do four, you set four, you'll almost always get two. The fourth one almost always turns into a yes. So it's kind of like this. If you want a yes, you want to hear yes. You've got to have three swings at the ball. You've got to have at least three chances. There's a rule of three. So if you set up for three, you put yourself in a position to get that one yes. If you set four, you're putting yourself in a position, you're stacking the odds of where you're going to get two yeses. So it's all up to you. If you compress, it's all a matter of compressing your time and setting yourself either up for success or failure. Now, I don't know why this is the way it is. I wish I could change it, but that is the way it is. It's the rule of three. You want a schedule for success, you want to definitely hear a yes. You better have three at bats for any period of time that you where you're expecting to hear that yes. That's how you schedule for success. You give yourself three shots at success.
