Ryan Dohrn explains that prospects say no four times before yes on the fifth attempt. He counts a phone call plus follow-up email as one touchpoint, recommending five total touchpoints spaced three business days apart. That's roughly ten individual actions to land a meeting.
Hey friends, Ryan Dohrn here, your Global Sales Coach, and this is your listener question of the week. Comes to us from Brendan in Delaware. He asks, Ryan, how many touches is just enough and not too much in the prospecting process? So Brendan from Delaware, I think it's one of these porridge is too hot, porridge is too cold kind of scenarios. You want to kind of get just right in the middle. So For me, I recognize what Sales Donut says about the math behind it. Most prospects are going to say no 4 times before they say yes on that 5th attempt. So what I do is I try to do everything, I double up on it. So for example, when I reach out via phone, if I don't get them, I leave a voicemail to encourage them to reply to the email that I'm going to send to them immediately. So what I like to do is I consider that to be one touchpoint. Even though it's a voicemail, it's an email, it's 2 things, I consider that to be 1 touchpoint. Then using the math from Sales Donut, I try to do 5 of those. So it's actually a total of 10 touches. Phone, if I don't get them, I'm going to use that voicemail to refer to the email that I'm sending to them, asking them through that voicemail to give me an email response, which tends to work very well. So together, the phone, the email, the 2 of them together is 1 touch. 5 total touches. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to reach out to them every 3 business days. I think every day is aggressive, every 2 days is a little bit annoying, every 3 is just annoying enough to move that sales needle forward. And I want to encourage you to get real rhythmic about that. Understand that everything in life happens in certain cadences and certain rhythms, Brendan. And so I'd encourage you to adapt or adopt a a new way of doing that. Create your own rhythm. Now, once a week, not going to work out. You're very deletable at that point. You're very forgettable. And that's why I love every 3 business days. So Brendan from Delaware, I hope that helps you out. Thanks for sending in your question to ryan@ryandohrn.com. And friends, to find out more about what I can do for you, for your company, the blog, the podcast, and so much more, head over to ryandohrn.com. All right, friends, keep your questions coming. We will See you next week. And don't forget, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it, and they're not. So we're either crazy, or we found a career, friends, that will feed our families for a lifetime. All right, take care.
