Call Planning for Call Success!

Ed Albertson

Vice President, National Accounts

Carew International, Inc.

“An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience.”

Ray Bradbury (1920 – ) American writer


“Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning." Thomas Edison

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." Dwight Eisenhower

“Hoping consumes as much energy as planning." Unknown sales professional

As sales professionals depart a sales training experience, one of the tools they typically take with them is some sort of call planning form. That form is accompanied with the best of intentions to use it in preparing for their next sales call. Of course, we all have heard where that road that is “paved with good intentions” leads and it is not a desirable destination.

Perhaps we’d engage in call planning more often if we paused to understand why call planning is so valuable to us and to our customers:

1) Planning focuses us on an outcome (Purpose);
2) Planning provides us with rehearsal time (Practice);
3) Planning reinforces our skills and process(Perfection);
4) Planning leads to improved results (Payoff).

Focusing on an outcome demands we consider what the purpose of the call might be, both for us and for our customers. That purpose becomes our guide for handling any deviation from the plan and sustains our discipline to remain on track despite interruptions, objections or unexpected reactions. Considering the limited exposure we have with each other in today’s business environment, being purposeful with time and others’ is perhaps the most considerate and strategic thing we can do in a business relationship.

Every skill-based human activity benefits from practice, be it an athletic endeavor or an artistic performance. Practice rehearses the mind and the body to function in unison and to produce consistent, superior results. Practice produces improvement in skills and provides a greater latitude within the discipline of process than without it. Sales calls have a smoother and richer quality for sales professional and customer alike because uncertainty is reduced and relaxed environment of confidence leads to a level of creativity that is obscured when we cannot escape doubt.

Skill improvement is typically experienced incrementally and in small, manageable steps toward perfection. Beyond practice, call planning with a planning form reinforces the skills learned, eventually resulting in those skills becoming good call execution habits, call after call after call. The very act of capturing our strategy and tactics in one place disciplines us to put into action the process we have learned.

Finally, every bit of data on the subject indicates that planning for anything always leads to better results. The payoff to a sales professional is measured in better use of limited and valuable time, improved outcomes, and further development of competitive skills. As we examine the other benefits of planning, it is apparent that each is inextricably related to the other, increasing the combined value of all.

Perhaps the greatest “take-away” from a training experience is not the skills we learn, but the application of those skills to produce the results we seek. Call planning takes us much farther down that road and deserves a second look from us in our pursuit of sales excellence.