SFM Ep 35: Adam Bluemner On Applying Phone Selling Strategies To Your Entire Sales Funnel

Phone selling and particularly cold calling is a lost art in today's world of automation, but it absolutely should not be. In episode #35 I bring on Adam Bluemner who has broken down over 63,000 cold calls to discuss what works and what doesn't, but more specifically, how to apply his findings into your entire sales funnel whether you ever sell on the phone or not! We'll show you how to take his findings and apply them to your emails, direct mail, calls to existing customers/clients, and even to cold leads.

Check it out, share it, leave a review, and let me know what you think!

Resources Mentioned

Adam's website - http://findaccountingsoftware.com/

The study mentioned - http://findaccountingsoftware.com/expert-advice/2015-b2b-web-to-phone-qualification-study/

Want To Work With Me?

Visit http://www.JeremyReeves.com or email me at [email protected]

Enjoy!

Transcript

Jeremy Reeves: Hey everyone this is Jeremy Reeves with another episode of the sales funnel mastery podcast and today I have another expert guest on the line his name is Adam Bluemner, and he works at findaccountingsoftware.com and we have a pretty interesting discussion for you today because it is not technically about your sales funnel, it is kind of like what to do to get people into your sales funnel and it is something that a lot of people really do not do very much anymore and that is cold calling and so he is going to -- we are kind of going to talk about a case study that he did.

They actually did 63,256 calls and they took all of that information and they kind of boiled it down to what works and what does not and that kind of thing, and then we are also going to because I know, depending on if you do cold calls or not this is going to be really valuable because we are going to then tie that into how you can put the information we are going to talk about into your sales funnel and use for example one of my strategies that I always talked about, and that is calling customers after they buy from you. See you can use the information it does not have to necessary be a cold-call, it can be kind of at any point in the sales process. So, we will tie that on together. So Adam, how are you?

Adam Bluemner: I am great. How are you doing today?

Jeremy Reeves: I am good, thanks for joining us today. I think is going to be a pretty interesting conversation.

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, I mean, there is a lot of really interesting data to go through, so I am certainly looking forward to that.

Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, sounds good, sounds good. So, first of all, tell us a little bit about yourself, the context behind why you guys did, you know, you compile all this information and the story behind all that.

Adam Bluemner: Sure, absolutely. So, my name is Adam Bluemner, I am the managing editor at Find Accounting Software, it is kind of an interesting company, I have been here for over a decade myself.

What we do is we are a software matching service, so it is kind of two different angles that the company is providing value out into the market. One is buyers of software, so if somebody is looking for a new and a business management system, very likely 236 the internet or doing some research, so we have provision ourselves there with a lot of different resources and especially a matching process, so if somebody wants to find some good solution to consider they could share their requirements with us and we will get them some recommendation and different options that they might wanted to appear that is completely pretty thing on the software buyer’s side.

On the other side we are also working with the companies who are selling software. Obviously, there is a lot of company out there who are offering technology solution, they partner up with us because we have the ability to get them matched up with people who are looking for software that is 319 of what they are offering, so that is kind of a little bit about how the company works.

Jeremy Reeves: Okay. Yeah, it is kind of an interesting business model, it is actually a good one too because I even know, and I am going to start doing more of this, a lot of people kind of come to me as the resource for sales funnels like even the various different software and resources like people they need things like that. So, there is -- I mean pretty much every entrepreneur is looking for different things that they need in their business and you essentially matched them up to various accounting softwares that they can use.

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, that is exactly right, I mean there is a lot 357 we are able to kind of realize that a lot of the software sellers themselves are not able to do, so we are able to kind of address really wide range of different kind of functional types of software, put out a lot of different marketing material on those different things and then use that kind of slice and dice it and bring it back on to the level of the individual solution that an individual seller might be looking to sell, so that is kind of where we come in and 428 we are able to do it, mark it and connect them with really 433 leads in a way that is less expensive than if they were doing internally.

Jeremy Reeves: Nice, nice, sounds good, sounds good. So, let us get into the study that you guys did and you know before we get into because there is a whole bunch of statistics and all that kind of good stuff to go over, but before we get into that tell us the story of why you guys did this study and why you compile all the data, where are you using it for -- for your own kind of internal marketing or for may be clients, tell us the story behind that.

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean 506 right away that we looked at 63,000 different calls 510 essentially people who had so 514 a lead form on our website or request for information that 518 so there is a huge amount of different opportunity to connect with this people and you are dealing with that 526 every efficiency that you can gain is really tremendously important then it is going to be multiplied many times or so. We have always kind of work at making our process as wean as possible if you want to use that term to make sure that we are eliminating 546 I mean just kind of break it down connecting with as many of this folks who are interested in finding software as possible. So what we want to do with this particular study is we are going to take a disciplined consistent approach that gathering the information and 606 really kind of quantitative benchmarks that we can 610 in and see without our suspicion about what is working 615 understand anecdotally and through our own experience what works well with when we actually break this down to the number 623 what we are doing here.

Jeremy Reeves: Okay, nice, nice, sounds good. So, I guess, there is a whole bunch of statistics to get over like I guess let us just pick one. How does speed, because one thing that I have always noted is that when leads come in, it is something called recency and that is the use in direct mail it is kind of widespread marketing term, and is very relevant in what you guys are in to.

So, how does the speed -- so when somebody comes in let us just say it is 1 o’clock in the afternoon, they filled out your lead form, does it make a difference if you call them within in a minute or within in a day or within in a week, does that make a difference?

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, good question, I mean like I was saying, we are really looking for the things that we did, kind of quantify right? And 714 is one of those great things that 717 and really drove out exactly what you are doing and keep whatever the results of that. So, basically we did exactly that and it and we always knew that the speed of getting on the phone with somebody after they have indicated their interest was really important but is really pretty startling to see how profound that affect 743. So, for instance they kind of give you a number on it we actually work that -- what happens when you call somebody who has submitted a form indicated an interest within 5 minutes, how often are we able to get that person on the phone. We find out that it is about 50% of the time. We actually looked at that compared or what if you wait until the next day and it actually drops down to 28%.

Jeremy Reeves: Wow.

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, I mean from an efficiency standpoint, you are talking about doubling your efficiency in terms of being able to talk to folks just like getting on the phone with them right away within the 5 minutes.

Jeremy Reeves: Wow. That is a pretty big drop I mean that is essentially doubling. You know, if you are waiting until the next day to call people back and you do it within 5 minutes you are essentially doubling the amount of people you get to talk to.

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, that is exactly right and I thought one of the interesting things that I thought would be you know need to kind of find out is to take what are the industry approaches how quickly do people tend to follow up 851 there was some information out there it was not something that we had put together as reference in the study or so, but apparently, the industry average is about 46 hours.

Jeremy Reeves: Wow.

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, so I think, you know, and I think for some people if you are a salesperson and you are busy, you are out making calls you know, calling within a day can make me actually feel kind of feel fast, I mean it does not feel like if that 919 is a delay, but when you are actually kind of look at the result is that, 924 really interesting that you are talking about radically different result of that if you do wait that day or two.

Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, that is interesting, okay. That does not matter -- do you have any stats that are based on industry or is that kind of a total aggregative of everything you have done?

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, so I believe the stats that I referenced on a study would be average of when people call to follow up with 951 in the different industries. In terms of the data that we gathered it is definitely across a huge variety of different industry type. We do not really make any effort whatsoever to focus on one particular etch, though. The people that we are talking to could be a nonprofit organization with a handful of people or could be you know a really large multinational manufacturing company, so those are the individual specializations are kind of 1026 because we do talk to such a wide variety of different folks out there.

Jeremy Reeves: Okay, okay, nice. That is really good thing to know and to bring it back to -- to even with sales 1037 even if one skill that they always tell people to learn is the ability to take information and take a concept from one area and applied it to their own business.

So, just one idea that just pop into my head is, if you look at that and it is basically the faster you get in touch with people when they first get in touch with you, the better results you are going to have. So, if you put that into even something like emails, so if you are doing callbacks and obviously call them back and -- but if you do not have that in your business right now you can take the same concept into something like email or retargeting or something like that, and that is kind of one of the things I say is when people get in touch with you whether to email or calling or whatever it is, that is when they are the most open and receptive and kind of you know, hot to do business with you because they just got in touch with you that moment and every minute that goes by, they become less and less excited to do business with you and that is why it so important to do things like call people back right away and to send emails right away, because a lot of times, they kind of get like that first initially you know like, “Oh, thanks for downloading our thing” and then you do not send the next email for like a week and by that time they forget who you even are, it is kind of the same thing with calling, it is definitely a good concept that you can use in several different areas in your business.

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, absolutely. I think you are definitely right on to 1207 it is one of those principle that expands beyond 1212 one of the things that I am interested in doing this is actually doing a similar type of thing of work, quantifying it with our email 1222 to see exactly how to play out there. Now, I would expect we are going to find a very, very similar kind of phenomenon that is going out there, but the other part of what you are just kind of talking about is that when you see the soft of the fact, really the important thing is to actually grab it and latch onto it and integrate it and have a process -- it is great to see okay, there is this data that 1250 it is better if we get on the phone faster I think that -- from my perspective really groundbreaking I think most people are kind of intuitive 1258. The important thing is do you have a 1301 that you can actually rely on and to move forward with that, do you have the motivation to put into the practice.

Jeremy Reeves: Yeah and do you have -- is there anything, and I totally agree by the way, the fact I was actually just working on one of my standard operating procedures right before we got into this call and that is -- it kind of shows the importance of having you know an actual system in place rather than just like “oh okay, you know one call you get back and you are not doing anything, so you call right away. The next time somebody calls may be you are in the middle of writing something or you know on another interview or whatever it is so they do not get called for two days, you know, it is -- do you have any kind of further insights into -- how to build those systems, is there anything that you guys do or any of your clients or anything like that do, that kind of helps make it so that is a very consistent process?

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I can tell you exactly what we did with that to make sure that it was consistent I can definitely share some ideas on. I think some very easy ways that you can kind of lean on technology to make it easier, so what we did and I talked about this in the study is we actually had developed kind of a piece of internal software super super simple it might be -- we have a couple of really smart internal developers here it might be online 1426 simple application type put together for our own use here. Basically what it was is they just look at the database and when a new lead, a new request free information came through what it would do is we have a team of software experts that speak with this different people about what their needs are. It literally will bring up a screen on their workstation with a little alert segment. I mean it is literally exactly that, I mean it is a visual 1455 Yeah, it is great it is funny I mean it sounds almost illegal when you have that kind of visual reminder in front of you, I mean it is very -- it demands action, so and that is all it is. It basically just says, “hey, there is something waiting for you here” and it allows you link to open it up and then make a call to you for those folks so that is our own internal system for it, I think there is actually a lot of really good ways that are very technologically simple that people can do that. For somebody who is hosting their own site, they are definitely waiting for you to get an email 1539, immediately letting you know that you got this new opportunity waiting for you. There is great services out there. There is something called IFTT, and you heard of this particular application?

Jeremy Reeves: Ift?

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, IFTT.

Jeremy Reeves: No, I have not.

Adam Bluemner: Okay, so it is a very simple thing. It is completely free. The IFFT stands for “If This, Then That.” Basically, it is kind of like a bridge between different software application and different web applications that allows you to make the action from one place, maybe it is a new tweeter post or something like that, cannot 1626 the action from somewhere else like if it is like an open web service, so people use this to, you know, if they get an email on a particular thing that includes a particular keyword, what kind of 1638 text message email or if they post a Facebook thing or, you know, a particular Facebook post come across with a particular topic 1648 down to some other means. I think those are the things which, again, is actually completely free to use. This particular web application, really, really simple 1700 being kind of democratize with the development of all this cool services out there, so the technology is 1708 out there, it is something that people can access at no cost.

Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, yeah. I actually just - I was kind of browsing on the website. It is actually really cool. That is very similar if, for some reason, most of the people I know have either have or use called Zapier, and that is basically, it is a very similar kind of concept, you kind of link all the various apps together and they tell each other, you know, if this thing happens on that, you know, do this.

So, yeah, I mean either of those works and I am actually going to keep it up on my screen because it looks pretty interesting. Yeah, that is really good kind of tip on doing that. How about-- while you are talking about the little notification that they get with the red siren and that kind of thing, do you guys have anything in place let us say for example that I get a lead and I am on the phone at that moment and it is going to be like an hour or something like that. Is there a way to -- and you might not even noticed, is there a way to like kind of click, you know, I am too busy and then it kind of does like a round robin thing and it goes to the next person?

Adam Bluemner: Yeah. We do it absolutely, have that built in to it. It will even 1823 on that siren that we have. It will identify other people who may be potential people to call back are actually engaged in some other activity. So, 1834 phone system to see if that is the case which I guess is, you know, that level of sophistication beyond what I was going to present before 1844, so yeah, I mean there are all sorts of cool stuff you can do it but I mean really obviously being in the company that matches organizations up with different software solutions to business 1858 it is something that is angled that we are looking at every single day, so there are tremendous systems out there and you can take this as far as you need to take it, so something like -- yeah, 1913 an independent contractor right which definitely needs to set up, down and very simple little notification system.

Now, that is going to be very different than if it is a large organization that has thousands of different sales reps that needs to manage all sorts of territory role and all sorts of different processes like that, but there is technically solutions out there that to do. There is a lot of 1942 systems they give you kind of leverage to do the sort of internal notification to keep a track of the results of these certain 1951 it really needs to take kind of analytical approach to this.

Jeremy Reeves: Ok, nice. I like this. So how about, you know, we talked about speed and various ways to what kind of like the technical details in getting it done, what about you know, one of the things that I have learned over marketing is that you cannot like if you expect to be successful in whatever you are doing at any kind of marketing campaign you cannot just put yourself in front of the person one time, you know, obviously that is where you are going to get the most result is the first attempt like if you do a direct mail letter you will get whatever conversion rate for the first mailing but then what a lot of people do not do is then follow up and to a second one or third one and so one of the principles I teach is keep doing it until it is no longer profitable for you, because it is something like people give up too easily. Talk to us about that, does it make a difference in terms of cold calls, does it make a difference if you call them just one time versus two or five or ten times, how does that work?

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, like I was talking before about the average of the time between when people receive a lead and when they would make in terms of the industry average in about 46 hours I also went to find out how many times do people really make when they get a 2118. The number that I came back for that was also shockingly 2124 about 1.2 according to the study that I consulted. I believe it was from a company called IBM 2131 study again, but I really, really 2135 number of followup at times. So, the interesting thing is I know there is and probably a lot of your listeners do 2144 so these are expensive and there is a lot of cost tied into the marketing efforts to actually acquired that 2151 and you certainly want to make sure that you are doing everything that you can from a return on investment standpoint to get the value out of that leads.

So, we wanted to look at it exactly from that window to make sense to what to give up on this particular lead. So what we did on that one is we actually checked out what are contact rates were by the number of calls that we made and found out some really interesting things with relation to that. We are able to go from about 42% of our first call that we made, we are able to speak with somebody right on that first call right. So, now the individual contact rate drops down significantly from there but if you go out to the 7th, 8th, or 9th call where the upper 70th percentile 2245 contacting that particular lead contact.

So, again, we are almost approaching doubling the number of people that we spoke with by, you know, simply making 6 or 7 more calls. So, 2300 for an individual sales rep I understand that you are making, you know, making that 3rd and 4th and 5th and 6th call and you are not getting the experience, the feedback of talking to somebody, that is frustrating, but if you can take a look at the whole thing, if you have the perspective of “hey, I’m actually doubling my qualification rate or my contact rate here” I think that puts the difference on that when you actually look at the 2329 return that you are getting on the investment of your time.

Jeremy Reeves: Definitely, definitely and I am looking at the image where you guy show this and it goes from the exact numbers are 42.9% for the 1st call and then it goes all the way up to 79.6%. So, it is basically doubling by 10 calls and then -- another way of looking at that is you can then just kind of like 80/20 that and say, okay but we are getting 80% of the results within the first, whatever, five calls you know, so for example it goes from 43% to 71% in the first 5 calls, so maybe you just stop there and maybe after that point, that is when you like, okay, you know, it is not worth the extra time to do those other five calls just for another 10% bump, maybe it depends on how profitable you are, it depends on how much you are paying your sales people, it depends on the margins I mean it depends on all kinds of different factors, but beyond, it is interesting, and once again, you know, moving that into other areas if you are doing direct mail. Keep testing it, keep sending out new letters until it is not profitable anymore.

If you do an emails, you know, do not just have one or two emails, have it up until the point and you are able to track things like emails and any of retargeting things like that, so you know exactly how much you are making after each email, so just look at that and say, okay, it is not profitable anymore after email, whatever 20 and then stop. So, it is applicable in so many different areas, but you know, the thing is, do not just give up because like what I am talking about, I mean you can -- after 10 contact attempts you double just about -- you double your results and then if you mix that with calling people and it is funny because nobody thinks that doing cold calling works, but if there are not doing these things, like, imagine somebody, you know, they are getting 2528 cold-calls and there calling them the next day and then only following up once, imagine how much better if you -- because both of them basically double, so even if you just say, you know, 2-1/2 times overall just to be really conservative and did calls right off the bat like in the first 5 minutes and follow up with them 5 to 10 times, I mean just look at the difference in the results and that is probably why people are so frustrated when they do stuff like this is because they are not doing the right way basically, they are not doing everything that can make it worth their time.

Adam Bluemner: Well, for me the interesting thing about it is they are actually is in mathematical answer, 2613 for how long it make them to follow up, right? Now, it is a little bit difficult to ride back you have got to consider all these different variables what 2621 making these calls what is the time required to make all of these different calls, but one of the reason why I wanted to present this information is because this is where it starts in order to that. For us, we are able to look at it and say, well, you know 2639 a minute and they ask may be to make an individual call. We are able to kind of calculate our own internal cost that are associated with that and then we actually able to see the return on what that cost is and compare it and come to actually in mathematical conclusion of this is where it make sense to stop and this is where it make sense to keep going and that is something that I would encourage every sales professional to do individually if they are not in an organization that are helping to do it themselves and I think it is really 2715 you got to just start to gather the information seeing what it is, in your case understanding, you know, the value of your time versus the time it takes to make these attempts and write it out, you will see what the difference and may be in your case for an individual it is the 4th or the 5th call and beyond that ---- on the time that takes 2739 and it is just really is not worth the rewards on it or maybe 2742 down the line but takes the time to actually figure that out because the differential between what you are doing and what is optimum is essentially 2750 and you can eliminate that you are making your company yourself more efficient.

Jeremy Reeves: Okay, yeah, yeah, it make sense, make sense. So, the next question is, as you go down the line and you know, I am just going to play devil’s advocate a little bit. Do the prospects become less qualified as it gets harder to contact them, so let us just say that you have 100 people that you contact on 1st call, does that mean they are more open to buying from you or do you have any statistics on kind of how qualified the prospects are as you go down the line?

Adam Bluemner: Yeah. We do. Actually, you are right, I mean, so far I have been talking about contact rates. What it would matter is that ultimately the qualification rate, right? You want to find out if there is somebody who is moving along on the process and kind of getting to the next stage. Now, I mentioned the context 2851 were qualifying these opportunities for external organizations the fact it does not matter so much, it could be whether it is for your sales or whether it is for, you know, outside company, it does not matter if you just need to move them along in that sales cycle. When you take a look at these numbers on that 1st contact attempt our qualification rate is about 24%.

So 24% of the time that 2918 pick up the phone and make the call. We are going to have a qualifying prospect somebody that yes we are looking for software yes. We are looking to find out more information about this, yes were in the buying process. That is what qualifying 2933 that is going to be the number on that 1st call. Now, when you look at this and you continue on, the further you go and the number of contacted comes the lower that qualification rate is going to come. So, for instance, the 5th conversation you are at about 2.5% of those times that you take up the call, you are going to 2957 individually qualified prospect as the result of that particular call, but it is the same as it is with the contact rate if you look at the cumulative numbers, you are almost doubling your qualification rate by giving up the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th contact attempts.

Jeremy Reeves: That is interesting. Yeah, it is kind of funny that like almost everything is doubling over 10 contact attempts. It is kind of -- it is a weird little phenomenon. Even when you are doing that I imagined -- and again, it kind of comes down to your specific business what make sense for you, but people listening to this, could you get to the 5th contact attempt and only a couple percent are qualified, what you can do in that case is just outsource the very beginning of the call and then maybe you have a question for them and then if they show that they are qualified, then they get transferred to the normal sales person. I mean there are always ways around this to make it work for your business. You have to get creative with it and figure out how to make it work for your business.

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, all those 3105 numbers in terms of the value that you get out of it 3108 associated with following up that is where the rubber meets the road and of course that will be different kind of business by business key, but the general kind of overall phenomenon I think is going to be pretty consistent.

Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Now, how about -- so far, we talked about -- and I am going to see if I remember everything, we talked about the speed of how fast you contact them, what was the second thing, it was speed and then how many, so the number of calls that you should do and then we talked about how qualify they are as you go down the line. How about things like, the time of day because I know a lot of people asked me specifically to like emails and things like that, is there certain time of day you should send them as a certain day of the week that kind of thing. Should you do them on weekend, should you not, should you do in the morning, afternoon, or night. Do you have any kind of insights on days of the week and times of the day and kind of breaking it down into that specific detail?

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, so that was something we wanted as well, we wanted to put the actual numbers to that. I definitely seen a lot of different articles out there that were living at this very topic and trying to figure out is there a sweet spot. So, we were able to take a look at that and examine that I think one of the important things to mention is our specific contacts, I think the results will depend on whether or not each individual sales team or sales person contacts matches this one. We are talking about B to Be sales here. So, we are not calling up with anybody who is a direct consumer, buying the consumer product, this is all business to business type of sales, right? So we did look at what were the results from calling Monday through Friday and standard business days that is when we make our calls and then at 8 in the morning to 5 p.m. local time, that is also when we make our calls. So that is really where we have the data and where we were able to assess. So, we have been seeing some differences and at the middle of the week, Tuesday through Thursday was a bit elevated in terms of the contact rates that we saw there. Similarly we are seeing that there was a little bit of an elevated contact rate for the morning hours versus the afternoon hours, but I think for me when I look at this data, what we 3339 we are talking about differential of half a percent, 1.5% and 2%. So, before 3347 we are talking about doubling to get back. Here we are working at half percent or a couple percent, so I would actually urge people not to get too hung up on finding that exact particular time, recency that you are talking about before as well as the number of followup attempts I think is going to be a much -- further going to be much more important 3411.

Jeremy Reeves: Okay, yeah, yeah. Like you were just saying, I think the recency and also the frequency are both way, way bigger determining factors than looking at it and just so everybody knows, it does kind of make sense because I am looking at it now, the days of the week, it is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I know for me personally, both checking my own emails and also reaching out to potential clients or clients whatever, most people respond, in those middle days, Mondays usually terrible because everybody comes off of the weekend and their inbox is just overloaded, they are getting ready for the week and then Friday there is kind of like that mad rush to get everything done before the weekend and then throughout the day, there is a big jump at 11 or 12 so that is basically lunch time, so a lot of people and I know, you know, myself I know most of my friends, my clients they check their email a lot during lunch hours because it is kind of like a little bit of -- they get a little bit of down time, they kind of chilling for an hour or so, and they use that to kind of catch up on their email. A lot of people only check their email during lunchtime.

So, that all make sense, but and that is -- I am kind of glad that you found -- that you came to these conclusions with days of the week and times of the day because I have talked about that several times in marketing and everybody wants to know when they should send it, but the reality is, it does not matter that much. Yeah, I mean if you are already a 50-million dollar business and you have tested the bejesus out of everything that you are doing, okay you can get really, really granular like that and test, you know, tiny little tweaks, but the bigger changes are going to happen when you are testing how fast you call them back, the script for when you call them back. How qualified they are in the first place, all that kind of stuff. So, I definitely agree with you that these, the last statistics there are -- they are interesting but they really, should not be focused on all that much.

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, I mean as 3624 talking through why, some of the 3627 like variations made and 3628 I understand people 3631 about that and one of the interesting things I thought when I did the research for this is when I went out to see have other people found similar things and 3642 time of articles out there that are talking about reporting to tell you that this is the golden hour, the golden day for following up and I think I have 3655 theory that probably a pretty good portion of those studies are the results of sloppy analytics so here is my theory on that. When I originally ran these numbers, I saw that Monday and the first thing in the morning had really, really elevated contact rate, like abnormally high and I thought why that is really strange, that does not seem to make 3722 especially not on followup calls or a call after the 1st attempt was made and I think actually what happened is, because you have such a higher contact rate on that 1st call that you make, right? You are eliminating that 3742 people who, the reason they are not answering because they change their mind about 3749 that first 3750 where you got your best chance, well Monday morning you have got all of the needs and inquiries without being submitted over the weekend, 3800 abnormally high number of fresh opportunities and that is actually we wanted kind of avoiding those numbers. So when I 3809 and took that out of the equation, right, and I just listed the followup once and kind of normalize the 3815. That phenomenon completely disappeared for me. So I think a lot of the articles out there that are saying, hey 3825 first thing on Monday morning. I suspect there may be this kind of bias that is still can 3836 who knows, I mean maybe there are some niche industry where that really is a good time, I certainly do not want just to come to all of them, but it seems likely that there is some 3845 going on.

Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, yeah. There could be a couple different things going on there I think and the number one it is kind of like -- like you were talking about -- basically correlation versus causation, is it correlators, is one thing actually causing the other thing, so there is that argument to it and then, another kind of potential thing would be something as simple as some marketer, 50 years ago wanted to bring out a new tactic to tell everybody to sell a course and he said, “Oh, its -- you have to follow up at Thursday at 2 o’clock” because that worked the best for me, 10 calls and therefore that is exactly what you have to do and then it just stuck. That happens a lot in the world of conversion rate optimization. Today, you know, people would get invalid results, they do like a sample size of like 10 or 20 people and they get a result, and they are like, “Oh, I tripled my conversion rate” but little do they know if they did, you know, 100 or 200 or 1000 conversions it would go down to insignificant numbers, 3948 I think your number is definitely after almost over 63,000 calls I am pretty sure you have a good enough sample size.

Adam Bluemner: Yeah and those are one of the things that -- because of the unique position that we hold, we are actually able to deal with that sort of volume which is great, I mean it is an awesome sample size to be able to get into but, you know, interestingly 4014 and play it with, you know, at any given time, so we are really looking closely at where the rubber meets the road in terms of what is working and trying to be as nimble as possible and putting this things into a fact but I think also what you are saying before about somebody 4036 to sell a particular course. I agree I think those 4039. The truth is often a little bit more mundane than that, I mean for instance, I think you can see that 4052 study what we did we find here. We found that the biggest factors are 4056 again, something that most people 4058 as we 4100 continue to follow up, but there are things that I think, the value of this is -- okay here is the approach of how to work at the actual numbers on it and kind of work it out and let us think about what kind of mechanisms that we need to bring this in to an actual process. That is the value of thinking about that sort of thing.

Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, yeah, absolutely and for everybody listening before we jump off here. I just want to bring everything back to a few key points.

So number 1, if you are doing cold calls, make sure that you are doing all the things that we are talking about, but if you are not doing cold calls, maybe you are doing calls to customers, right?

So if that is the case, then make sure -- again, that you are still -- all of this stuff still applies to that.

And even if you are not doing now but you really should be, but even if you are not doing that if you are sending out emails, the same thing, it is recency, frequency and there is some other things in there but kind of -- do not worry too much about like time of the day and all that kind of stuff. Really 4204 with my 4206 just to show that it does not make that much of a difference with my side business it is a Kinowear I show guys how to dress better and a lot of the audience are younger guys a lot of them are in college, probably 50+ are in college.

So when we send out emails, a lot of times we get better open rates but it is not a huge difference later in the day because most college students kind of check it like weekend nights, stuff like that or like after midnight.

So a lot of times if we end a promotion it is really, really late in the night because we will get sales at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning when they are coming home from the bar and they have a couple beers in them, they see the promotion, then its “oh yeah that is a great idea” 4251 it helps them a lot in dressing better and getting confidence all that, but it really -- it depends it is something to test, but is very far down on your list of test.

And then the fourth thing is if you are doing direct mail, again, the same thing applies. Do not just send out one piece, send out many pieces and then when they call you, if one of your ways to get in touch with you is to call you, make sure that you are getting touch in with them if you missed their call, you are getting in touch with them as fast as you possibly can and then calling them back a few times reminding of why they called you that kind of thing.

So just the kind of bring it into a way that everybody can apply everything that we talked about today because it really is pretty fascinating information that we discussed and it is something I was even kind of shock of how much you can increase by just doing really simple thing. It is not rocket science.

So, anyway, I really appreciate you coming on the line today. Why don’t you tell everybody where they could find you, how you can help them and then we will jump off.

Adam Bluemner: Sure, absolutely. findaccountingsoftware.com is the website. If you are actually looking for the study, what you want to do is there is going to be an area where there is a number of blog post or doing discussions of our variety, different business management topics, this is one of them. If you click through to that, you will see it is probably I would say maybe 6th or 7th most recent post 4426 so you can find this study their 4429.

Jeremy Reeves: Oh sorry, I was just going to say, I will put in a show notes for everybody, so you could just go to the post -- I will put the direct link just so you do not have to scroll around and try to find it.

Adam Bluemner: Yeah, that is great and my email is actually on that as well. So if anybody has any questions I am definitely happy to provide any insights I can. So, yeah, check it out if you get a chance.

Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, sounds good. Thanks for joining us again. It was very, very fascinating for me. I know if I found it fascinating, everybody else did and again everybody knows that I am all about taking action. So make sure to listen to this again if you have to. Go and read the actual case study. Again, I will put a link to it in the show notes that you should -- just go to my blog and go to the podcast section, you will see the show notes for this interview. Go there and make a list and look through everything and see exactly how you can apply it to your business because that is kind of the whole point of all of this.

Thanks again Adam for coming on, it was absolutely awesome and I hope to talk to you soon.

Adam Bluemner: Sounds great. It was a pleasant for being here. Thanks so much for providing the opportunity.

Jeremy Reeves: Yeah, sure. Thanks.