Turn Up The Volume, I Can’t Hear You!

It seems we’ve become consumed by volume!  Just look at the so many of the blog posts are articles.

We are exhorted to “live life at 1000 dials per day,” conduct social selling at “scale,” “tweet your way to 1000’s of followers,” “How to get 10,000 Facebook fans,” “How to get 10,000 LinkedIn connections relevant to your business,” “How I got 1,000,000 followers on LinkedIn,” “How to send 40,000 emails a day,” “What we learned from 1000 cold emails,”  “Cold calling 100 prospects a day,” “How to generate 1000’s of leads.”

I’ll stop here, there are literally……..  well, 1000’s of these types of articles  (I suppose volume begets volume.)

Our managers are always saying “More,”  more leads, more calls, more emails, more content, more deals in the pipeline, more of everything.  If we don’t have enough of whatever management says we need, we simply do more, we cast a wider net.

The problem is volume doesn’t seem to be working.

The majority of sales organizations seem to be opportunity starved, their natural plea is more.

So we do more…….

More is easy, it’s virtually free.  Just send out another 10,000 emails – the incremental cost is virtually zero, perhaps we have to buy a list.  Just ramp up your followers (you can pay a few $’s and get 1000 new twitter followers).  LinkedIn reinforces this, with a single click I can send connection requests to 100’s of people…..clearly they think more is better (It’s a long way from their warnings, “Connect with people you know.”)

We spend $ billions on 1000’s of sales and marketing automation tools—most focused on giving us more.

The digitization of our businesses seems to make more the default solution to all of our sales and marketing challenges.

But more isn’t working.  Each iteration of more, produces proportionately less.  We see declining open/click throughs, declining response rates, declining phone pick ups.

More is mindlessness….

What if we eliminated increasing the volume as the “answer?”  How might we rethink our approaches, rethink our prospecting, marketing, and sales strategies?

How would we change what we do and how we engage of there was a limitation to who we could reach?  I don’t know what your number is.  If it’s 1000, 10,000, 100,000.  What if that were the limit to the volume that we could drive?

What would we change to get the engagement we need, to produce the results we seek?

Our prospects and customers are already telling us that more simply doesn’t work.  They are ignoring our calls, they are ignoring/Spamming our emails, they are immune to our social outreach.  They are increasingly impatient and unaccepting of our race to capture their attention.  They are overwhelmed and shutting down.

So more is clearly not the answer.  Volume has it’s limitations and rapidly declining returns.

So what are you going to do differently, any idiot can do more.  I trust you don’t fall into that category (otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.)