Sales Intelligentsia

Prospecting Tools: The Phone

You should learn to love the phone. It is cheap, personal, direct and instantaneous. The phone is, in my opinion, the single most effective marketing and sales tool. Yet it also causes a level of fear second only to public speaking. It seems easy enough. You pick up the phone, dial a prospective customer’s number and ask them for an appointment. They either say yes or no. You make your appointment or thank them for their time and make the next call. It costs virtually nothing in comparison to almost any other technique and your results are instantaneous. So why don’t we all use the phone to its full marketing potential?
It has to do with a concept known as ‘cold calling’. These calls are considered cold because they are unsolicited approaches directly to a customer. And if you take the boiler room approach of simply calling every Sam, Dick and Mary, you’ll get a frosty reception much of the time. Their are several skills involved in prospecting with a phone. First you must know something about the person you are calling. The more the better. Otherwise you’re wasting their time and nothing turns people off more. Second, you must use a script to get appointments. Using a script seems to shock a lot of people because it seems as though you’re using a ‘canned’ presentation to sell your very personal business.
The script is nothing more than a step by step guide to make sure you say what you want and keep the conversation moving towards your goal of getting an appointment. It might read like this:
“This is Jane Smith calling for Bill Johnson.”
“ I’m with the Concept Company.”
“ Mr. Johnson, I wonder if you have a few minutes? I’d like to talk to you about the effectiveness of your marketing. Yes we’re a consulting group that specializes in helping growing companies evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing budget. Can we get together so I can show you what we do? Great, is Monday at 10:30 OK? How about Tuesday afternoon?”
“ Thanks again for your time. I’ll see you on Tuesday.”
This helps keep you on track. There are a couple of important things happening here. First, your primary goal is to get an appointment. Don’t tell them about your business or rattle on about past experience, special tools or anything else. Just go for the appointment. If they ask you to send information just tell them that every situation is different and that you’d like to show them personally how you can help them. And always offer them a specific date and time with an alternate ready if it won’t work.
Scripts are a real help for the fear that often accompanies calling. Just keep moving through the script. If someone has no interest, thank them, hang up and immediately dial the next number. Their refusal has nothing to do with you if you have been brief and polite. If they’re rude it is likely that something you know nothing about is behind it so don’t take it personally.
There is a simple routine that helps turn cold calls into warm calls. It’s a motivation game. Just realize that even if it takes ten calls to make an appointment and three appointments to make a sale that generates $300 in profits, each call was worth $10! At ten bucks each, a few rejections can still seem like money in the bank. And its likely that you will do much better than this if you’ve pre-qualified your prospects and assembled a highly motivated list.

Welcome to Sales Intelligentsia, everything successful in sales management

We’ve been involved in selling in one form or another for over twenty years, including everything from car sales to major technology sales, sales management and even writing sales books and training materials. We designed comp plans, recruited sales teams, made those cold calls and closed the deal over and over again. Sales Intelligentsia is about intelligent selling- no hammering, no pushing, no dirty tricks; just successful selling that builds your career, grows your business and improves the lives of your customers.

This blog is for business owners (you have to be a superlative seller to succeed in your own business, no exceptions), beginning salespeople, sales managers, experienced old hands looking for a little edge sharpening and even marketing people- because if you don’t generate leads, your sales team can’t bring in the business.

We’re going to review books, sales systems, sites and training programs (if you have one Contact us for a review), we’re going to tell stories, offer tips and shortcuts, help with elevator speeches and scripts, deal out some motivation and talk about money and comp planning. In short, everything related to sales of all kinds.

Stay tuned, we’re going to be giving you something new every day.