What happens when I cold call?

I pick up the phone and dial and someone tells me they don't use my product or service. Someone else won't answer the phone so I have to leave yet another voicemail and we all know how effective that is so why bother? The next person hangs up on me. The next one is a current customer on someone else's list.

I am usually talking to a screener and I can't show them enough benefit to get through to the decision maker. When I do get someone on the phone or over their desk who might actually have the need and ability to buy my product or service I have no confidence that what I say is actually is catching their attention. If I do get through to the decision maker they bring up an objection that I can't counter and I feel frustrated and a fool.

We are also facing our an even bigger barrier. Our failure to live up to our own misplaced expectations.

NMO CD"Selling When You Can't See the Whites of Their Eyes: No More Objections CD $44.95"

You are told repeatedly about people who develop tons of business cold calling. You hear of people who make a heck of a lot more calls than you ever do and you wonder what in the heck you are doing wrong. You expect the people your are calling to give you a chance and they don't.

You have not made the calls or had the success you expected to have. Failure to live up to expectations equals unhappiness.

I hope it isn't quite that bad.

Here is the good news. Everybody experiences what you are experiencing. You can and will develop skills and attitudes that will make it much less painful to make the calls you need to make. You can and will develop skills and attitudes that will make you much more effective and efficient-If you are willing to let go of things that aren't your responsibility and take responsibility for some things you probably haven't thought about. Oh, and you will have to have some discipline.

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Let's look at step one on this journey-Understand that the objections you face are not about your product or service. They are not about you. They are not about your technique. They are not about your voice or tone or anything else. Many are not even true!

Potential customers use the objections they use, "My brother-in-law sells insurance, I renewed my policy yesterday, or our training is all handled out of corporate," not because they are true, but because all the bad sales people in the world have trained our future customers to use them to get you off the phone or out of their office and save the potential customer's most precious possession. Their TIME!

And you have probably done this yourself. Remember the last time a sales person called and you said something like: "Oh I just renewed my contract for another 1, 2, 3, 5 years, call me back then?" We probably didn't even consciously register what the person was trying to sell us. They didn't say anything interesting enough to engage us or ask a question that caught our attention. We turned them down on autopilot!

Remember that whatever you said was maybe not anywhere near the truth, but it was effectively designed by years of practice to get the person off the phone or out of your office as quickly as possible?

"Thanks, I'm not interested" will stop 95% of us!

It is completely okay for us to use any means at our disposal to get rid of a bad sales call. It is going to happen to us as sales people. Accept it!

Also accept that a big part of the reluctance that you are experiencing about making calls is that it can be a horribly inefficient and ineffective way to build a business.

Is this horrible inefficiency and ineffectiveness fixable? YES IT IS!
We will cover improvements in this area in near future issues.

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Each e-letter will encourage you to take immediate action to implement consultative selling skills and positive leadership principles. Action item's for part one of turning call reluctance into call excitement:

1. Realize that the first objection you hear is probably an autopilot response to your call

2. Review the most effective objections or push-backs you use yourself

3. Review the objections or push-backs that stop you and ask yourself if they can possibly be true. How many people statistically, out of all the people you call, could have just renewed their contract or have brothers-in-law who sell insurance?

4. Give your prospective customers permission to value their time just as you value yours.

5. Need to convince your reps or yourself that resistance is ingrained, natural, and OK? Then try the following experiment:

The following demonstration will cost you some of your selling time. My guess is that out of fifty conversations you might have to pay out a couple of hundred dollars. I do not guarantee this ratio!

Ask your reps to call people and sell $100 bills for fifty dollars as a promotion. Here is your rough script outline.

"Hello Mrs. Business Woman. This is Bob Brown with ABC Company. I am calling today to sell you a $100 bill for fifty dollars, no strings attached. ABC company is giving this $50 away as a marketing promotion to make people more aware of our wonderful company. We are doing this to publicize that doing business with us is like getting a hundred dollars for only fifty bucks. I simply need for you to sign for the fifty dollars when we deliver it."

"Hello? Hello? Mrs. Business Woman are you there?" (You or your reps will hear a lot of hang-ups)

This experiment will prove very quickly that people are conditioned by all the terrible sales calls that take place to automatically say NO! It will prove how suspicious and resistant our future customers can be! And rightfully so.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to speaking to you again in a few weeks with more ways to turn call reluctance to call excitement-taking the pain out of sales calls. And if you liked what you read-forward it to a friend!