I have been using the phrase “don’t show up and throw up” for a long time in my training and have blogged about it previously. I use it to persuade sales people from launching into a canned spiel that is focused on them, their product and their company.
The people you call and meet really don’t care for the “show up and throw up” approach to sales. They want you to be focused on their business, their business goals and their Customer Value Proposition (CVP) -that is how you help them win more business and add value to their customers.
I have to be honest and say that I never really thought that I invented the phrase but I could not put my finger on where it came from. Until now that is!
I was just looking over some of my old sales books and low and behold came across my source of inspiration in a book called: Knock your socks off prospecting.
A great sales blog that has sadly shut it’s doors is sales itch which was run by Ed Mclean. I had chance to have a look at it again today and it made me smile. In particular, I love Ed’s sales bloopers series. In particular blooper number 2 – which starts off like this:
Me : “Good morning, may I speak to Mike Wright please?” Gatekeeper : “No, I am sorry, Mike doesn’t take calls” Me : “OK, no problem. Perhaps you can help, I saw that Mike recently made an announcement about the Hertford project. I have been working on a similar project and wanted to make contact. Is Mike in the office at the moment?
One of the things that most salespeople on our sales training want to know is
“how do we deal with gatekeepers?”
I am not a big believer in the old style tips and tricks for ‘fighting’ your way through gatekeepers and have used a more personal yet professional aproach in my training for a long time.
Recently a contact of mine (shaun gisbourne –
www.twitter.com/shaungisbourne ) showed me a really good blog post written by some sales pro’s and a gatekeeper. Have a read – it makes sense!
Now you have read that be careful what you get upto when trying to manipulate or use tactics to get around gatekeepers. Many of my clients have been both salespeople and gatekeepers and they devise some ingenious ways to find out if you lie to them.
One group of telesales salespeople we trained made up a ficticious Director to use on unprepared callers. Any time someone rang up asking: “Who is in charge of xxxxxxxxxxxxxx?”
They would tell them this Director and put them through to his voicemail. Yes, they went that far by creating a voicemail for that ficticious person. Anytime someone then rang up asking for Mr ficticious director they would just say: ”he is on another call – would you like to hold?”
They also told me that they would very often get unprofessional salespeople ringing in and trying to get away with old style tactics, such as:
“I spoke to mr ficticious director last week and he asked that i call him today”
This usually resulted in an extremely short phone call!
So the next time you are thinking of ‘playing the game’ with a gatekeeper, remember the tale of these two blog posts.
Oh, incidentally, if you want to know how to bypass the gatekeeper altogether and get direct access to your prospective client than come on one of our sales training courses because that is what we specialise in.
There is nothing worse than some one openly bending the truth in their first sales contact with you. It will blow your credibility and any chance that you ever had of some one taking you or your company seriously.
Why am i saying this?
Because it just happened to me. I just received this email:
Hello,
My name is xxxxx xxxxxx and I called earlier yesterday on behalf of Present.ly http://www.presently.com/ (An award-winning microblogging SaaS – Software as a Service platform that keeps your company connected in real-time). They are working with SalesConx to help them find more companies that could benefit from working with them.
I was running a sales training course last week where the attendees were making live cold/warm calls to prospective clients. One of the things that struck me is the influence that working in a team environment has because nearly every person had fallen into the same bad habit.
The habit was opening the call with a weak and meaningless statement that robbed them of their impact. This is not unusual within a company and I generally find that teams very often adopt one or more of the following week terms:
“Hi John, you don’t know me” — There is nothing worse than this for flagging up that this is a sales call and that you have not prepared. You might equally say something like “Hi John, Its raining outside”
“Im calling to introduce myself” — I once coached an IT sales person around using the telephone to set appointments. When we examined his last 10 calls it was clear he was upset about the apparent lack of success. after all 10 calls in and no appointments. I pointed out, however, that he was 100% successful. He had made 10 calls with the aim to introduce himself. He did and the other person thanked him and then left the call as quick as possible.
How are you? — Generally despised by everyone in every sales training I have ever given yet the most common offender. Unless you have an existing relationship with the person then do not use this line. You might be asking with complete sincerity but the other person is likely to think – “Here we go, another useless sales call” and then switch off.
Let me introduce you to Cold Call Collin. He is the very epitome of everything bad about telesales and cold calling.
Cold Call Collin is going to be a regular contributor to the blog and will help demonstrate some fantastic ways to fail in cold calling.
See how many old style techniques you can pick up in the video? Leave a post to see if you have got them all right! You never know, there might be a prize. Maybe a coaching session with cold call Collin.
One of the things people request on my telesales training courses is a day planner or calling planner. Now it just so happens that I have one and I would like to share it with you here:
Do you struggle to be able to pick up the phone and sell your own services?
This is a common comment that I get very frequently in my sales training programs. It is usually made by business owners, consultants and sales people who have a direct and personal connection with the success of their calling. Very often it comes in the words “I can comfortably sell anyone Else’s services but I always struggle selling my own”.
Psychology this makes sense. It is natural for our human side to question our own value and our upbringing has generally been about not bragging or boasting about ones successes or qualities. In many ways this is a good thing because very few people like an ego driven boaster.
In sales, however this is not a good thing. There are many things we work on from a sales mindset, a sales skills and a sales confidence side that can help people faced with this challenge but I want to share one thing that i guarantee you have never ever come across before.
There are times when your inability to pick up the phone and speak to people can begin to take a hold of you and result in a quickly worsening downward spiraling. It gets tough to make a start and speak to that first person.
How about this as a way to build your confidence back up. I do mean build your confidence back up because there is nothing so thrilling, confidence building and enthralling as a good spell of business introductions made over the phone. Why not team up with a someone from a different business. This could be a business owner or a consultant that you trust.
It is extremely interesting to read the latest buzz around the area of Cold Calling and Telemarketing dying a death due to Social Media and other modern prospecting methods. I’m going to be upfront, here and give my opinion. Cold Calling will never disappear and that is a good thing.
Let me get this straight. I’m not talking about mass market business to consumer calling, which is prehistoric and will die out. I am talking about professional, business to business calling. Or as I prefer to call it:
“Identifying people who potentially might have challenges you could solve, or goals you can help them achieve, and seeing if you can help them. If you both decide it warrants you meeting or further action then you can agree to do so”
One of the single biggest areas that delegates on my sales training workshops want to cover when we look at cold calling and appointment setting is CONFIDENCE.
When we all set goals at the beginning of the day almost everyone wants to walk out of the door with:
“more confidence in my ability to make cold calls and to sell”
Some of the next questions I ask are to find out what actions the delegates to develop their own confidence and also what their current thoughts of their offering are.
Do you truly believe in the value of your product or service?
How well do you know businesses of your target clients?
Ah, the long running debate that splits the opinions of the Sales world. Mostly because people are vying for position or want to be seen to take a stance. My belief is that cold calling will never die. It is by far one of the best ways to introduce yourself to another business person. My two caveats are:
Business To Business. Cold Calling people at home is pre-historic.
With business to business you must be able to demonstrate value.
There is much debate around social media, google search and networking being the death of cold calling. I don’t believe so. I believe these are fantastic ways of getting leads through the door but they do not in themselves provide the ‘magic bullet’ that means you can sit back and wait for the phone to ring.
Sitting In my email in box this morning was the following:
Being in the car business for years, I understand the importance of your Services. There is no beating around the bush: Times are tough and dealers are cutting back. I strictly deal with the automotive industry, and feel the pain as well.Your company provides quality Services that dealers know they need to operate. They are looking to be more efficient, Help them.We have a detailed data base of just over 72,000 dealerships Principals / Management Including: Name Job Title Dealership Information Address Email Address Phone NumberOnce you obtain the data it is yours for UNLIMITED USE. My feeling is that this will be one of those milestone campaigns that not only rocks on its own, but more importantly is so cool that it becomes viral, and friends will forward to friends who will forward to friends.This will be massive for your bottom line. I’m excited and would love to talk with you.Please coordinate, and set aside some time for us to chat.Feel comfortable emailing me to schedule a call time for us. Looking forward and talk soon … Robert
This is a great little sketch that I found on the BBC web site.
Cold Callers can be annoying, especially when they call you at the wrong time, say the wrong things and read from a script with no room for manouvering.
We teach businesses that there are other options to using outdated cold calling techniques. This can be achieved by using 21st Century Prospecting and 21st Century Lead Generation and using a professional non scripted calling approach. Of course – the best sales training helps too!
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Peter O'Donoghue is a Business To Business Sales Expert specialising in Modern Day Prospecting.
