Hi Peter.

I really need your help.

My name is Yari and I work as an independent sales contractor in Spain. I recently graduated and managed to sign/secure a contract with an events company as a delegate sales executive. I have designed a pitch which is somewhat OK in my opinion as it does get the prospect attention but as soon as mention EVENT,SUMMIT, B MEETING I really straggle when the prospect says things like “I don’t have time now” “send me an email” “I m not interested” send me an email is the most common one.  help me?

Please forgive me if I come across cheap since you have great packages I could buy for help. I just love what I do, I literally love getting on the phone to sale. so I’ve spent everything I had to set up an office in my house to run this little business and I m not going to get pay unless I bring the business in first!

I m crazy, I know!

Any advice or suggestion would be appreciated more than you can imagine. Thanks!

Kind regards

Yari.

Yari, Thanks for the question and here are some things for you to consider:

Great question with many possible responses so lets see what we can do to help you out as quick as possible.
If  I  read this right, you are working as a lead generation contractor who is setting meetings on behalf of your client. If this is the case I would hope that you have followed most of the principles outlined below. If not then don’t worry as you can see some dramatic sales prospecting upturns when you do.

Correct Targeting:

How did you develop the criteria for developing the list of people you were going to call? Our experience shows that developing the right criteria for the people you are going to contact will account for as much as 60% of your success rate. Determining the right prospects allows you to:

• Be focused on one key benefit in your initial approach that is likely to resonate with them, rather than having a vague, wishy washy, statement that is trying to appeal to all comers.

• Allows you to invest more time and energy to grab the attention of the prospect rather than skim through them without knowing how valuable they are. Instead of just one call and 1 voicemail, you can now develop a system of 4 (example purposes only) calls, voicemail, emails, faxes, and other touches.

• Allows you to demonstrate value to your client by ultimately producing appointments that are targeted and result in business increases rather than a drain on their resources.

You can’t do this alone. You have to have your clients agreement as to what constitues an ideal prospect. If they don’t know, consider charging them to do a mini consultancy project to help them find out. Start with their existing clients and profile their most desired prospect. This is their ‘dream’ prospect that they would love to work with.

Break it down into items that their ideal client can be identified by:

• Most profitable
• Business goals or challenges – Problems!
• Easiest to do business with
• Shortest sales cycle
• Average order value
• Highest margin
• Number of people in company
• Company Industry sector
• Annual Turnover
• Stage of business – i.e High growth or declining market

And this list can go on and on. As you are targeted on results it is imperative you get this right otherwise you will be wasting your time on people who are never going to be good clients and this can be demoralising and extremely difficult to sustain.

Once you have identified these characteristics then how have you sourced the names of the people you need to contact?

Have you randomly acquired a list from a cheap broker or have you invested in a quality list from an expert in your target market? Have you considered companies like  www.zoominfo.com
and www.jigsaw.com?

Value Proposition:

What is your value proposition?

What are you saying to grab immediate interest and attention?

What is your goal?

If your goal is to set a meeting then what is the value for them in having a meeting? You must carefully design value into the actual meeting so that they are curious to see you and want to see what it is you are offering at the meeting. You must be able to provide them some research, an answer to a problem they knew they had, or illustrate a problem they didn’t even know they had, or even ask some questions that no one else is capable of asking.  You must be able to offer value at the meeting.

Let’s face it, you are an interruption and peoples natural scepticism is to say No. Its ingrained in them. You have to have such a powerful message that it overcomes their natural reaction to say “No way”

A few other things stand out in your email:

• You mention ‘pitch’ this may be an unfortunate selection of words but a pitch is an old style one way conversation that does not include the other person. I, personally hate ‘pitches’ and would happily see the phrase disappear from the sales dictionary. You are trying to engage someone in a two way dialogue.
• You mention that you know there are products out there to help you but you did not give a valid reason why you won’t invest in yourself. Especially when you say “I m not going to get pay unless I bring the business in first!”. You have set yourself up as the expert at what you do and you have a responsibility to yourself and your clients to become that expert. You can do that by investing. You can either invest time in scouring free information of which there is a lot on the Internet or you can invest money in books and courses – or a mix of both. It is unlikely you will grow if you don’t.

Some other resources you should check out:

Home study course – It was on offer recently and I  haven’t got around to changing the sales page so grab a great product at a great price quickly – sales objections click here

http://www.salesdnaltd.com/blog/cold-calling-opening-lines/

http://www.salesdnaltd.com/blog/the-value-bullseye-if-youre-not-hitting-the-3-core-componments-you-are-leaving-money-on-the-table/

Yari, I hope that helps and I would love to hear how you get on with your sales prospecting activities.

Peter

I have been using the phrase “don’t  show up and throw up” on your sales prospects 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.

The “origin” of my phrase on sales prospects

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 (which greatly focus on learning about sales prospects) and low and behold came across my source of inspiration in a book called: Knock your socks off prospecting.

One of the best sources to learn more about sales prospects and sales training

I remembered that this was my source of inspiration and thought I would share this with you. Go and get a copy of the book from amazon. It’s definately worth the £10 you can get it for. It’s a great source of learning more about sales prospects, telesales and cold calling – sales training.

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?

The ending – well you just need to check out the post yourself here : http://www.salesitch.com/2009/07/sales-bloopers-no-2.html

That’s one of the things that most salespeople on our sales training want to know is

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.

Getting around gatekeepers

Recently a contact of mine Shaun Gisbourne showed me a really good blog post written by some sales pro’s and a gatekeeper. Have a read – it makes sense!

http://thesaleswars.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/the-wisdom-of-the-gatekeeper/

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.

Some scenarios with gatekeepers

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 gatekeepers 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.

If you do this then just watch out. You might get Jack…………….

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.

And then the email went on to invite me to a webinar. Now, I’m not even going to get into the rights or wrongs of the general text of the email because there was something far more obviously wrong.

“I called earlier yesterday” – This might have happened as I do get calls on my mobile that are unaccounted for. If it was to my office, I definitely would have got the message. What struck me as being economical with the truth was the fact That there were  at least 50 email addresses visible in the ‘to’ box. Now I know it might have been possible to call all those people yesterday morning  but the odds of all fifty being out and requiring an email?

I don’t know what this company does and I don’t ever want to know. This obvious bending of the truth has made a big impact on their reputation with me.

Consider what tactics you use to approach other businesses. Does your method smack of bending the truth or dishonesty?

Peter O’Donoghue – Modern Cold Calling

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.

Cold Calling Habits

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 weak 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”

• “I’m 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.

What weak opening lines have you and your companies fallen into. Id love to hear from you.

To make the best possible approach when cold calling (or warm calling) use the 3 step formula ‘OVQ’

Cold Calling 3-Step Formula ‘OVQ’

O – Opening

Don’t be too clever here. Just aim for the quickest and most human connection possible while still developing a conversation. Try one or more of the following:

• Hi, John Jones?  – Clear and straight to the point.
• Hi there, I was wondering if you could help me? — Everyone likes to be asked to help, it’s part of the human psyche. The answer you get will also give you an idea about the type of person you are talking with. “Shoot, you’ve got 20 seconds” will tell you a lot about the day orthe  direct personality style of this recipient!
• I’m not sure if this is relevant for you — This works really well for two main reasons. Firstly, from a psychological point of view most people will be engaged and will either listen to see if it is relevant or they will think “I’ll decide if it’s relevant, not you!”. Secondly, it is far removed from the typical cold calling approach where the person rings up and dives straight in with “Have I got a deal for you!”

V = Value Statement

This where you really earn your right to continue in the conversation. It is your polished, practiced and relevant statement of the value you think might be relevant to the person you are calling. You  can reference:

• Money saving
• Profit increases
• Production Increases
• Time saving although technically this will result in increased profit and/or money saving
• A competitor
• A legislation change
• An industry problem or challenge

And many more…

A good value statement can make or break your calling effectiveness.  In the following example, a company had Marks and  Spencer as a client and wanted to introduce themselves to John Lewis. The value statement could go like this:

“We have just completed a project for Marks and Spencer  which reduced staff churn down from 29% to 18% which has saved them £500,000 in 6 months and is on track to do that every six months from now on in”

Q = Question

Modern day calling is about natural conversation and nothing makes this work better than good questions. This will finish of your brief introduction with a way to pass the communication batten to the other person. It might be something as simple as:

“How relevant is  <insert key value statement item here> to your organisation?”

So our example might go something like this:

“Hi Mr Jones, I wonder if you can help me?”

“I will try”

“We have just completed a project with Marks and Spencers which reduced their staff churn down from 29% to 18% which has saved them £500,000 in six months and is on track to do that every six months from now on in.”

“How relevant is staff churn in your business at the moment?”

This is short, to the point and demonstrates value, value, value. It also comes across very naturally and allows the person being called to engage in the conversation or not at an early stage.

Next time you make a call follow the OVQ process and see how easy cold calling is.

Let me introduce you to Cold Call Collin. He is the very epitome of everything bad about telesales and cold calling / cold calling techniques.

Cold Calling Techniques – Cold Call Collin

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.

Cold Calling Techniques Video

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, sales training, or better yet some more intensive coaching about cold calling techniques.

Telesales Daily Planner – A cold calling/ telesales day planner

Do you struggle to be able to pick up the phone and sell your own services? Are you looking for cold calling tips?

This is a common comment that I get very frequently in my sales training.  It is usually made by business owners, consultants and sales people who have a direct and personal connection with the success of their cold 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.

Focus on you mindset as well as cold calling tips:

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. It is one of the  greatest  cold calling tips:

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.

Get together and plan sessions of  calling where you call each others prospective clients.

Success is built on your mindset as well as cold calling tips:

Try it. It’s a fantastic way to get your confidence back up and there’s no pressure on you having to sell yourself for a while. Use these great cold calling tips!

PS: You might like this video!

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”

 I do think the Sales Training Industry, bloggers and commentators, have been guilty of for too long is a basic ‘school boy error’ that we tell all of our clients not to do. We have got caught up on the process and the tool and not the outcome. Let me explain. The debate rages over the effectiveness, and legitimacy of cold calling which is fundamentally wrong. What we should be focusing on is the desired outcome i.e  A business meeting, or appointment, rather than just one of at least 20 ways of achieving that. This is a failing perpetuated by the Training Industry who still hold ‘cold calling courses’ rather than courses aimed at getting an appointment. I could go even further to say a more relevant desired outcome in today’s modern, tech savvy world could be to get a sales presentation. This might not even need a physical appointment due to the ease of use of online ‘webinar’ programs such as www.gotomeeting.com.

If I wanted to learn about gardening I wouldn’t go on a course about grass cutting, I would go on a course designed to show me how to develop a low maintenance, well planted and decorative garden. Grass cutting is just a small part of that. Does that make sense?

What about social media?

Again, social media is one element of an integrated sales strategy that includes using the telephone. Recently, I was working with a large IT company. One of their sales team has 300 named accounts from which he is targeted to make around £10 million in sales. When we first spoke, he was down to his ‘tough nuts’. These were the last 42 contacts that he could not get in touch with. When I listened to his approach it was an exact replica of the ‘canned’ spiel popularized by Stephen Schifman in the 1970′s. He was stalled at the ‘Gatekeeper’ who he had given the same spiel to at least 3 times previously. With no success. When we discussed where he would go from here it was plain that the next step was to diarise a call back in a few weeks.

I was shocked! I thought the world had moved on from that. There a complete lack of, what I term, ‘sales guile’. Being tech savvy sales professional I could immediately think of at least 10 different ways of getting in touch. The first thing we tried was a simple Google listing on the person’s name by using “person’s name”. Within 5 minutes we had a whole goody bag of information to work with.

The IT Director in question had:

• Recently spoke at a conference on emerging technology. Areas of his topic were actually in line with the solutions provided by my client.
• He was listed on a social networking directory – Zoominfo.com with an email address and an indication he was happy to be contacted for professional reasons.

Within 5 minutes we had the means of contact and the reason. We spent a few minutes drafting an email and then sent it off. It obviously referenced the conference he spoke at. Within 3 hours we had a reply and within two weeks a meeting.

The moral of that story is if your desired outcome is to get a meeting then focus on that. Don’t get too caught up on the mechanism. Ensure you have enough ‘sales guile’ and flexibility to find a way. On my training workshops we always stay focused on how to achieve the outcome and we cover at least 30 ways of getting there.

Would You Like To Know Your Prospects Industry As Well or better than They do?

The second essential element of ‘sales guile’ is leveraging technology to understand your prospects Industry almost as well or even better than they do. How much would you pay for an information agency to email you every time there is a change in your prospects industry, or if they submit a press release, or if they win a big contract, or if they are mentioned in a blog, or if there was a legislation change in their industry, or if there was a change in their clients industries and if there are whitepapers or reports being issued relevant to your Industry and those of your prospects and customers?

Would you pay me £1,000 per month for that?

Google will give you all of this, and more for FREE! Simply enter all of your existing and prospective customers names, products, competitors (and yours for that matter) and key individuals names into a simple tool called Google alerts and you will be emailed every time they are mentioned anywhere on the internet. That is amazingly powerful!

Once you have done that you should also head over to Google Insights (just google it!) where you will find one of the most valuable research tools money could buy. The beauty is, it’s free. Google insights will allow you to enter a few key search phrases and search on these to see the internet activity on those terms.

Diagram 2,  shows a simple search on sales jobs, sales recruitment and job sites. These might be extremely useful areas to know about if you sold into the recruitment marketplace, for instance. Within 2 minutes you can tap into the following valuable information:

sales research

Area 1: This shows the search trends over time for those key terms. Interestingly sales jobs has double the search term of its nearest competitor, sales recruitment. Also there are clear areas of seasonality on search terms with the summer being the highest and Nov – February being the lowest. This is all powerful information if this is your market place.

Area 2: Again great UK specific information which shows you where the majority of searchers are coming from. You can go down to a city or town level with this. Where do you think the highest density of searches for ‘Management Consultancy’ is. I will give you a clue. It’s two UK places that compete in a boat race. Can you draw the significance?

Area 3 and 4: These show the most frequent search terms related to the phrases originally searched on as well as the ‘what’s hot’ section. This is the latest, high rising search terms. Do you think they might have significance in your industry? Look out for brand names, competitors names and new ‘buzz words’ to be aware of.

I have only demonstrated about 10% of what you can do with Google insights. When you are playing with it could you tell me why most UK searches for ‘ice cream’ come from Farnborough and what the hell is an ‘ice cream bike’?

The 80′s and 90′s were the ages of the ‘opening lines’ and slick telephone tricks. Today’s modern selling environment is about Sales Guile, sales creativity and being able to master at least 10 different ways of getting an appointment – not just cold calling.

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  cold calling ability 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.

Cold Calling Self-Questions

• Do you truly believe in the value of your product or service?

• How well do you know businesses of your target clients?

• How well do you know how much value you add to your existing clients?

• How much time have you spent thinking through answers to common questions?

• What books have you read on any sales topic in the last 6 months?

Very often, when I ask these questions, I get blank looks and a few trying to avoid my gaze. This is not unusual.  Luckily they were in a position where they were doing something about it. They were attending a workshop.

If you are lacking in confidence in your ability to cold call, sell,  or just engage people in conversation about your product or services then take some time to answer the questions above.
Don’t spend too much time looking for the magical ‘silver bullet’ that might come in the form of a killer closing question or ’101 ways to overcome objections’. Put your efforts into developing a platform of strength that comes from the unshakable confidence in knowing you add value.

Cold Calling Confidence Tips

The more value you add and the more you understand that, the more your confidence will soar. Sometimes we second guess about the value we bring. Don’t. Now is a good time to speak to your existing clients. Firstly they will appreciate you taking the time to undertsand and ask them. Secondly, they will appreciate the contact – especially in todays climate and Thirdly – Don’t be surprised if you hear something like “John, Thanks for calling. I was only thinking about you recently because we……………..”
Get this platform right and funny things start to happen. People are more receptive, people want to talk to you and meet you.

You are a professional business person and your preparation for cold calling will lead you to sales success.

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:

1. Business To Business. Cold Calling people at home is pre-historic.
2. 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.

Invest in these prospecting methods. Learn about them and use them to the max, but don’t stop all the things that have proved successful for you in the past. Like cold calling or as I like to call it:

A call from one business person to another to see if there are areas of mutual benefit.

A fantastic web 2.0 or internet marketing company is www.hubspot.com and they recently blogged about the demise of cold calling. Its a great article and I have a few additions to add to it:

Check out Marks 3 tips on the video and the text on the blog article.

My thoughts are:

One of the common misconceptions about an inbound calling culture is that people who enquire about you from your web site (or other prospecting mechanism) will be sat by the phone waiting for you to call them. Come on – this rarely happens. The majority of the time someone has 12 browser windows open and has enquired from at least 6 companies. It’s easy for them to do as most sites have an easy to fill out web form (you do don’t you?).

When you call it may not be enough for you to state your name and assume they know who you are. Be attentive and listen out for their voice and any signs of hesitation. Be specific on a time and method of enquiry.

Give a visual reminder i.e as hubspot could do – “We are he company  with the bright orange web site and the (Your Description Here) logo ( I happen to love their animated logo!) You don’t see many of them around” In hubspots case many of their enquirers do know them well because they are fantastic at what they do and I have followed them for some time. If you do not have that following then never assume because it has come in as a lead that they will even know who you are by the time you call. Unless you can call them while they are still on the web page!

Never the discount the ability to pick up the phone and make a professional introduction to someone to see if you can help them.

Long live Professional Cold Calling!

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 Number  Once 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

Telephone_Number = xxxxxxxxxxxxx

I’m not sure wether this is spam or does the guy seriously expect me to call him back?

Is it any wonder sales gets a bad name?

A fantastic examination of the relevance of cold calling to modern businesses that I did for a social media site – hubpages.

Click “read more” and you will be redirected to hubpages. 

read more | digg story

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!