Cold Calling -How to deal with the gatekeeper
“How do we deal with gatekeepers?”
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.
2 Comments
Interestingly enough I went around the country and interviewed executive assistants (gatekeepers). They told me they wished callers would stop with the subversive tactics. These callers are immediately obvious and don’t have a snowball’s chance of getting in. The assitants’ mindset is “if callers try to deceive me they will try to deceive the decision-maker and that is not acceptable.” With the press of a button your call is unwittingly off to voice mail jail – an inbox that never gets answered.
Try this – Stop trying to get past the gatekeeper. Start trying to work with the gatekeeper. Speak respectfully and professionally. Keep you message short and sweet. Ask for an appointment. Turn the executive assistant into you strongest ally.
I agree with top dog in that the gatekeepers do need to be treated with respect and professionalism – making friends with them is a good route and cannot really go wrong.
All calls are different and all ‘gatekeepers’ are different – however rule of thumb is to treat others how you would like to be treated – and you should not go wrong.