A great sales podcast looking at Efective Cold Calling Opening lines.

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

How effective are you in managing your time in your sales prospecting and sales effectiveness?

Some great telephone selling techniques.

Here’s a great look at some new an innovative ways to develop cold (or more rightly warm?) calling Opening lines.

Do you use email for your prospecting?

When used correctly email can be a great way to open up new business. Unfortunately, very few salespeople can use email effectively to open up new business opportunities. I was reminded of this when I  received a typical badly structured sales prospecting email yesterday. Here it is:

Hi

Please forgive the direct approach, but my name is xxxxxxxx  and I work for The xxxxxxxx Group and I am an online marketing consultant in your market sector.

I really like your site, but you may be curious as to how your site could rank much better for a wider range of relevant search phrases, and with that in mind I wondered if you would like a free SEO audit looking at the meta-data, the keyword density and a detailed analysis of the back-link profile.

That should give you an excellent insight into how your site is performing, and allow us to develop a plan for getting your site some much better search positions.

The audit is free and with no obligation. So do please get in touch.

Thanks and kind regards,

xxxx,

This came from a UK company and not one of those Indian SEO companies that sends out thousands of emails a day. It also came via my website enquiry form so I know the person had visited my website.

So what’s wrong with it?

Where is the personalisation, the relevance, the promise of a better future and business outcomes for me?

So what could they have done differently?

Here are a few ideas from me and I would love you to leave a comment below with your own ideas.

• Include my company name! They visited my site so they knew what my company name was.

• Include my name. There is an about me section on my website and they could easily have got my name as a contact.

• Don’t apologise for making contact (first line) – You immediately come across as unconfident and almost subservient in a potential business relationship.

• Use very specific and impactful language. “may be curious” – Are they or aren’t they?

• Make reference to the key search phrases that my site is geared to rank for in Google. Anyone with a tiny bit of knowledge could find out my desired search phrases within 30 seconds.

• Make reference to where I  currently rank for my key search phrases.

• Reference something about me or my company – Even a simple search on google would show anyone that I am active in social media and have written extensively about SEO and the role of social media in modern selling.

• If they really wanted me as a client they could use ‘trigger event’ selling., This is a process of identifying the key things that cause a prospect to want to seek out your services. An example could be a drop in search engine rankings which actually happened to me last week. For an SEO company this is easily achieved by a rank tracking software which would notify them immediately of any changes in my rankings for my key search phrases. A timely call or email based on that would make a huge impression on me.

• Reference a client or result they have achieved to peak my interest and to let me see what might happen in my business.

A very quickly drafted new version of their email could go like this:

FAO: Peter O’Donoghue

Hi Peter,

We recently noticed you dropped from number 1 to number 2 in Google for your websites main search phrase xxxxxxxxxxx. We appreciate this can have a major impact on the number of inbound leads coming into your business as recent research has shown that the number 1 spot get around 60% of the search click throughs whilst the number 2 spot only gets around 25%.

We specialise in working with companies that are already on page 1 for their main search phrases and want to consolidate their position as number 1 without worrying about losing rankings and business by dropping out of the search.

We recently worked with ABC Training company and consolidated their position from 4 to 1 within 2 weeks which has seen their inbound enquiries double.

We have a system we have designed to allow us to do this quickly and effectively and would like to demonstrate it to you in an online demonstration. Just click this link here xxxxxxxxxxxxx  to register and we can show you how  we do what we do. It’s a very structured online demonstration that will take no more than 8 minutes of your time plus whatever time for questions you have of us?

Warm Regards

XXXXXXXX

Which one would you respond too?

I won’t deconstruct my email yet as I would love to hear from you to see why you think I have included specific elements. Trust me they are all their for a reason! In a couple of weeks I will revisit the blog and deconstruct exactly why i have included certain sales triggers here.

Show me you are alive and join the commentary!!

Selling the value of what you do in business is one of the most challenging areas for most people. There is so much to consider:

• Who is my target market?
• What is the proposition that I am offering?
• How do I get meetings with busy business people?
• I’m an Account Manager and I’m looking for ways to sell higher and deeper into organisations
• How do I break through the ‘SMADD’ disease that clients and prospects have – that’s Sales Message Attention Defecit Disorder!
• How do I get more referrals?
• How do prove our worth to an organisation so we don’t have to compete on price?
• How do I get clients to value what we have done for them and stop switching suppliers?

The good news is that I am about to share with you 3 core components of value that you can use in your business to help you with these business challenges and more. The best news is that very few sales people and businesses operate successfully proving 1 level of value, let alone 3.

Let me introduce you to the ‘Sales Bullseye’:

Value Hypothesis –

The value hypothesis is the outer ring of value. This is when you are on the outside of an organisation trying to get in or are breaking in to new divisions, or trying to create a new project within an existing client. Here you must use research to determine whether you can probably derive some benefit for them. You don’t know for sure yet because you do not know enough about the organisation or the particular business initiative or business pain that the company is facing. This is not to be confused with an ‘elevator pitch’ which can come across as a trite generalisation of what you do. This is a very specific hypothesis of what value you can specifically add  to that organisation. An example could go like this:

“John, you should be capable of reducing your stock holding of your entire widget range  by 60% through the ability to use our demand forecasting software to know precisely what inventory is required to within a 10% tolerance rate. This will require an investment of £320,000. Which could  be returned within 11 months. We recently implemented a similar solution at Major Corp PLC  who achieved  a 70% reduction and payback within 9 months.”

A t the very early stages of a discussion this is only a hypothesis because you do not know enough about their business and without the right kind of conversation, at the right level, and therefore validation it is only a value hypothesis. You  will rarely  win business selling on a value hypothesis! It is only the start of the process and without the questioning and investigating skills needed to get validation from the client and prospect then it will never be a true value proposition.

Value proposition –

This is where your Client or prospect, is describing  how their business operates, where the dysfunction and costs reside and what their vision is for an alternative way of doing things.  This is what you use to map your capabilities against with your value proposition.

Executives in large organisations give  feedback  that few, if any proposals, make them sit up and go “Wow, I really love what these guys are proposing” and very few if any actually propose anything. More they are no more than page after page of price lists and capability statements. Rarely is there a personalised story that tells the names of stakeholders, the challenges they face, the goals they own and an overview of how those tasks and goals will be affected by a new solution. They want  specifics of the value hypothesis turned into the reality of what can and will happen specific to their business.  Asked why they feel they rarely see this type of value proposition executives answered that salespeople are too intent on getting their message across without asking the questions needed to identify the core basis of a value proposition.

Value Statement –

The value statement is the single most important part of the whole process and yet very few people do it. An opportunity in your marketplace?

One of the core principles of sales has always been trust.  People don’t buy from people they like, they buy from people they trust. One of the greatest ways to build long lasting trust and credibility is to show you have delivered on what you have said you would. This is even more important when selling to large organisations because research shows that senior executives generally get involved at the project scope phase (value hypothesis) and post project review (value statement). The value statement is simply proving the value of what you said you would achieve:

“John, we said we might be able to  reduce your stock holding of your entire widget range  by 60%  and infact now the system has been live 3 months we have seen a reduction of 75% with a prediction  tolerance of 7% . Your  investment of £320,000 is on track for full payback in 9 months and not the  11 months we originally planned.”

If you can continually prove the value of what you have done then your credibility will go through the roof. In effect, you are closing the sales loop.

So my challenge to you then is “How well do you rate on the three stages of the value bullseye?”

Let me know you are alive and have a point of view by leaving a comment below, and share your experiences here too