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.