Sales and Sales Management Blog

Stop Sounding Like a Self-Serving Salesperson
By Jill Konrath

After several months of leaving a series of voicemail messages for a prospective customer, she finally picks up the phone. “Marie Trent speaking,” she says in a flat tone.

Startled by the human voice on the other end of the phone, the message you spent hours crafting disappears instantaneously from your memory bank. Instead, you blurt out:

“Hi. My name is __ and I’m the sales rep for Generic Industries. You’ve probably heard of us. We’re the fastest-growing firm in the market right now and we have locations in 13 different cities. The reason I’m calling today is I’d like to get together with you to explore your needs and show you …”

“Excuse me,” she interrupts. “We’re already working with another company.”

“Which one?” you ask, fingers crossed.

“Newco. And we’re quite happy with them.”

“What do you like about them?”

“They take good care of us, they know our firm and their pricing is great.”

“Would you be open to considering other options? I’d be glad to show you what we could do for your company.”

“Not at this time,” she answers curtly.

“When should I call you back then,” you ask politely.

“Why don’t you try calling in six months.”

“Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time you took with me today. I’ll get back to you then,” you say, smiling inside because you “KNOW” it’s only a matter of time before get lots of business from this firm.

~ ~ ~

What’s wrong with scenario? Actually, just about everything. If you were the seller, I’d tell you that:

• You suffer from a bad case of delusional thinking. The buyer brushed you off, plain and simple.

• You interrupted someone’s business day with no thought as to what they were doing when they picked up the phone.

• You lacked a peer-to-peer approach. Intelligent buyers immediately sense you’re a lightweight when you’re so eager to settle for a ‘fictional” appointment six months from now.

• You solidified your prospect’s positive feelings about the competition by the questions you asked.

• You were entirely focused on “what’s in it for you” – not the value your prospect gets from your using your product or service.

Certainly that wasn’t your intention. You were trying to be nice, conversational and perhaps even avoid sounding like a typical salesperson. Unfortunately, that’s not how you came across. You sounded pretty self-serving.

Tips For Getting High Quality Appointments

1. If you’re sick and tired of getting yourself caught in situations like this, use these tips to help you change the game. Plan out multiple contacts before you even pick up the phone.

• Develop multiple scripts highlighting various aspects of your value proposition.
• Then, write out various emails you can send depending on your prospect’s business situation.
• Finally, develop a campaign you can roll out over time.

2. Make sure your message focuses on your value proposition. Ensure each contact states the clear business value that clients receive from working with your firm.

• “We work with clients to significantly reduce time-to-market on new product introductions.”
• “One of our customers saved over $1/3 million in just the past year by eliminating the redundancies in their system.”

3. Treat the person you contact like a human being, not a prospect. In calling a friend, you’d:

• Automatically ask if you were interrupting: “Is it a bad time?”
• Notice if they sounded distracted and address it head on: “Hey, if you’re swamped right now, I don’t want to interrupt. I’d rather catch you when you have a few minutes to talk.”
• Immediately suggest a future contact, initiated by you: “When is a good time to call you back?”

4. Prepare for the common obstacles prior to the call – and eliminate them if at all possible.

• “We already use ___.” You respond: “Well I assume a company of your size would be working with another firm. (pause) AND that’s why we need to meet … “

• “We’re really busy right now. We couldn’t possibly take time to look at options.” You respond: “You and I know that six months from now your workload isn’t going to be any lighter. AND that’s exactly why we need to get together …

• “Your prices are too high.” You respond: “Yes our prices are higher than others on the market. AND that’s exactly why we need to meet …”

Please note that the second sentence starts with AND, not BUT! Because ‘and’ doesn’t negate your prospect’s perspective, they’re interested in learning more.

Then, reel off 2-3 valid business reasons that this prospect should get together with you. They need to flow out of your mouth without hesitation, so prepare them ahead of time. These are true statements, not slippery manipulations, so make sure you state them with quiet confidence.

If you (or others in your company) can’t come up with any reasons, then you’d better take a serious look at the sustainability of your business model. Just because “you want their money” is just not a good enough reason for them to meet with you!

Recently I interviewed Amy, the “Vice President of First Impressions” for a small technology firm. Using the phone and email, she arranges meetings between her company’s sales reps and Chief Technology Officers from Fortune 1000 firms.

In less than 8 months, she’s set up appointments with over 50 of these big companies. She’s a real telesales professional. If you heard her conversations with prospects, you’d think they were her long-time friends.

Amy focuses on business, treats these C-level executives as equals and enjoys her conversations with them. But, she also has at least 4 voicemail messages and 3 emails at her fingertips, ready to use as needed.

In addition to the above strategies, Amy recommends that you:

5. Piggyback off competitors, if at all possible. When you’re trying to get into an account, don’t immediately try to displace long-standing incumbents. Instead, position your offering as one the co-exists alongside their current supplier or even enhances it.

6. Keep “tweaking” your “message” till you get it right. In her first three months on the job, Amy didn’t set up one single appointment. Yes, she was extremely discouraged. AND, she kept trying new approaches till she found ways that worked.

7. Be yourself! Laugh with your prospects, enjoy them – and let them know you’ll be coming back.

SUMMARY

Sounding like a sleazy, well-oiled seller will not get you an appointment in today’s market. Think of your phone calls as business-to-business conversations with peers. That may be a hard mind shift to make, but it’s where you need to be. If your business acumen is lacking, start reading up on the subject so you can become conversant.

And, most importantly keep working at it! Try focusing on different aspects of your value proposition. Try reframing what you say. Change a word or two, if need be. But don’t keep doing the same thing, again and again. That’s insanity.

Jill Konrath, a leading-edge sales strategist and business advisor, is a popular speaker at annual sales meetings and association events. She helps sellers crack into corporate accounts, speed up their sales cycle and win big contracts. She’s the author of, Selling to Big Companies, an Amazon Top 25 sales book for 3 years running. Most recently, Fortune magazine selected it as one of eight “must read” sales books, along with classics such as How to Win Friends & Influence People and Getting to Yes. Visit her website at www.sellingtobigcompanies.com

Warm Leads in Cold Weather
By Umberto Milletti, Cofounder and CEO of InsideView

As the economy worsens, inbound sales opportunities quickly dry up and sales teams are forced to become increasingly proactive. Just picking up the phone and calling a sales target is generally not enough, but that is particularly true during the economic times we are currently in. Your Rolodex is static; in a down economy, people move around, lay-offs happen, even entire companies disappear. In order for your sales teams to strike up promising conversations in a tough economic climate, they need to have a clear and compelling reason for initially calling.  They need to know who to call (calling somebody after they just blogged about being laid off could lose a business relationship permanently.) Updated inside knowledge of what is going on with the company and the person you are selling to can make the difference between beginning a relationship or ending one.

Let’s face it:  While cold calling is incredibly impersonal, and rarely successful, it is a necessary part of the sales process. In a cold economy though, it becomes much more challenging, and the need for a warm lead is significantly increased. Fortunately, social sites across the Web are hot with the latest activity on a myriad of subjects and industries, and in the process, are publishing enormous amounts of rich, useful content for sales teams. In fact, much of the most insightful and timely content for sales people on the Web can only be found via social Web sites. For example, you can only learn that a mid-level sales manager with whom you used to work at a now-defunct start-up just joined a company you’ve been focusing on through an RSS feed from LinkedIn.  That same update wouldn’t be available from Reuters.

Distilling rich, up-to-date insights from the social Web is a prime example of how Sales 2.0 solutions are revolutionizing the sales process. With the Internet as the new business platform, now all stakeholders – prospects, customers, salespeople and marketers – can connect, learn, plan, analyze, engage, collaborate and conduct business in ways that were not even imaginable a few years ago. Sales 2.0 is about leveraging the wealth of information and interactive possibilities on the Web to accomplish customer engagement rather than just customer-data harvesting. Today’s “smarter” and better informed prospects are requiring sales people to be better versed both in their products and their prospects, rendering Sales 2.0 a two-sided interactive process. It is no longer just who you know that will make business deals happen but “what you know about who you know” along with “when and where you should know it.”

Here are some of the ways that we’ve found that the social Web can make the difference for sales professionals:

Know where your target is actually working (or not): Company moves, promotions, new roles and departments

Know company updates: Did the company that you got denied from last quarter just post record profits? That would be a pretty good time to give ‘em a call back.

Know industry news: Is there a shake-up in one of your target industries that will lead to more opportunities for your company?  What is the commentary going on surrounding the news?

Know it quickly: With all of the examples above, its best if the information can come to you. The sooner the better, so you can have time to properly prepare your sales approach while still getting in early.

By now you’re probably thinking, “This is all great, but who has the time to spend scouring the social Web?”  And you’re right:  There is just too much stuff on the Web to research randomly on your own.  But Sales 2.0 is also about increased productivity and speed and the emerging Sales 2.0 tools accomplish this by intelligently utilizing the massive amount of resources on the Web. For example, at InsideView, our vision was and is to help sales teams save time by integrating our business search and intelligence application, SalesView, directly into the CRM tools they’re already using: Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce and Oracle, just to name a few.  That way, they can get important sales insights from across the social Web while their list of sales targets remains right in front of them.

Customer relationship management is a fundamental element of success in an economy like the current one, and the leads you have need to be good ones.  While the world outside gets colder, remember that in a Sales 2.0 world, warm leads are waiting for you on the social Web.

Umberto Milletti Bio

Umberto Milletti is the cofounder and CEO of InsideView, the pioneering business seach and intelligence service. Before founding InsideView, Umberto was an executive and co-founder of DigitalThink, a leading provider of Web-based corporate training services. Beginning in 1996, Umberto held a number of key roles at DigitalThink, serving as GM, Products; VP, Technology; and VP, Marketing & Product Management. Umberto helped lead DigitalThink to a successful IPO, and ultimately to its sale to Convergys.

A recent article of mine, Why Decision Makers Hate Cold Calls, is creating a number of responses to it on EyesOnSales, as well as a number of emails to me.  The majority of the responses are defending cold calling and challenging my thinking on the subject.

What I find interesting is the article simply related the reasons decision makers hate cold calls and that if one wants to use cold calling as one of their primary prospecting tools, they had better get the best cold call training they can-or, better yet, learn more effective methods of prospecting.

I’m always amazed at the emotional reaction many salespeople and managers, and a great many sales trainers have to anything that might question the orthodoxy of cold calling.  Simply mention that you question the effectiveness of cold calling and the reaction is immediate and vehement.  I’ve been accused of hypocrisy since “those who oppose cold calling are only trying to sell their overpriced, worthless ‘training.’”  Nice to know that the only trainers who believe what they say are the ones who agree with the sender of the email.

And, of course, I’ve been accused of being ‘dangerous’ and should be ‘stopped’ for leading salespeople to believe there are other, more effective ways of finding and connecting with prospects.

We conducted a survey last year that asked business decision makers and individuals a number of questions regarding how they found the salespeople and companies from which they bought goods and services.  Regarding cold calling, of the several hundred people we spoke to at random, less than 5% indicated they had bought anything in the past year initiated through a cold call (slightly higher for businesses than individuals).

My argument isn’t that cold calling doesn’t work-you can certainly find clients via cold calling, and every once in a while, even find a great client.  My argument is that cold calling is inefficient.  Certainly for some companies and even some salespeople selling a commodity, cold calling can be the only reasonable way of operating.  But for salespeople in relationship driven industries, is cold calling really the Mecca of prospecting?

I’d be very interested in getting your cold calling experience.  My only request is that you identify yourself with your real name (too many try to hide behind a screen name), and that you give real experience, not opinion.