Category: Other

When putting together a sales presentation, there are certain guidelines you’ll need if you’re creating a first class performance. And make no mistake. You aren’t just educating your prospect, you’re performing for them. Your presentation has to have style, panache, and showmanship.

So when putting together your presentation, it’s best to start at the beginning.

Sales Presentation Tip 1: Know Your Audience

You’re going to have to do some research here. In many ways, the public speaker and the salesperson are alike. When you’re in front of your group, what you present has to be what they are ready to hear.

I once sat in on a technical conference dealing with CRMs. One of the speakers delivered a very technical presentation, complete with a whole lot of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms). His presentation came across as dull and boring. In hindsight, there were many reasons his presentation failed to engage the audience. But the speaker’s biggest challenge was that he created his presentation for the implementers. And his audience was a group of engineering managers. The ideas may have been important, but they didn’t address the managers’ needs.

The next speaker, Joshua, didn’t make the same mistake. He was engaging and bantered with his audience. But most importantly, Joshua talked about the technology in terms of what the managers wanted and needed. He did not talk about what he wanted them to hear.

When you speak to a group, especially if you are making a sales presentation, gather extensive intelligence about your audience. Then, like Joshua in the previous example, tailor your presentation to your audience.

Know Your Audience and Talk About Their Interests

Knowing your audience is an excellent place to start in your presentation. To get your audience’s attention, you have to talk about the things that interests them. Then, you must deliver that material the way they want to hear it. But before you can reach that point, you have to know your audience.

The material you present to a group of end-users won’t be the same material you present to a group who manages them.

If you are speaking to entertain, you don’t want to stand in front of a group that is expecting an educational session. When speaking to a group of manufacturing workers, you don’t want to talk about management issues.

If you want to get the attention of your audience and keep it, you have to talk about what’s interesting to them. Do your research. Determine what type of audience you will be speaking to and tailor your presentation accordingly.

Remember, you open a presentation the same way you open a sales call. Use the following sales affinity rule:

Get your prospect’s attention by talking briefly about things in which they are interested.

You’ll find other ideas for creating your sales presentation in our playbook, Persuasive Sales Presentations, available for download here.

Listening is one of the communication tools you must develop if you want to dominate resolving objections. Another communication tool you’ll need to develop are your listening skills.

We cover listening skills extensively in our sales leadership and sales coaching sessions. However, these skills are also critical when you are opening a sales call, sitting across from your prospect conducting an analysis, and especially when responding to your client’s objections.

Typically, when you’re in a situation requires your listening skills, there’s a certain listening level to which we typically rise. Different situations will cause us to rise to different levels of listening. For example, you will listen to a child telling you about their school day at a different level than you would listen to your doctor talking about your test results. Supplement your library with our playbook on resolving objections, 7 Steps to Resolving Objections. Get it here.

5 Levels of Listening

Here are the 5 levels of listening we review in our sessions:

1. Ignore: At this level, we intentionally don’t listen. This is your level of engagement when you want to get rid of someone who is wasting your time. Yes, this level does have its uses.
2. Pretend: At this level, you create the illusion that you are listening. Usually, you’ll use your body language and modulate your voice to make the other party believe you are listening to them. But in reality, you are not paying close attention to what they are saying.
3. Selective: Here, you are listening for the things you want to hear and can use. Typically, couples having an argument will settle in this level. They listen for the appropriate place to intervene so they can make their point.
4. Attentive: Here, you listen carefully to the message content.
5. Empathetic: At this level, you listen from the other person’s perspective and can identify the content and emotion that the sender is expressing. At this level, you don’t judge the message. You are only attempting to understand as the other party sees and delivers the message.

Listening Skills in Resolving Objections

Now, when you are resolving objections, you are using your language to engage your prospect or client. And you’re listening to the responses to honestly see things from their perspective. Naturally, you want to be at the attentive or empathetic level to be in the best position to resolve the objection.

Now remember, your prospect or client is also at a listening level. If they are at the attentive or empathetic level, then you are resolving a real objection. However, if they are trying to get you out of their office by ignoring you, pretending to listen, or sometimes even selectively listening for the right trigger phrase, then you are engaged in a put-off. It’s time to head back to the start of your sales process.

6 Behaviors to Show You are Listening

Here are 6 specific things you can do to show the other person you are listening to them:

1. Look at the Other Person

Not looking at the other person in the conversation is a dead give-away that you are preoccupied. Either that or you’re simply not interested in what your presenter has to say. It sends a nonverbal signal that there is something more deserving of your attention than the current conversation.

2. Ask Questions

Asking questions and summarizing what you heard are verbal ways to let the other person know you are paying attention. If you are using the telephone as your communication tool and you don’t have the advantage of looking at your prospect or client, you’ll need to lean more heavily on asking questions and summarizing what you heard.

3. Don’t Interrupt

We’ve all had those moments where the light bulb went off, we understood what our prospect or client was saying, and we wanted to prove it by jumping in and finishing their thought. Please refrain from doing this. Interrupting the other person when presenting their ideas also sends an unspoken message – what they are saying isn’t important to you. Let the other person know that their ideas and what they have to say are important. This is critical in resolving objections. And it’s absolutely vital in your coaching sessions.

4. Stay on Subject

Naturally, you want to stay focused on the subject at hand. While it may make sense to bring in a related topic or solution, you don’t want to stray too far off course and send the unspoken message that something you are thinking about is more important than the current conversation. Stay focused on the current topic at hand.

5. Emotional Control

You want to be engaged. You want to be animated. And you want to express your views with passion. What you don’t want is to be controlled by emotions and have your conversation partner control you with a few, well placed words. I have seen sales reps lose deals because they had to be right and argued with the prospect. Reps have lost deals because they encountered an objection that they didn’t feel comfortable with and found themselves controlled by fear and desperation. I’ve seen reps lose sales because they got angry over a competitor sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Remember, emotional content is a good thing to have, but only if you maintain control.

6. Respond Appropriately

Lastly, you want to be sure your response is appropriate to the situation at hand. You want to show that you were paying attention to the conversation. If you are at the highest level of listening, your response can be anything from an acknowledgement giving them the green light to continue to a summary of what you heard from their conversation followed by a trial close question. Just remember, to respond appropriately, you must pay attention to your prospect or client. You need to truly see things from their perspective.Here are 6 tactics to develop your listening skills and enhance your ability to communicate with your clients and prospects.

Summary of Developing Your Listening Skills

This is a quick summary of the levels of listening and tactics to enhance your listening skills and to resolving objections faster. In your endeavor to communicate with your prospects and clients, the more skilled you are at using your language to shape the conversation, the faster and easier you will find your sales process moving forward. Use this article as a training guide to help you develop your skills and become one of the top sales reps in your organization.

We’ll talk more about communication and listening skills in the future when we review coaching procedures for your team.  But for now, realize that any process that makes you a more adept communicator will ease any friction in the sales process and make you a more efficient, and effective sales rep.

Discover more about resolving objections. Click here to get your copy of 7 Steps to Resolving Objections. A quick how-to guide to help sales reps resolve objections quicker and more efficiently.

Oh, and One More Thing…

Giving a shout out to my followers on social media who found my book, Selling is an Away Game, in a Hudson News location. Travel time is learning time. And readers are leaders! Show them some kudos. Give them a follow!

2 yrs ago my boss started telling me about this Lance guy. So at 9 mons pregnant (w/this peanut) I stayed at work until my due date to learn from him. Today I find his book at John Wayne Airport & am excited to take in even more of his expert knowledge! Big congrats @lancetyson! pic.twitter.com/EBwfTAQ1nQ — Jessie Zahner (@Athletchic) July 25, 2019

👀Spotted in the wild (Hudson News) with prime front and center placement! #bestseller congrats @lancetyson ….although I’m not sure why you’re in the ‘fiction’ section?!? (joking of course 🤣😂🤣) pic.twitter.com/ZTgXMp6Sjm — Ryan Cook (@CookTBL) July 24, 201

Here’s a question about sales objections I encountered a lot when we did lead generation work:

I keep running into objections before I even have a chance to introduce myself. What is the best way to overcome “I’m too busy,” “I do not have time” or “Call back in two months?”

One of the challenges we face with sales objections is knowing when we have a bona fide objection as opposed to the prospect simply trying to get rid of us.

For example, in the playbook, Seven Steps to Resolving Sales Objections, I started by recapping a story told to me by a master sales instructor. In that anecdote, Ed recounted how he had marveled at a high-powered car of one of his clients. But he didn’t balk at the price. That was because he simply saw it as a fabulous piece of art. He had no interest in buying the car!

Now, recognize this. When you receive responses like the ones listed above on your initial call, you’re not facing a sales objection. What you’re facing is a put-off.  For your prospect to make a true sales objection, they need to have some type of interest in your product or service. At the start of your call, you don’t even have their attention.  They are still preoccupied with whatever they were doing before you called. To them, you’re an interruption.

If you hear your prospect use phrases like “I’m too busy” or “I don’t have time”, remember that these statements are socially acceptable ways of them saying, “Get lost. I don’t want to talk with you.”  Their response most likely has nothing to do with a lack of time or you. It’s just a quick and easy way to get rid of you.

Circumventing and Resolving the Put-off

We’ve discussed a few tactics in past posts circumvent these types of early put-offs:

1. Open by addressing them by their name to break their preoccupation and get their attention.
2. Ask a question related to their business to get their attention and interest.
3. Open with a startling fact about their industry to get their attention and interest.
4. Use a known reference to gain interest and trust. Make sure your reference is in good standing!

From a strategic perspective, you want to keep the opening focused around the needs and interests of your prospect.  Keep your sales approach and your opening statements prospect-centric. Avoid taking a product-centric position in your introduction.

If you do find yourself immersed in this type of situation, start by assuming they are short on time. Ask to reschedule your sales call.  Recognize that you probably inadvertently opened the call talking about you, your company, or your product, which handed you the put-off.  So, use the opportunity to make a course correction. When you ask to reschedule, take a prospect-centric position.

For example: Bob: I’m too busy right now! You: I can appreciate that. Time is always at a premium. Bob, when would be a good time to call back to review an initial set of keywords we’ve identified for your website and the impact your digital marketing team can make with them?

Now, if you fail to get their attention this second time with a prospect-centric view, and they continue to say, “Nope. Still not interested”, then it’s time to move on to your second contact and build your web of influence at the account.

Using Your Communication Tools to Resolve Sales Objections and Put-offs

You’ll notice we used two elements here that we’ve also used when resolving genuine sales objections – the verbal cushion and questions. Remember, use all of your available tools in a strategic fashion to obtain a mutually beneficial outcome. When you’re facing a real sales objection, the prospect has given you their attention, they are interested in your product or service, and they have a real problem they want to resolve. If you’re encountering these roadblocks early in your sales process, they haven’t given you their attention, they aren’t interested in your service, and the only problem they want to solve is how to get rid of you as quickly as possible.

As you spend more time actively engaging new prospects and your listening skills become more discerning, you’ll be able to tell the difference between someone who really is pressed for time and someone who is just trying to get you out of their hair.

But your easiest and best way to address these early put-offs is to avoid them using the techniques identified above. Take a prospect-centric view at the opening of your sales call and truly see things from their perspective. Save your energy to creatively resolve the real sales objections later in the sales process.

Remember, selling is an away game. It takes place in the mind of your prospect.

To learn more about resolving sales objections, grab a copy of the playbook, Seven Steps to Resolving Sales Objections. Start coaching yourself and your team to shorter sales cycles and bigger deals today!

Oh, and One More Thing…

If you’re looking to make good use of your travel time, take a page from one of our sales trainers, Traci Tigue. Pick up a copy of Selling is an Away Game, available at many Hudson News locations.

When you’re in the field, your sales activity requires the use of various communication elements, like the verbal cushion. To be effective in sales, you need to know how to communicate with your prospect. However, you also need to be adept at using the various communication elements at your disposal.

For example, being able to ask thoughtful, probing questions will enhance your sales process and earn your prospect’s trust. Ask those questions at the wrong time, however, and you become a bumbling sales rep.

That’s why in sales, we take steps to reduce friction and eliminate arguing with the prospect, especially when they bring up any sales objections.  Remember, a sales objection is something your prospect sees as an impediment to moving forward with the sale. As highlighted in our playbook, “Seven Steps to Resolving Objections”, if they have no desire to move the sale forward, then they would have no objections.

Sales objections, therefore, are opportunities  to advance the sale, provided you can address the issues and resolve the objections.

That’s why the first steps in resolving sales objections are critical. This isn’t the time for conflict or expressing your opinions. If you want to avoid conflicts at the first stage in resolving objections, use a communication element called the verbal cushion.

What is a Verbal Cushion?

Now, I’m sure when you hear cushion, a seat cushion is probably the image that comes to mind. In fact, that’s a good analogy for what we want to develop. A verbal cushion is a word or phrase that acts as a buffer in a conversation.  It’s a neutral phrase that keeps you from getting into an argument with your prospect.

Remember, if your prospect is voicing their perception of a particular challenge, getting dragged into an argument won’t help you move the sale forward. Also, becoming defensive won’t help win their hearts and minds. And going on the attack won’t help either.

If your prospect makes a claim about you, your company, your product or your service, you want them to define, defend, and explain their statement. But that won’t happen if you react defensively or make a statement that steers the conversation off into a verbal ditch. Instead, you want to redirect their energy back to a place where it can be useful. So, after acknowledging their statement, redirect the conversation back to your prospect. Have them explain their claim without directly challenging them or arousing resentment.

The Verbal Cushion in Action

In our past coaching sessions, with our clients and our internal team, we used a variety of vanilla phrases that acknowledged the prospect’s claim without being confrontational.  For example, “your price is too high” was one of the most common objections our inside sales team heard. And often the new sales rep would try justifying the price and argue with the prospect.

That phrase, “your price is too high” is actually information poor. The sales rep needs more information. So instead of reacting by justifying the price, our sales reps were taught to pause and respond with a neutral verbal cushion that acknowledge they heard the prospect:

“I can appreciate that. Investments are important.“

And from there, the inside sales rep could then redirect the focus back on the prospect to define, explain, and defend their claim with a question:

“When you say price, how do you mean?”

Below are additional examples of neutral verbal cushions:

Remember, the foundation of sales is the ability to communicate effectively to achieve an outcome. Communication elements like the verbal cushion are indispensable in your sales process. Use coaching sessions like this  to learn how to use them well.

To learn more about resolving sales objections, download a copy of the playbook, “Seven Steps to Resolving Sales Objections” here. Start coaching yourself and your team to shorter sales cycles and more deals today!

Back in 2016, I penned an article for Selling Power that addressed selling and opening the sales call in the new digital era where we are inundated with apps, devices, and instant price comparison.

Most of that material can be applied to how a sales rep conduct themselves when opening a sales call. Remember, your prospects have massive information at their fingertips. They can find a mountain of information on your people, your company, and your product. Also, they can find similar information from your competitors. They can do instant comparisons between your solution and what your competitors are offering. And they can get quick access to reviews and testimonials from your clients, customers, and even prospects.

To this end, and I made this argument in that Selling Power article, the sales rep of today has to be more than a walking encyclopedia with hair who can merely regurgitate information and take orders. Successful sales reps must provide real value, and help show they can provide real, differentiated value when opening the sales call.

In that article, I highlighted 5 ideas your sales reps need to improve their success rate for opening a sales call. Those tips are:

Building Rapport When Opening the Sales Call

First, let’s look at building affinity. Your sales reps must be skilled at developing rapport quickly so they can build the relationship and the trust that comes along with that relationship. As the adage goes, people buy from people they like. While there is a certain level of truth to that, I think it’s also important to recognize that people buy from people who are like them. So, when coaching your team to achieve rapport when opening the sales call, include the following:

Getting Feedback When Opening the Sales Call

Next, you must get your people to create feedback loops. While this might sound a bit technical, it really isn’t. Your sales reps need to know if they are on point with the solution they are presenting or if they are driving the process off road. Feedback comes in many forms. However, here are two that you’ll want to coach your people on immediately:

Opportunities for Coaching

We’ve just reviewed only two of the 5 ideas outlined in that Selling Power article. However, there are still plenty of opportunities for coaching your sales reps. Here are three that come to mind:

Opening the sales call is probably the most important part of the sales process you can coach your sales reps on. It is the foundation of everything we do. Like building a house, when you start with a strong, solid foundation, putting all of the other pieces in place becomes a lot simpler and easier.

For additional ideas on opening the sales call and executing your sales process, get a copy of Selling is an Away Game, available online at Amazon, fine bookstores and many Hudson News locations.

Salespeople pursuing a single point of contact when prospecting is like an engineer designing a system with a single point of failure. One mishap and your whole project crashes!

When Prospecting, Don’t Create a Single Point of Failure

My director of technology once told me about an experience he had in the early creation days of our call center. He said he had called into a local manufacturing company and was hooked up with the director of sales. He had done everything right, moving the relationship towards selling a set of training programs for the company’s sales team.

After two weeks of conversation, diagnosis, and evaluation, the talks suddenly stopped. In fact, my tech director said his contact just went completely dark.

After leaving his tenth creative voicemail, my tech director finally phoned in and called the operator for information. And that’s when he learned that the sales director, his single point of contact into the company, had suffered a debilitating heart attack and was out of action for at least two months. And according to the operator (remember, this is a small company, so information was less compartmentalized) the owner of the company hadn’t made a decision about a replacement.

So, in an instant, almost a month’s worth of effort was gone. When I asked my tech director how he handled the situation, he said he simply dropped the contact and the company. He said, “I spent a lot of time learning about this guy’s challenges, his professional life, his family, and his business. It may not have been the right move, but I felt that asking for a new contact in the company was extremely callous and unfeeling. If I was going to start with a new candidate, I might as well start with a new candidate in a fresh company. I didn’t want to leave the impression that I was a sales rep who cared for nothing but making the sale.”

The Prospecting Solution That Resolves This Challenge

I can understand the reasoning here. Everyone has their own style of dealing with these situations based on their personality, skills, and experience. But as a sales manager, you’re probably wondering, “How do I coach my people to deal with situations like that?”

Well, I’m here to tell you, the best way for anyone to address this type of situation is to head it off before it happens.

Here’s the deal. Studies have shown that 82% of sales reps feel challenged by the time it takes to research a prospect just to make the initial cold call. Thinking back to the earlier situation from my tech director, that’s the start of a major time commitment. But many sales reps often use prospect research and data collection as a crutch. For them, the inefficient sales rep, Google and LinkedIn have become the purgatory of sales activity.

The Art of Spiderwebbing to Create a Web of Influence

So here’s the solution to this particular challenge. On average, your salespeople should have 3 different decision makers within an account with whom they’re prospecting. Let’s define these decision-makers as:

In most B2B sales, it takes 2 to 3 decision-makers to influence a decision. So, it’s best to call in, probe the organization, and find the important stakeholders who will be directly impacted by your solution. Don’t get me wrong, using one of the online marketing databases is a good start. But you’re still better off calling into a company and striking up an conversation with the gatekeeper or a manager and getting references rather than relying on a database of contacts that’s updated every 2 to 6 months. This methodology for using cold call prospecting to discover these decision makers is called Spiderwebbing. It’s one of the techniques we review in our programs. It’s also something we teach sales managers how to coach their team to use to be an effective prospector.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit, it’s easy to connect with a Level 3 contact. But to shorten their sales process, they’ll need to meet with a Level 1 or 2 decision maker. Level 1 decision-makers have more power and can make a decision quicker. They will ultimately be the ones who close the deal. However, sometimes they are the hardest to secure an appointment with. Level 2 decision makers ultimately may control the budget but will also rely on the opinions of the Level 3 managers.

Enhancing Your Team’s Prospecting Process

Here’s my question to you: Do your salespeople have the capacity, talent, and bandwidth to cold call your target market? Are they banking on a single point of contact like my tech director? Or are they developing a rich network of contacts using techniques like Spiderwebbing? As sales managers, it’s our job to train and coach our team to reach success. But coaching individual team members is enhanced when you give them coaching based on their strengths, weaknesses, skills, and abilities.

If you are anything like me, you’ll probably spend some time during this Independence Day weekend reviewing your team and assessing what they need to help them reach their full potential. That’s why during these holiday breaks, I’ll spend some of that time reviewing our salespeople’s backgrounds. I’ll then determine the skills and abilities they need to enhance their effectiveness. By the same idea, our processes will help you and your team do the same. We measure your team’s skills gaps and blindspots. We then help you create a system to achieve a level of performance with your team through assessments and coaching.

Contact us directly and discover how individual assessments, leadership coaching, and training can enhance your team’s overall prospecting effectiveness.

For more ideas on how to coach your team on prospecting and cold calling, get a copy of Selling is an Away Game, available online at Amazon, fine bookstores and many Hudson News locations.

One of the main points we make in our training and coaching is that throughout your sales process, from prospecting to close and beyond, you have to be able to get out of your head and see things from your prospect or client’s perspective.

In fact, if you review some of our past posts, you’ll see examples from some of our trainers and sales execs who tried every way imaginable to secure a meeting with a prospect and failed to get their attention every time.  Yet when they stopped focusing on what they wanted to bring to the table and focused instead on the challenges that their prospect brought to the table, they were able to secure high quality meetings with better overall close rates.

This is an important concept throughout the history of sales. In fact, one of the phrases that I constantly heard in the early days of my sales career was, “If you want to sell what John Brown buys, you must see the world through John Brown’s eyes.”

And yet, many companies continue to be product-centric in their training and coaching, focusing on how to push product features and benefits and less on the strengths and skills of the salesperson. Don’t get me wrong- presenting product features and benefits is necessary to make the sale, but it won’t get you in the door or engender trust from your prospect. To do that, you need an additional set of skills, strengths, and the coaching to enhance them.

Tyson Group Conducting ALSD Training on Prospecting

That’s why Allison Schuller, Vice President of Sales at Tyson Group, will take this topic on at the 2019 ALSD conference in Chicago.  This year, ALSD will hold it’s 5th annual Sports Sales Training Forum during the conference. It’s all pure sports sales training.  And Allison will lead a session on prospecting that focuses on seeing the world through the customer’s eyes. After all, if you want to sell what John Brown buys, you must see the world through John Brown’s eyes.

If you are attending the Sports Sales Training Forum on July 1, be sure to attend Allison’s session, “Prospecting: Drillbit vs Holes” to get your prospecting process back online. And if you haven’t registered yet, there’s still time. You can register for the entire conference  here at the ALSD site.

When making cold calls and opening sales calls on the phone, you need guideposts, touch points of some kind to help guide your interaction.  Now, some sales trainers would say you need a script when cold calling. However, I think a cold calling script is too rigid. A sales rep must be flexible and address people where they find them mentally and attitudinally, not where the script says your prospect should be.

Besides, most sales reps use the script as a crutch, reading it like a nervous speaker reading their PowerPoint slides while delivering a presentation.

In its most basic form, a script gives you an outline of your opening process when cold calling. But to make it your own, you need to have flexibility and awareness so you can respond appropriately to your prospects and earn their trust.

So, let’s trade the traditional, worn out cold calling script for a general outline of your opening process. This will give you a better chance of engaging your prospects when you have them on the phone.

6 Powerful Ideas to Master the Art of Cold Calling

Here are 6 ideas to review. But remember, be flexible and adapt your process to your individual situation and your prospect.

1. Master Cold Calling by Getting Your Prospect’s Attention.

Sometimes, simply using your prospect’s name is enough. Most sales reps, when they open a call, talk about themselves, their company or their product to be interesting. As I told my team in the call center, your name is not an attention-getter. No one knew you before you call, and they’ll probably forget you 10 minutes after you end it. If you want to be interesting to other people, be interested in them. So, be different. Use the prospect’s name to get their attention.

You can find additional ideas on opening your call by getting your prospect’s attention here.

2. Show Them That They are Important to You

Share what you know about them: verify their title; compliment them on something that they have achieved; make a statement about their industry that they may not know. Find a way to tactfully display your knowledge of them and their issues. It shows them that you consider the relationship important.

3. Ask a Question Bearing on Time

People are busy and chances are always good that an unexpected call will catch someone in the middle of an activity. Now if you left a previous message stating that you were going to call at the designated time and they were expecting your call, ask them how much time they have set aside to talk. I hammered this point so often when developing my call center that to this day, my director of technology continues to ask at the start of our meetings, “How much time you got for us?”

Ask a question related to their time constraints. Your prospect will appreciate the fact that you cared enough to ask.

4. Tell Them Why You Called

This is the general benefit that you supply to their industry. Remember that you can’t make a claim about their specific situation until you can perform a diagnostic session with them. However, you can state some of the benefits that you have supplied other clients in that industry. If you have examples or testimonials, this would be a good time to roll them out.

5. Don’t Make Promises

When we first started selling training over the phone, my team faced a lot of challenges. One of the biggest challenges was that my team of fresh college grads was calling older, seasoned business owners and making statements like “we can improve your business by X%” or “we can add Y% to your bottom line.”  These were college grads! They had no real-world experience and no credibility. So naturally their “pitch” came off like it was being read from a note card. Instead of reading your script from your cards, tell your prospects about the results your product or service obtained for your current customers and that you may be able to do the same for them. But you won’t have a good idea until you can sit down with them for a diagnostic session.

Remember, you don’t know the specifics of their environment or circumstances. So don’t make broad claims and promises until you’ve had a chance to review their situation.

6. Run Your Trial Close

Ask them if they have time for some more questions or if they are open to a face-to-face meeting. You always want to use a trial close. This tells you if the prospect or client is open to advancing in the sales process.

Adaptability, Flexibility, and Awareness are Key Elements in Cold Calling

Remember, these are guidelines to include in your general process for opening a cold call. Your goal is to get to the next stage of your process.

Also, remember that no two people are alike. Adapt and arrange these guidelines in your process in response to your individual prospect’s needs and expectations. Stay aware of what your prospect is saying and doing to fully leverage the power of these ideas in your process.

Adaptability, flexibility and awareness are necessary elements for success. Dump the rigid track of using a script when cold calling and prospecting. If you have these elements at your disposal, you will be free to make adjustments as you move the sale forward and you will move more prospects into your pipeline.

For additional insights into prospecting and cold calling, pick up a copy of Selling is an Away Game, available online at Amazon, fine bookstores and many Hudson News locations.

This post on cold calling was originally published on Oct 6, 2015  and updated on June 26, 2019.

This post on cold calling was originally published on Dec 19, 2016  and updated with current material on June 19, 2019.

I was reading a blog post put out by another sales trainer titled “7 Ways to Make Cold Calling Easier”. It got me wondering, where do these tips come from? Were these ideas formulated by this trainer or were his insights rehashed from basic advice you can find anywhere? Was his advice based on empirical data, or was it based on opinions from his experiences in sales? And at that moment, I had an epiphany. This wasn’t the first time I came across a basic ‘tips to cold calling’ post. And it wasn’t the first time I was turned off by an article like this.

What to Watch for When Getting Cold Calling Tips.

You could choke an entire farm of horses with the various articles published every day about cold calling. In fact, Google users search the term “cold calling tips” on average about 2,000 times every month. However, if you type “cold calling tips” into Google , it will return over 100 million posts, pages, and articles.  And most of these, like the previously mentioned post, are based on opinions, personal experience, or just vague, outdated ideas. You need to be careful not to follow fluff or general opinionated advice. Rather, make sure the advice and ideas you find are practical, have some data-based evidence behind them, and they work for your team.

Over the 5 years we ran our call center, our team made over 1.25 million outbound cold calls and talked to over 150,000 C-Suite, VP, and Director Level decision makers on behalf of B2B organizations in a multitude of industries. Additionally, we have spent the past 15 years training over 10,000 sales professionals. So when you talk about empirical data, we’ve got it!

Based on the tens of thousands of cold calls we have made, the countless bad articles I have read on cold calling, and where we have truly seen sales professionals make cold calling work for them, I wanted to provide you with 7 cold calling tips to avoid, and what you should focus on instead.

Want more ideas on coaching your team to increase their sales performance? View the on-demand webinar, How to Drive Sales in the Face of Business Uncertainty here.

1. When Cold Calling, Don’t Read the Script. Own Your Material!

Many trainers tell you to write out a script for your cold calling sessions.  A script that you stick to implies you know what the prospect is going to say. You have no idea what your prospect is going to say. No one does, not even the best salespeople. Good sales calls are bob-and-weave conversations. Own the conversation!

Higher Success Rate Tip: Map out talking points and give yourself the freedom and ability to maneuver. Build guide posts, like a sales GPS to help you navigate the sales landscape with agility. Ask questions around pain points, issues, and the topics they are getting heat from their bosses about at the moment. Learn the ins and outs of your product so you can suggest next steps. Also remember: there’s a difference between “this is what our product does” and “this is what our product will do for you.” People are more responsive to the latter.

2. Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect, It Makes Permanence!

Many trainers say, “Practice, practice, practice”. Wow, that’s novel! This isn’t advice. It’s common sense. Ever heard of Malcolm Gladwell and the 10,000-hour rule? Practice does make you better when you are practicing the right thing. I practiced my golf swing a ton without a coach. That resulted in me perfecting my hook! You must practice with the right coaching!

Here is the problem. Often, these training sessions will have you practicing with peers. That’s not a good approach. Rather, record yourself. Judge the feel; the look; how you sound. Also, make sure you press your trainer to show you how it’s done. If they’re coaching you on cold calls, have them pick up the phone and make a few calls. If they can’t make the call themselves, then you know you’ve got someone who can’t practice what they teach! Theories suck unless you can execute on them.

Higher Success Rate Tip: Practice with actual prospects. Start with “colder” calls that you can afford to mess up. Work through conversations and issues that come up on those calls, as opposed to practicing scripts with your peers.

Take a look at any field — notably medicine. It’s nearly impossible to get better unless you fail, fail, and fail again.That’s how products in medicine get to market.  It’s the same with sales. Through testing, you become acutely sensitive of what works and what to change. You’ll have some awful calls in this period, but it shapes you for later.

Here’s a test. Ask your trainer to make a few cold calls in front of the team. Did they get a target decision maker on the phone? Were they able to move the conversation to an appointment? How ‘practiced’ are they?

3. “Set Aside Some Time for a Call” Is the Wrong Approach.

Some trainers focus on this: “set aside time to make your calls.” Again, this isn’t a strategy, it’s common sense. Plus, you need to keep your prospects in mind when you are picking the times to call. Just because Mondays and Wednesdays between 10-2 are convenient  for YOU to make calls won’t yield a high success rate if all of your prospects are busy at that time.

Higher Success Rate Tip: Understand the best times to call. For example, there’s a 164% better connection rate from 4-5pm local time zone than 1-2pm. Many people would totally miss that, assuming that prospects are checked out by 4pm. However, the best times to call are usually the AM. That’s just a random fact to showcase how people often don’t base decisions off real data. There’s tons of data out there about sales call optimization. Use it.

Additionally, leave voicemails. The voicemail may be dying, but it ain’t dead yet. And voicemail still counts as a sales touch. Also, follow up your calling activity with emails. Emails are ridiculously easy to send and customize in modern business. If you do 10 calls and don’t get a connection, send out 10 personalized emails later that day.

4. Warming Up for Cold Calling Sessions Isn’t Necessary.

Trainers will tell you to spend time warming up before you start making calls. You’re not a relief pitcher in the ALCS. You’re cold calling. Dive right in and start talking to people.  Smile, dial, use the trial and go the extra mile!

Higher Success Rate Tip: You do need some type of plan for how you’re prospecting. Ideally this plan would be strategic and group prospects a certain way according to potential need or market. But if you’re not at a strategic level yet, at least have an operational plan for calling. If you know you’re not a morning person, plan your calls for the afternoon. At 1pm, be ready to start dialing and conversing. When you have a plan, warming up becomes irrelevant.

5. Don’t Wait for the Rejection. Build It Into Your Conversation.

Many sales trainers tell you to write out potential rebuttals for different arguments, wait for the arguments, and deliver the scripted rebuttals. Sometimes this can work, but not as often as you think. Here’s a subtle distinction you need to understand. Objections happen at the closing stages of a sale and actually signify interest in your product or service. In the early stages, like when you’re cold calling, what you get is called a put-off. When you get a put-off, there’s a good chance that the prospect has already made up their mind.

Higher Success Rate Tip: Track your put-offs. What are the common ones? Pricing? Approach? Not right now? Once you know the common ones, you revise your messaging so that you address the put-offs before the prospect can bring them up. For example, if everyone is hitting you on price, get price out in the open quickly with some context. In doing so, you remove a put-off from the prospect’s table. They may still say “no”, but the conversation just shifted a bit, giving you a new window to explore.

Also, ask questions to overcome put-offs. There’s almost nothing better in sales conversations than the ability to ask intelligent, prospect-centric questions.

6. You Don’t Have Time for a Presentation.

I hate it when trainers over-focus on the presentation. In a cold calling context, there really isn’t a presentation. You have 4-7 seconds to get someone’s attention and 7-21 seconds to keep someone’s interest. That’s not a presentation.

That’s not even one slide.

Higher Success Rate Tip: Consider starting with an email. Introduce yourself, mention one connection point you have with the prospect, for example, someone on LinkedIn, explain what you’re selling, briefly mention where you see a value for the prospect, and say you’ll be calling within a specific time period..

Create affinity, build rapport, and connect!

The most common response you will get is “send me information”. That’s fine. It’s not even a put-off. Now you need to figure out what resources to send this person to move to the next step. Remember, humans are typically visual, so don’t send another text-driven email. Insert a chart, graph, product feature, or other another visual that will help capture their attention.

7. Encouragement Is Good. Coaching Is Much Better.

Bad sales trainers are usually cheerleaders, not coaches. If a Patriots wide receiver drops a ball and trots back past a cheerleader, she’ll probably say, “It’s OK, you’ll get it next time!” When that wide receiver gets to Belichick, what do you think he’ll say — if he even speaks to the guy?

That’s the difference. During a cold calling session, a mediocre sales trainer will give your sales rep a pat on the back and say, “Keep at it and you’ll get there.” That isn’t good enough. Good sales trainers are coaches. They will give your team communication ideas, listen in, and coach them to improve your cold calling skills.

Higher Success Rate Tip: Find a trainer who can listen in on your cold calling sessions, identify the areas where you fall short, and help you create a plan to improve those areas. You have a process for the way you sell. But realize that  you should have a process for the way you improve as well. If your organization isn’t getting ideas to build a documented improvement process from your sales trainer, then most of what they’re doing is feel-good fluff.

Hopefully the above 7 tips help you elevate your game and provide a little more substance than other blog posts and articles you’ve come across. Remember when you are prepared and hone your craft, success will follow.

For additional insights and wisdom into prospecting and the sales process, pick up a copy of Selling is an Away Game, available online at Amazon, fine bookstores and many Hudson News locations.

Sales Wisdom I’ve Discovered in my Career

Throughout my time in sales, I’ve researched numerous complex theories, process descriptions, tactics, and strategies. In addition to these, I have also come across a number of quips from sales gurus who try to encapsulate sales success in a simple phrase that can be easily understood, even by a 5th grader.

For example, Zig Ziglar was famous for saying, “Either you’re green and growing or you’re ripe and rotten.”

Not only is this a nice example of an analogy, but it’s a message to all salespeople, young and old, that you need to be learning new stuff all the time. Otherwise, you’ve reached the end of your useful life.

Throughout my training sessions, speaking engagements, and lectures, I’ve peppered my talks with my own version of these sales success tips based on my own experiences. In my book, Selling is an Away Game, they are referred to as “Lance-isms.” Here are a few you can use to put you on the path to your own sales success.

Sales Success Key: Be Your Own Architect. The World is Your Oyster.

This is one I actually heard from my father. I still use it in my sessions to impart upon salespeople that they have the freedom, power, and responsibility to visualize and create their own outcomes. They simply must do the work necessary to reach those outcomes. But as we teach in our sales leadership programs, people will work willingly in a world they help create. And they will work tirelessly to reach a goal they set. So, we coach and encourage salespeople to set meaningful and relevant goals that support the world they envision. In doing so, they find the motivation to propel themselves forward as opposed to having the sales manager hold their hands, constantly micromanage their activities, and sometimes even give them a push.

So, to sales leaders I say coach your people to be independent. Give them the responsibility to act.

And to salespeople striving for sales success, I say be your own architect. The world is your oyster.

Sales Success Key: Don’t Confuse Activity with Results

Back when I ran several training franchises in Ohio, I had a new sales rep who spent a lot of time developing a territory about 70 miles north of our office location. He cultivated some good leads, made some good contacts and we held a few training events in the area. But the trip there and back cost him over two hours every day.  That was over two hours every day that he wasn’t in front of a prospect. That was over two hours every day that he wasn’t selling. That activity may have been necessary to get him up to the area, but it wasn’t getting him the results that he wanted, more sales.

I see this all the time. Sales reps getting caught up in performing busy maintenance work, like updating the CRM – important functions to be sure. But these aren’t selling activities. These are maintenance activities. Remember, don’t confuse activity with results. Use activity to build habits and skills. Then use those habits and skills to get the results you want. If you aren’t getting results, build up some different habits and skills. But focus on getting the results you want. If you do that, you’ll have an easier time of identifying and performing the necessary activities.

Sales Success Key: Stop Spraying and Praying

I was once in the presence of a gifted sales rep who was producing mediocre results. The guy was able to read people quickly and easily. The challenge was in his selling method. He would sit across from the prospect, rifle through a list of features, and watch the prospect for a reaction. When he got a reaction, he would focus on the feature that got him the reaction.

The problem here is that you aren’t interacting with your prospect. You aren’t performing any type of diagnostic conversation. You aren’t helping them to identify and acknowledge their challenges. You’re simply poking them with a variety of sticks, looking for that one, magic stick that will make them jump.

And then you’ll keep poking them with that magic stick hoping for a sale.

Add to the fact that not every sales rep has the skill or temperament to read people that well. They are simply praying that something they sprayed will stick.

Look, to produce consistent results and achieve sales success, you must  be like a scientist or an engineer and adhere to a reproducible and repeatable process. Showing up at a prospect’s door, spraying out a bunch of product features, and praying that something will stick is not a recipe for reproducible results. Be investigative in your approach. Diagnose your prospect’s challenges. Design solutions that solve their challenges or create opportunities for them. And above all else, stick to your sales process.

Remember, If you have to pray for a result, your activity isn’t producing it.

For additional Lance-isms and ideas on achieving sales success, pick up a copy of Selling is an Away Game, available online at Amazon, fine bookstores and many Hudson News locations.