by John Boe

It’s been said that salespeople who avoid making phone calls have skinny children. Prospecting for new business is critically important and for the majority of salespeople, it is by far the most challenging and stressful aspect of their profession. Successful salespeople are proactive and recognize the importance of prospecting for new business daily. They don’t have to be reminded to ask for referrals or follow up on a sales lead, they do it automatically. This article is packed full of helpful phone calling tips and techniques which, if put into practice, will fill your appointment calendar with new business opportunities!

Don’t shoot from the hip, use a script. If you want to sound confident and competent, I strongly suggest that you write out your opening and closing remarks. If you sound in the least bit nervous or unprepared, people will immediately sense this and rightfully assume that you lack experience. Using a phone script for your opening and closing remarks is a good idea for several reasons. A well-polished phone script gives you a consistent approach that keeps you on message and guarantees you don’t leave out important information.

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Be respectful of your prospect’s time by designing your phone script to be short, sweet, and to the point. Once you have prepared your phone script, it’s now time to tape record yourself reading it aloud until you sound smooth and polished. While you might be tempted to skip this step, don’t do it. Recording your phone script role-play session provides you with a golden opportunity to critique your performance and improve your delivery.

First impressions count. During a face-to-face conversation, first impressions are based primarily on appearance. While on the other hand, first impressions created over the phone are based on brevity, vocal quality, and attitude. An upbeat mental attitude is contagious and, unless taken to an extreme, builds rapport and creates a very positive first impression. Keep in mind that a smile can be heard over the phone. The best way to build trust and rapport during a phone conversation is to match your prospect’s energy level. This is accomplished by “subtly” matching their rate of speech and tone of voice. For example, if you have the tendency to speak fast/loud and your prospect begins speaking slow/soft, you will need to lower your voice and slow your rate of speech down to match them. The psychological power behind the principle of matching is based on the premise that people want to do business with salespeople who they feel are similar to them.

There is absolutely no substitute for preparation and practice. Like most successful endeavors, the key to effective phone calling has a lot to do with preparation and practice. Practice builds confidence through repetition. Ask your sales manager or an associate to schedule an hour role-play session with you. This session is important because it gives you a dress rehearsal and the opportunity to work the kinks out of your script. As they say in the military, train like you plan to fight. Create a realistic training environment by role-playing over the phone. Begin the role-play session with minimal prospect resistance and then, as your confidence builds, gradually inject typical prospect objections. While it is impossible to have a script that might address every conceivable objection, you must anticipate key objections and develop scripts to respond to them.

Remember to stay positive, polite, and professional. It is best to make your phone calls during the morning when both you and your prospect are rested and fresh. Be organized, do your homework, and take good notes. Before you contact your prospect, take a moment to research their company by visiting their website. By reading your prospect’s company newsletter, annual report, and press releases you become familiar with their products and services. Stay organized and save time by using a contact management system, such as ACT, to record your notes after each phone call. Relying on your memory alone is a poor business decision and is bound to cost you money.

It is important to keep in mind that the primary purpose of any prospecting phone call is to make an appointment, not a sale. Most salespeople make the fundamental mistake of overeducating their prospect and dominating the phone call in an attempt to showcase their knowledge. Obviously you will need to respond to some questions; however, questions that require a detailed response become an excellent reason to secure an appointment. Use your precious phone time to gather information through the use of open-ended questions. Your objective is to build your prospect’s interest and arouse their curiosity through a series of well designed, probing questions about them and their organization. Just before you ask for the appointment, summarize the key points of your conversation for clarity and agreement.

Top producers don’t take rejection personally, because they realize that selling is fundamentally a numbers game. It really doesn’t matter what product or service you are selling; the key to your long-term success is directly linked to your ability and desire to prospect effectively. Phone calling in today’s marketplace is much more challenging than in years past, but fortunately the basics never change. Selling is, after all, a contact sport!

John Boe is an entertaining speaker with a powerful message and a passion to help salespeople reach their full potential. He has devoted the last two-decades to training and motivating high-performance, successful salespeople. His knowledge has been synthesized into one of the most powerful sales training programs ever created on the subject of peak-performance selling and personal achievement! To learn more visit www.JohnBoe.com

When selling services, whether you’re in the restaurant business, a plumber, or a lawyer, people feel they can negotiate the price, if they believe you’re selling a commodity. If your customers believe the only difference between you and your competitors is the price, you’re in deep trouble.

Did you ever experienced this?

If this sounds [painfully] familiar, think of ways to:

1. Differentiate yourself

Come up with something only you do, or better than anyone else in your industry/market, and mention it in every opportunity. Think of FEDEX‘s promise: Overnight delivery, Guaranteed! Fedex have changed the postal market forever!

2. Remove price from the equation, by developing strong relationship with the client.

You don’t shop your friends around. If you make your customers your friends, they won’t shop around, and will recommend you to others, which won’t shop around as well – after all, why look around for a better price, when you’re guaranteed a satisfactory outcome?

Go on – Be REMARKABLE!

The concept of CRM is that we have to have an ongoing relationship with our customers. CRMs helps us to do that. The challenge we face, as salespeople, is not understanding the concept – we get that – but we don’t have the patience to update the system, filling in paperwork, etc. We do everything but do the essential admin work – cause we hate it! If we wanted to do paperwork, we wouldn’t have gotten into sales!

See, this approach will slow us down, and make us work harder, more hours, have more frustrations (and don’t we have enough?), rather than work smarter, less hours, and generate more sales with very little effort.  But how?

I use a system I call Contact Management System. It is not a software, it is a process. It is simple (cause I need to do it myself), and is working perfectly for me. Here it is:

1. When I meet someone (anyone!), I either take a business card (not just giving mine – that’s pointless), or write down their details

2. I enter their details into my Blackberry, and as soon as possible, sync it with my outlook.

3. I look them up on Linkedin / Facebook / Twitter, and connect with them on the appropriate network (if you don’t know which one is appropriate, please comment below and I’ll answer)

4. I write a note on the contact card – where and under what circumstances I met them. I meet many new people, and it is sometime difficult to remember. (I’ve met 3 Andrew Roberts in the past 2 years – trust me, you need to add that note

5. I make a simple calendar entry, to follow up in a day/week/month/ 6 months as appropriate. I then link it to the contact, so I can see history when we meet.

6. I also try to add their picture to the contact info. How? sometimes I take a picture with the phone, and “add to contact”. (It may feel weird at first, but it is very memorable for both sides.) Another way of doing it, is just copy and paste their profile picture (from Linkedin/twitter/facebook) into the contact.

Why do all that?

To create a relationship, we need to look at the long term. If we meet someone briefly, for a sales presentation, in a networking function, or elsewhere, we get an impression, and leave one. In order to make more sales, we need to know more people, but more importantly – more people need to know about us! People need to remember us, what we do, what we sell, and how we made them feel when we met. If we concentrate on us, giving them our business card, talk about us, and how good we are, we leave a very poor impression, and it is very short lasting.

On the other hand, if we take the time to talk about the person in front of us, take their details, take their picture – it is fun, memorable, and make them feel special!

When you make someone feel special, they’ll always remember you in that context.

Now, imagine this scenario:

You’ve made a great first impression, and a week later you get a phone call. The phone “recognizes” the number, and put a name and picture on the screen. How would you then answer the phone? Would your voice be more excited than if it was just an unrecognizable phone number? For me it does the following:

* When Susan calls, I pick up the phone and say : “Hey Susan!” with a  big smile on my face – I’m excited that she remembered me and called me!

* Instantly, by looking at the name and photo, I remember where we met, and what we’ve discussed. This is important, to be able to pick up the conversation from where you left off. It is also a good time management skill

* By me having an excited voice, I make Susan feel special as well. She’ll love me for it!

* What sometime happens – Susan tells her friend about this salesperson who made her feel so special…

How do you make your customers feel? Will you invest some time uploading your contacts onto your phone, to make people feel good?

As a side, if you feel overwhelmed by the amount of cards in your rolodex, buy a card scanner (www.cardscan.com). It will scan the business card into a database, which you can export to your contact management system (outlook and others). Then you sync with your phone. job done!

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