Phone Calls: The Little Stuff Matters

Having been in sales, sales training, and sales management for more than 25 years, I have seen many sales people who were successful and many who were not. While there are many reasons for both, I would like to focus this blog on one of the things that all salespeople have to do and what can make or break a sale: Phone Calls. One of the issues with successful sales people is that they can tend to get lazy in their techniques. This blog will address just one of the basic techniques that they need to keep sharp. Even professional baseball players go to spring practice every year and they practice throwing, catching, and batting before each game. Salespeople need to practice the basics of their profession to stay at the top of their game.
Phone Calls: More than 75% of the time when you call someone you will get there voice mail. The question is how to make your message valuable and effective, and yet short. If you are calling an existing client you may think that you should just say “hi Sue, sorry I missed you, please give me a call back”. While this may be OK, wouldn’t it be better to say “hi Sue, this is John Smith from XYZ Company, I’m sorry I missed you, I am calling to talk to you about ABC…., please give me a call, my number is ##. Again this is John Smith with XYZ Company and my number is ##.” The important parts of this are: You said your name twice, you stated what you wanted to talk about, and you gave her your phone number twice. It is also important to say the phone number slowly especially the second time. This gives them time to get a pen and paper so they can write it down. Some people would say that the person I’m calling already has my number so I don’t need to repeat it or even give it. Wrong, what if they are away from their desk or their cell phone is dead. Our job as salespeople is to make it easy for the client, giving your number to them every time you leave a message makes it easy for them.
Cold Calls: Everyone hates cold calling and everyone hates receiving cold calls. In a perfect world there would be no cold calling but, we don’t live in a perfect word. When cold calling it is of great importance to get the attention of the prospect, get their interest, and to get them to call you back or at least take your next call. Let’s talk about getting their attention. Be creative and change things up. One thing you could do is to say what company you are with before you say your name. This is a simple technique that works well for getting the prospect to remember your name and sounds a little different from all the other messages they have to go through. By your starting out different than everyone else, they tend to listen. Asking them a question can also help get their attention. Using a very short value proposition can also help, if your value matches their need. Saying you are going to call them back again on a certain day or better yet at a certain time is a very good technique but, you had better call them back when you said you were going to call them. A good CRM tool will go a long way toward helping you manage these call backs. Salesnet is really good at helping you manage this with its color coded activity approach. It is OK to call the prospect more than once a day but only leave one message per day. Call at different times each day. Try calling before and after business hours.
Having several scripted calls and emails to reinforce the calls, works very well for cold calling. You don’t want the calls to sound scripted but they should be scripted. The emails should be short and to the point. Using a customer testimonial in the email is great but if it is more than a couple of sentences long, you should use a link to the testimonial. I like to mention the customer testimonial in the body of the email with a link and put the short version of the testimonial below my signature. You can also put it at the top of the email as a headliner. Change it up and see what works best. Until next time remember “Success is 99% you and 1% the rest of the world”. Scott Farmer