Cold callers always tend to call me about the same time, about 6.15pm, just as I am in the middle of making dinner. What is more irritating, is that they just presume that they have the right to talk to me and frequently launch into their script without pausing for breath. They make no effort to establish any credibility, they don’t even ask if its convenient. Not surprisingly, I’m not that inclined to talk to them.
Before you ever contact a potential customer, you should ask yourself, “why should they be interested in talking to me?” Of course, you know why – you have a great product to sell them. However, they don’t know why, so they will treat you like every other cold caller – a distraction from getting on with their job. You will need to tell them why it is worth their while listening to you. You should also know what your objective is for the call. You may not be sure if they fit your analysis of what is a good customer, so you may want to find out a specific piece of information about them. If you think they are a good customer, then you probably want to arrange a meeting with them. Whatever it is, make sure that this is your focus during the call.
If you want your potential customer to talk to you, you firstly need to see if it is convenient for them to talk. There is no point in having a conversation if your customer is distracted by other things. At this stage, when you have never met and have no rapport, you probably want to keep the conversation quite short so ask for a couple of minutes of their time. This is hard to refuse and as long as you only take a couple of minutes, you will gain some immediate credibility.
Now, you need to grab their attention and give them a reason to want to listen to you. Give them something of value, some useful information, explain how you can potentially help them. It could be as simple as saying “customers who use our product have saved 20% of their process time since implementation” or “90% of companies like yours use our product, would you like to know how they are using it?”. This should take no more than a minute and should probably end with “Does that sound like something that would be of interest to you?” If you have made your claim well, then your potential customer should be interested enough to agree to a further discussion. The door is open, you can make progress.
At all stages in the sales process, you need to sell the next stage. Don’t assume that the customer is on the same journey as you or knows what the next stage is. You need to gain their approval to proceed before you go further. In your first call, you want to sell the first meeting. During that meeting, you want to sell the second meeting. Quite what meetings or presentations or processes you need to go through will depend on what you are selling. However, at every stage, you must know what you next step is, as agreement to proceed is one of your objectives for each of your meetings.
If you always know your objective and sell the next stage, you will keep the customer’s door open to you. Sales is a process and while your end objective is to sell your product, you need to take the customer on a journey. This means selling every stage of the process and constantly providing value to the customer in everything that you do.
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