How to Make the Most Influential Sales Call of Your Life by lisafugere

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How to Make the Most Influential Sales Call of Your Life
by lisafugere

shutterstock_125120990There it is: the nemesis that has haunted you all your life: a CRM bulging with names and leads. You've got the entire pitch memorized, you've got a legal pad filled with ideas, prompts and the odd doodle. Yet, you hesitate. You stare at the address book for hours, playing out the call in your head instead of picking up the phone and dialing those all important numbers.
This is a dilemma sales people face all over the world. Veterans succumb to it as much as beginners. Sales is a tough job, especially when approaching cold leads. Rejections can be brutal and calls can often turn into confrontations. Yet, call you must; it is not an exaggeration when they say that a call can change your life.
So how do you go about making the most influential phone call of your life? We've got some tips to ensure smooth sailing:
1. Do Your Homework
Trite as it may sound, research is really what sets you apart from your competitors. Nothing gets shot down faster than a cold call to a prospect about whom you know nothing. Knowing your prospect - their habits, likes, and tastes - can turn a cold call into a "lukewarm" call, as Keith Rosen of Profit Builders puts it. Once you understand the prospect, it is much easier to turn them into a paying customer.
2. Tell a Story
Human beings are natural story tellers. We've been telling each other stories since the dawn of our species. The earliest of humans would huddle around fires and listen to a master storyteller narrate fantastical tales. The setting may have changed, but our appetite for storytelling remains the same.
Storytelling can cut through the jargon and tug at the all important emotional core of the prospect. It can turn your business from a nameless, faceless organization into a human, organic entity. Learn to create a narrative around your pitch, complete with protagonists, development arcs, and just a bit of suspense. This skill may take years to master, but will dramatically improve not just your sales, but the quality of your conversations everywhere.
3. Follow the Fifteen Second Rule
Forget the five-second rule. In sales, the first fifteen seconds are all that matters. Limiting yourself to five seconds will stress you out unnecessarily, and if you get past the first 5 seconds, you still need something to say. Grab the prospect's attention in the first fifteen seconds of the call and you'll find the rest of the sailing far smoother. Flounder, and you'll be working uphill to drag yourself back into the prospect's field of interest.
4. Align Your Pitch to their Business
So, how do you grab a prospect's attention inf fifteen seconds or less? Simple: align yourself with the prospect's line of work and demonstrate that you care about the business and its line of products. Once you've got the greetings out of the way, jump straight into the meat of the matter: talk about the prospect's business (not yours) and any recent readings, data, etc. on their line of work.
For instance, when pitching to a manufacturer of mobile phone accessories, it would be a good idea to refer to any recent article in a business publication (INC, Fortune, etc.) that talks about the growth of the mobile phone accessories market and chief players in that space. This instinctively creates a connection and tells the prospect that you care about his/her business, at least enough to read up about it.
5. Schedule a Face-to-Face Follow-up
The ABC of sales (Always Be Closing) dictates that each call end in a substantial step towards making an actual sale. A sale is the best possible outcome of any sale, but a face to face meeting is equally desirable. Despite the ubiquity of email, Twitter, SMS and voice-chat, a lot of business still takes place over an old fashioned face to face meeting. When pitching a prospect, make sure that you close with an offer of a meeting, and ensure that you offer pre-emptive alternative timing should the prospect reject. An example: "I can stop by your office later in the afternoon today at 4:00 p.m., or if that's not convenient, I can schedule a meeting for 11 a.m. tomorrow". And if the main intention of your call is to get a prospect to agree to the next meeting, make sure you say so at the very beginning of your call. Your prospect should never have to question why you're on the phone with them. Tell them why you're calling and how you're going to change their lives, and their phone call with you might just change yours.