sales | selling | sellers | prospect | Sales Tips | Sales Training | strategy | Objection Handling | Pipeline Management
Yesterday, we spoke about advocating the advantage of your product, not igniting an argument. It is also crucial to demonstrate curiosity by asking thoughtful questions. Here is the third ingredient to transforming an objection to a great appointment: customize.
How do you customize a prospecting call? Well, the more carefully you listen to the actual words people use to respond to you during the call, the more effectively you’lI be able to feed those words back to the person.
So if someone tells you, "I don't think you'd be able to work within our budget," find a way to use the words "work within your budget" in your response.
"You know, ABC Company had the exact same concern at first, until they were able to see how we could create a plan that did work within their budget. I'd love to get together with you so I could show you how we did it. What about Wednesday at 1:00?"
You also want to customize the length of the turnaround. If they have a very short objection -- for instance, "Listen, I’m not interested" – you won’t have the opportunity for half-hour long turnaround. You must get right to the point.
And finally, the fourth ingredient that will complete the savory dish is passion.
Suppose you get on the phone with someone and say, "Hello, this is ___, I’m making a lot of calls today. And I was hoping, after dealing with this whole long list of people who said 'no,' that maybe you might say 'yes' to me."
That call is headed towards a dark and lonely hallway.
Think about the prospect’s perception. To our horror, most sales that calls they receive may actually sound like that.
We want to make sure that the energy and tonality in all of our calls are genuine and effective. We want it to go more like this:
"This is ___, and the reason I’m calling is that I could not sleep last night. I was up at two in the morning thinking about what your company does, what we do, and you know, it occurred to me that we can make some serious money together. We should be talking about working together. I know we can work with a company like yours, and I know we can bring a lot of value.”
"___, stop! OBJECTION! OBJECTION!"
"Hey, I hear you, but you know what? A lot of my current customers were in that same place before they saw how we could help them. We should really get together. Are you free Wednesay at 1?"
If you deliver the kind of message like that, the other person’s going to think about meeting with you. Why? Because when you speak with passion and conviction, you tend to get more positive responses that holds much potential.
So remember these 4 the next time you're prospecting on the phone:
- Advocate the Advantage
- Interest and curiosity
- Customize
- Passion
About the Author:
Steve Bookbinder is Co-founder and CEO of Digital Media Training, a training partner to some of the most successful sales organizations around the world. DMT delivers training which treats sales as a competitive sport and changes behavior needed to help sellers consistently win. DMT is a leader in M-learning training reinforcement with a proven track record of improving sales through training. Steve has delivered more than 500 keynote speeches at national sales meetings, conducted more than 3,000 training workshops and trained, coached and managed more than 35,000 sellers and managers from leading companies around the world for more than 20 years.
