In this week's Sales Buzz: Answer the cold calls that are made to you and learn from the mistakes of others, here's a good example...

Answer Cold Calls and Improve Your Telephone Pitch

You and I can learn as much from really poor sales calls as we can from the occasional good ones that we get.

The good news for you is that I’ll take the calls and pass you the information.

I like you get calls every day to my home and my office from people trying to sell me a wide range of products and services.

Marketing companies, recruitment services, advertising agencies, utilities providers, communications, and so on...

You probably get the same unless you have a gatekeeper receptionist or have registered with a telephone preference service.

So why do I take the time to answer cold calls when nearly all are of no use to me?

The answer is: I can learn from the calls and use that information to improve my team’s calls, and pass that knowledge on to you both here in the Sales Buzz and on the provensalestraining.com website...

This past week I’ve been getting cold sales calls to my office from people that want to sell me marketing services. All the calls had one thing in common and made a basic mistake that meant they were wasting their time and they have a business model that is ineffective.

This is where the learning part comes in.

When I take these calls and I don’t buy, or commit to the next stage, I look at why their sales pitch failed. I also think about their business model, the cost, the gains, and the assumptions and beliefs they have that they use to form their business plan. Then I look at my own business plans and actions and make sure I’m not making the same mistakes.

One of the most common mistakes that I find when I answer cold calls is:

The sales person or appointment maker has nothing unique to offer. They give me no reason why I should meet with them. Nothing to make them stand out from the other twenty calls I’ve had that week.

If I only received a call from marketing companies every 3 or 4 months then I might meet with them and spend time giving them details of what I want and then see what they come up with.

But marketing is a very competitive industry. I could not physically see every company that contacts me saying how great they are and how they can transform my company image.

I ask the many agencies that call me what makes them different. What can they tell me about my marketplace, what’s unique about them. They tell me they have experience with a similar client. My answer is, So What?

What does that mean to me. Why should I invest , because that’s what it is an investment of time and money, why should I invest part of my budget with you.

Here are the key learns that I take from the above calls:

1. Always have a really great reason for cold calling a prospect.

2. Be prepared to deal with objections by listing all the questions you would ask if you were the prospect.

3. Don’t take objections personally. As in the above example the buyer, me, is bombarded by calls from similar companies. The questions asked were not a personal attack but a way of sifting through the ordinary to find the extraordinary.

Having a great reason for calling in the introduction stage of your call is the most important tip I can give you for creating an effective sales or appointment telephone pitch.

Buy taking time to answer cold calls such as the example above I can experience them as a customer. This allows me to learn how they can be improved and put together information on the website for sales professionals like you.

You can see a full page of sales training on creating a great introduction to your calls at Creating Cold Call scripts...

I'm Stephen Craine from the website Sales-Training-Sales-Tips.com

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