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The Sales Buzz Issue 263 - Keep Prospects Listening to You
March 25, 2015


Keep Prospects Listening to You

If you can keep prospects listening to you then you might get the opportunity to close a sale.

If prospects stop listening to your sales pitch, your sales appointment call, or your telesales cold call, you can’t sell them anything.

If you work in:

Telesales

Field sales

B2B

Direct selling

Retail sales

Or any other type of sales role

There comes a point in your script, your pitch, or your proposal, where the small talk or the introduction stage stops and you start selling.

When you start to move forward into your pitch or your selling script there is usually a line that gives the prospect a reason why you have called them, or why you are sat in front of them.

I’ve managed and trained sales teams for a long time and for me this is the most important line of any call or meeting with prospects or existing customers.

So here I offer you some thoughts and examples on how to keep prospects listening at this crucial point in your calls and meetings.


Don’t Avoid the Fact That You Are Trying to Sell Something

Don’t try to avoid giving a reason why you are there, or why you are calling.

I’ve seen some sales and telesales people back away from telling prospects why they are phoning just to keep prospects listening.

It’s as if the prospect will suddenly slam the phone down or end the meeting if they explain that they want to sell them something or gain some commitment from them.

You shouldn’t avoid explaining why you are contacting the prospect.

I’ve had cold sales calls where 2 minutes into the call I still don’t know the reason they have phoned me.

Even if the product had real benefits for me by that time on the call I have lost all interest and I am so focused on trying to find a point of reference to understand what they want I would not get into a buying state.

So you shouldn’t avoid stating your reason for calling, but you can use sales techniques to put the reason into a frame of your choosing.


Keep Prospects Listening by Re-framing Your Reason for Calling

Imagine you’re speaking to a prospect, on the phone or face to face, it doesn’t matter the training principles are the same, and you are selling holiday vacation packages.

All of the following could be true:

  • You are selling vacations packages.
  • You are selling them because you will benefit from commission on the sale.
  • You want to influence the prospect to buy from you.
  • You could save the prospect money compared to other providers.
  • There could be something in your packages that are of superior value when compared to competitors.
  • You may have something unique to offer.
  • Your customer service may be exceptional.
  • Financially you are more secure than your competitors.
  • Your company has been helping people enjoy vacations and holidays for over 100 years.

Which of the above pieces of information, all of which could be true, would you use as the reason you are calling?

And yet so many sellers use the top one as their reason for calling or meeting a prospect.

They often creep around it, avoiding coming out with a direct line that says, ‘I’m trying to sell you something.’ But the meaning behind the lines that they use is the same, they just soften it up a little and make it less direct.


There are so many opportunities to use a more positive frame for meetings and calls.

All the sellers needed to do was make a list similar to the one above, but for their products and services, and they could select any number of really positive reasons why they’re calling or meeting and keep prospects listening to them.

We’ve got a full page of examples to give you more ideas on what reason to use, for calling or meeting with prospects, that will keep prospects listening to you.

They are in our section on cold calling for making sales appointments but the theories are the same for any form of sales contact. Take a look at Telephone Sales Training



The Sales Buzz is published by the website www.provensalestraining.com.



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

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