If your reps hate picking up the phone to prospect, take a long, hard look in the mirror. That’s right. Often, the source of reps’ call reluctance is the sales manager – and most of the time, managers are completely unaware of what they’re doing to sabotage those prospecting efforts.
"A sales manager with call reluctance contaminates the whole organization," warns Connie Kadansky, CEO of Exceptional Sales Performance, a company that helps salespeople overcome the fear of prospecting and self-promotion. Managers are usually oblivious to their prejudice, but their occasional off-the-cuff comments about the difficulties of prospecting are a slow drip-drip of negativity that saps reps’ willingness to pick up the phone. Here, says Kadansky, are three strategies you can use to fix the problem and turn around your team’s attitude toward prospecting – which in turn will bring a turnaround in their sales results.
To turn things around, change the way you talk about prospecting. Instead of positioning it as a necessary evil, be enthusiastic. "It takes a confident manager to say, ‘Prospecting is part of our sales model, and we’re going to show you how to do it with the right scripts and mind-set,’" says Kadansky, who advocates a "do vocabulary" instead of a "don’t vocabulary." In other words, make sure you’re telling your reps to "do this, do that, and say this," rather than "not to do this and say that." It’s a small change that will yield big results.
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