Pick Up the Phone

There’s a big difference between shooting the breeze on your cell and actually using the phone – cell or office – as a sales tool. Not that many sales reps aren’t connected to their customers and prospects by phone, but there’s a difference between consciously using the phone as a sales tool and just wasting time dialing, dialing, dialing in an endless loop.

An increasingly globalized business world combined with the increasingly high costs of travel mean that telephone sales have become even more vital to any sales effort. Here are six useful tips for making the phone work for you and your sales.

1. Forget “dialing for dollars.” If 10 calls get you one thumbs-up, the logic is that you need to make 100 calls for 10 go-aheads. But while sales can, in a sense, be viewed as a numbers game, the truth is that more isn’t necessarily better – particularly when it comes to phone sales. “The numbers game doesn’t work,” says sales consultant and speaker Jill Konrath, author of How to Sell to Big Companies (Kaplan Business, 2005).

“It’s the old definition of insanity – expecting something different from the same approach,” agrees Kenny Madden, director of sales development for network, change, and configuration management software company AlterPoint. “Sales execution and sales success is not a mathematical equation,” he explains. Making more calls can actually boomerang on the rep, meaning each call is more cookie-cutter and less targeted at the individual. So if more isn’t the answer, what is? Dialing smarter, not harder, says Madden.

2. Do your homework first. If there’s one key point that successful salespeople make over and over again, it’s know who you are calling and why before you pick up the phone. “I do two hours of research before I even place a call,” says Madden, who regularly cold calls high-level decision makers at Fortune 500 companies. According to Madden, the quality of prospecting is so incredibly low that it’s not difficult to stand out in the crowd, and doing a bare minimum of research is an easy way to set yourself apart. He says that more than 90 percent of people who use the telephone for sales don’t even go to the company’s Website once before they call. That means in the time it takes to pour yourself another cup of coffee, you can do enough homework to put yourself head and shoulders above the other guys.

3. Have a strategy. The most successful phone salespeople know what they’re going to say, the key points they want to make, and their first-, second- and third-line objectives before pushing buttons. “Corporate decision makers are insisting on relevancy,” says Konrath. It’s the price of admission – demonstrating in a few seconds that you understand them and their business issues and goals. If you can’t do that, you’d better hang up fast. You should also know what you’re going to say to the executive assistant or to your contact’s voice mail if you don’t get through on the first call.

4. Make voice mail and gatekeepers friends. Instead of seeing voice mail and the admin as obstacles to your goal, design ways to incorporate them into your strategy. Konrath says most voice mail messages are deleted after only a few seconds, so plan out what you want to say in headlines, not in details. And don’t rely on the contact to call you back; instead, set a specific time that you will call again, and then do so.

Madden stresses the importance of treating the admin or assistant with the utmost respect. “How you talk and how you sell and how you deal with the chairman of the company is exactly how you should treat the executive assistant,” he says, and it’s a mistake to assume differently. The assistant can be a source of a tremendous amount of information, as well as your biggest supporter – or detractor. How you treat that person makes the difference.

5. Forget about selling. Madden says that making a sale isn’t even on his mind for the initial call with the prospect. “I’m not selling anything,” he explains. “I’m just trying to see if there’s relevancy there.”

Konrath says that the phone call should be seen as only one of a series of encounters with the prospect before an agreement will be reached. “If you are going after an account and you know you can make a business difference, you need to plan on 10 contacts,” from phone calls to voice mails to emails to in-person meetings, she says.

6. Treat the call like a meeting. Speaking of meetings, one of the biggest mistakes salespeople make is not treating phone appointments with the same level of gravity and importance as they would a face-to-face meeting. “You literally have to have an agenda,” says Konrath. It’s not a time to chit-chat or shoot the breeze; it should be very targeted and focused. At the same time, though, it’s also not a data dump or a technology review. Konrath suggests giving the contact real-life examples and success stories and a bit of a technology background, if necessary, but spend most of the time focused on the prospect’s business issues. “The seller needs to build in questions to engage the customer around the business issues,” she says, and provide enough “meat” about the products or services so the buyer can decide if it’s worth pursuing a relationship.