The Great Cold Calling Approach

I recently received an email that provided tips on a great cold calling phone approach: write your script word-for-word, memorize it, practice, and master answers to common sales objections. Oh, and be upbeat and enthusiastic when we ask for the appointment.

Seriously? Empty promises for a no-win sales strategy. And, just plain stupid and a waste of your sales time.

Referrals: The Sales Approach that Works

Consider a sales strategy that works: Referrals. Think about it. When you receive a referral there’s no script, no interrupting people, no overcoming objections. The person knows you and expects your call. Plus you are pre-sold, you earn trust and credibility, shorten your sales process, gain a sales partner, and convert a sales prospect to a client more than 50 percent of the time.

Why would you waste your sales time cold calling?

Clients hire you because they know you deliver what you promise with a positive impact on their business results. They hire you because you make them look good, and they want to keep their jobs.

They hire your company for its expertise—either in their industry or on a specific topic—such as sales, customer service, productivity, business process improvement, leadership, information technology, etc. You get the picture.

You need a niche—a narrow niche.

Know Your People

What makes you the expert? What do you love about your favorite clients that makes them your favorite? Take George, for example: Insurance agent, George, focuses exclusively on engineers. He loves engineers, because he understands their thought process. George studied engineering in school, and he loves working numbers. He knows exactly how to communicate with engineers. (While this might drive some of us crazy, George is in his element.)

In fact, people in the engineering community know each other: The person who bought George’s first policy offered to refer him to other engineers. He told his friends they had to talk to George, because George “understood” him. George quickly expanded his business because the engineers viewed George as someone who explained the complexities of insurance in a concrete, systematic manner. George became known as the sales expert and the “go-to person” for engineers.

One of our family friends is a financial advisor and has made a great income by focusing exclusively on teachers. He brings 20 years of experience to his job and earned the trust and recommendations of teachers—who continually refer him to other educators. He hasn’t missed a sales award trip in more than 20 years.

How to Develop Your Niche

So where do you locate your niche clients? Ask yourself: What expertise do I contribute? How do my hobbies relate to my niche? What types of clients are my favorites? Most importantly, what kind of business do I love the most? Connect with your passion, and you’ve found your niche. Your excitement and authenticity show through in every sales interaction, and sales prospects will buy from you.

You don’t need or want just “any” business, you want the business that excites you and enables you to deliver solutions that actually help people. A well-defined niche is specific. Otherwise, you don’t have a niche, you have a pastime. As an example, insurance agents and realtors tell me that they love working with young couples buying their first home and starting a family. When they work this niche, they become known as the expert and earn the right to ask for referrals—which they readily receive.

Think about your background and your interests and determine how you parlay those into new relationships, new niches, and new business for yourself. When you establish a common interest, you connect immediately. The faster you dip into your connections and interests, the faster your niche client group accepts you.

For great information on niches, check out Susan Friedmann and her book Riches in Niches: How to Make It BIG in a Small Market, Friedmann explores the multiple factors that separate the “experts” from the service professionals who may have identical–if not better–skills, but whom no one has ever heard of.

Three benefits of niche expertise:

1. You earn the trust and respect of your niche client
2. You become the expert in your field, and clients recognize the power of your recommendations
3. You earn the right to ask for and receive referrals from your niche client

Where’s your expertise? Find out and shout it out!

However, one of my favorite people and top-notch copywriters is Ivan Levinson, and Ivan’s usually spot on. Read his short newsletter about thinking outside the box. I read his newsletters avidly every month. Sign up for Ivan’s newsletter and get his free report, “101 Ways to Double Your Response Rates”.

Ivan knows his stuff. Check it out.

Bottom line: We need to proactively talk to our clients and ask them to make the introduction. That is when referrals happen.

> Watch the Video

Here’s the conversation:

Paul: “You know Joanne, I always thought that if I do good work for a customer, they would just mention me to other people. It just never occurred to me that I actually should be asking for a referral.”

Joanne: “Well that’s it, we think we have done great work and of course our clients will refer us. Sometimes they do but they will in passing tell someone else about you. They don’t pick up the phone and call. I have more people say, did you hear from so and so I gave them your name. No, I never heard from them. We need to proactively talk to our clients and ask them to make the introduction. That is when referrals happen.”

CanDoGo™ is a sales productivity tool that helps salespeople close more sales–and close them faster. By receiving timely advice from world-renowned experts, CanDoGo™ users work smarter, faster and more efficiently.

Travel Tips

I received great tips recently from Tracy Congdon at International Payments Corporation. He shared some startling information that busy sales people (and leisure travelers) must know:

• Hotel Key Cards: The key cards you receive in hotels contain your entire credit or debit card information that you used to hold your room. I used to turn them in, thinking I was saving plastic and that the hotel could then re-use the card for another guest. Never again. Now I take the hotel key cards home and shred them.

• Credit Cards: When we’re in a restaurant, we hand a complete stranger our credit card and hope the only thing we just bought was our meal.  According to FACTA law (Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act), your receipt as well as the business copy should not contain your entire credit card number, nor the last four digits and expiration date. These put you at risk and the business in direct violation of the FACTA law, which falls under the FTC.

Bottom Line: Pay as much attention to your plastic as you pay to your clients and your sales activities. Keep your personal information safe and secure–no matter what season.

When people have too much to do and impossible deadlines, it changes how they make decisions—and their expectations of you. To be successful, you need fresh sales strategies. Jill shows you how to capture and keep the attention of crazy-busy people and how to speed up your sales cycle.

Sneak Peek & 4 Free Sales Tools

To download two chapters of SNAP Selling & get four FREE sales-acceleration tools, just click http://www.SnapSelling.com. I did.

And don’t forget to buy Jill Konrath’s book for more great tools.

Everyone Is a Part of Your Sales Team

If you don’t include your current clients in your referral-sales team, you leave money on the table—every single day. If you ask them, they will refer you. But, you must ask.

Get upfront and honest with yourself. Ask (and answer) the two most important sales prospecting questions:

1. How many client relationships do I have? (Translation: How many people do I know in all of my current and former client organizations?)
2. With how many of these clients do I have great relationships? (Criteria for “great”: They return my calls.)

Savvy sales professionals have at least 100 client contacts. If just 20 percent offered you referrals, you’d have 20 amazing new contacts. Once you actively cultivate them, they become part of your “sales team.” Can you see where this leads, and how much business you could generate?

Take a few minutes and imagine your new sales life when you talk to prospects who want to talk to you. When you receive a referral introduction, you:

• Are pre-sold (They know you and the results you deliver.)
• Have already earned trust (One of the hardest things for salespeople to gain.)
• Gain instant credibility (They know you’re not just there to “sell” them something.)
• Shorten your sales process by at least 25 percent (You decrease your cost of sales.)
• Convert that referred prospect to a new client more than 50 percent of the time (You decrease your prospecting time and increase your client-facing time.)

Really.

It’s Who You Know

Most salespeople have numerous current or former customers who they know pretty well, well enough to receive a steady stream of referrals. But they leave untapped referral riches at their fingertips.

How many of your clients have you asked for referrals? When I question sales professionals, the usual answer is “not many” or “hardly any.”

Your Clients Will Help You Make the Sale

Here’s the hard fact -most clients think of us only when they need us. It’s up to you to get them thinking about you between orders. Your clients may not automatically offer referrals: Regularly remind them that you exist, so when a referral opportunity arises, you’re the one who gets it.

The clients you serve well-the ones who know you, like you, and trust you-truly want you to achieve sales success. After all, they know your work and the business results they’ve achieved from your solutions. Referring you makes them look good to their customers and business partners.

Our clients will refer us—if only we ask. With a little “instruction” you can empower your clients (your Referral Source) to refer you. Teach them how to introduce you (How do you want “what you do” to be described?). Teach them about your Ideal Client, and provide them with the answers to these critical questions:

• What business issues do you solve?
• What is the function of your Ideal Client? (CEO, VP, IT, Marketing)
• In what industry or geography do you work?
• What size company is your sweet spot?

The more specific you are, the easier it is for a client to refer you.

Referral selling sounds too good to be true. But it’s all true. Referral selling works. You choose how to spend your time. Get back in touch with your clients, ask them for referrals, and ask how you can help them. Your new sales opportunities will amaze you!

It’s time to ask.

Making Cold Calls? People Would Rather Give Up Sex.

“The prospect of making cold calls for a week as a salesperson is more unappealing than giving up sex for a month, a survey showed this week. “Only getting a root canal was deemed worse than making sales calls to businesses people did not know, said the survey of 1,226 respondents…”

Read the full article and learn once again why cold calling is an un-productive business-development activity and a waste of your sales time. http://yhoo.it/auaQ5Zcoldcallsandsex

You know who they are—the time-wasting, buy-nothing customers… By dumping them, you free up time to develop and care for the ones who really matter. Just do it.

The PITA Customer

You can see the warning signs a mile away: They push you on price, threaten to take their business to your competitors, make unreasonable demands, masquerade as the decision-maker, don’t return phone calls; yet expect fast, complete and reliable delivery of your service.

You know who they are: The “pain in the ass” (PITA) customers. Do you have a PITA client–or perhaps more than one?

PITA customers are never happy. They drain your energy, test your patience, and waste your time. They demoralize your entire sales team. Yet companies accept this bad business continually, thinking bad business must be better than no business. But is it?

Dump Hidden Costs

When organizations take on these bad customers, they pay a hidden cost–the lost opportunity to use those resources going after and servicing the phenomenal clients they want and need to make money! Collect too many PITA customers and watch your profits dwindle… not a compelling scenario.

Why accept business from a few customers who drive us crazy and drain our resources? Many salespeople say they sell to “anyone who fogs a mirror”–because of a looming quota, or because their company insists on certain deals. Many sales organizations create unrealistic expectations that they can turn a bad situation into a good one. Are you dreaming? Bad business is bad business. Period.

Dump the Junk

Targeting just “anyone” often means attracting more PITA customers. Never ask a PITA to refer you. Why? Because PITAs hang out with other PITAs. They belong to the same organizations, play golf together, and love telling stories about how they negotiated an unprecedented deal, or whipped a salesperson into shape. Your best sales decision: Fire the PITA. Don’t take them in the first place, and if you have one, recognize you have a PITA situation and fight back.

Yes, fight back–push back–whatever you call it. Don’t take their abuse. You deliver a service that boosts their business. If they push you on price, be willing to walk away. That really turns the tables.

To demonstrate this point, picture two people standing up with their arms out straight, pushing on and resisting each other’s hands. No one gets anyplace. It’s a stalemate. Now re-create the same picture: One person stops resisting. What happens? The other person moves toward the one who ceased resisting. The same thing happens when you’re willing to walk away. Sometimes you’ll walk, but many times the PITA comes to you.

Clean House

So Fire the PITA! We know them 90 percent of the time before we even begin to work with them. Say NO. It’s OK to walk away.

When you walk away, you have time to attract exactly the kind of clients you want, and watch your sales soar!

Several people I respect told me it’s one of the best business books written, so I dug in. I like going to baseball games, but I’m not a baseball fanatic, and I really don’t care who played third base for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1960. (OK, I know it’s Don Hoak. I wrote about it on page 57 of my book, No More Cold Calling: The Breakthrough System That Will Leave Your Competition in the Dust)

What I learned from Michael Lewis in “Moneyball” is that people have definite biases and beliefs and that a “profusion of ignorance” clouds otherwise knowledgeable men. I learned that many people are ignored by those who stand to benefit most from their work. Why? Because they are stuck in their ways. They behave the way they’ve always behaved. They’re mired in history and prevailing beliefs, risk-averse and politically frightened.

Yes, this is the “aha!” link to sales!

Are your clients stuck, afraid to change, to try new approaches? Are they afraid of not delivering results and of losing their jobs? Trodding along the same path won’t get them to a new destination. As salespeople, we make a difference to our clients. Let’s help our clients get “unstuck.”

The heck with baseball. In “Moneyball”, sales lessons abound!