#TuesdayTips
I am one of those weird people that sort of enjoys cold calling – within limits. My results have always been good, and that has given me the confidence keep going when I am rejected. But there’s a reason why my results have usually been so good, and that’s what I’d like to tell you about.
One of my early sales positions was in a highly competitive industry with very thin margins. Our performance was judged on the number of calls we made, not on the number of appointments or sales we got. I always thought that was a mistake because it put the emphasis on the action, rather than the outcome and it seems to me that if you expect really poor outcomes you’ll probably get them. Anyway, my outcomes were excellent and I ended up booked out for weeks ahead because I used this system.
People often said, “It’s all very well for you Chandell, you’re a natural salesman so it’s easy for you to get these results.” And I’d kind of smile and think, “Well, if you knew how hard I worked before I ever picked up the phone you’d probably realise that there’s not much natural about it!”
When I became sales manager I started to teach my teams the system I was using, and you know what? Most of them became ‘natural salesmen’ too!
So here’s my 7-Step Sales System – it works for cold calling, and helps you close sales in other contexts as well because it gives you confidence in what you’re selling. The one thing that makes it even more powerful – which I talk about in another post – is principles of observing your prospect and understanding what’s going through their mind. I learned those through neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and they supercharged my results because they also helped me identify prospects who were not a good fit for the product or service I was selling and to offer them an alternative (or suggest they just keep what they had).
