VIDEO: The Primary Objective of a Cold Call or Your Prospecting Efforts? It’s About Finding The Fit, Not Focusing On The Result
Mar 31, 2010 Cold Calling Tips, Prospecting, Cold Calling and Networking, Sales Coaching, Sales Training, Videos, cold calling, telesales
What’s the initial objective of a cold call or your prospecting and new business development efforts? Rather than focusing all of your energy on making the sale, first determine if there’s a good fit between you, your prospect, and what you are selling.
Instead of feeling that the intention of prospecting is to get a sale, provide a demonstration, submit a proposal, or schedule an appointment, the initial intention of prospecting is to determine if there’s a fit worth pursuing.
While this may sound a bit strange, closing the sale and earning the business of a prospect is not your initial goal. Instead, your primary objective is to determine whether you and your prospect are a good fit.
Take a moment and think about how this change in your attitude and mindset would change your cold calling approach as well as your experience.
While your traditional approach may be to produce a measurable result, now your primary objective is to discover whether you and your prospect are a good match and if this relationship is worth moving to the next stage of your selling process. If you feel that you constantly have to push the sales process forward, you’re not taking into consideration that the prospect may simply not be ready, let alone may not be a good fit for what you are selling. Pushing the sales process forward before a prospect is ready only creates pressure for the both of you, fostering an unhealthy relationship from the start.
By changing your thinking and your approach, you’ll now be able to focus your energy and precious time on the right prospects who are more inclined to buy from you, rather than wasting your time sending out proposals and following up with people who you have no business following up with in the first place. Filling your sales funnel with unqualified prospects does nothing for you other than cost you time when you spend it on people who are simply not a good fit for you or your product and service.
Here’s a clip produced by CanDoGo.com on how you can make this critical shift in your thinking which will result in more selling opportunities and less cold calling reluctance.
Tags: appointment setting, coaching salespeople, cold call reluctance, cold calling, prospecting, Sales Coaching, telesales
Book Recommendation: Smart Calling by Art Sobczak
Mar 31, 2010 All About Selling
Would you like to eliminate fear and rejection from your prospecting? And get a win on every call?
You can with Art Sobczak’s Smart Calling method. Art works with thousands of sales reps each year helping them get more business by phone. In his new book, Smart Calling – Eliminate the Fear, Failure, and Rejection from Cold Calling, Art gives you the field-tested, practical information you need to make your calls work.
Packed with hundreds of real-world examples, Smart Calling shows you how to:
*Grab your prospect’s interest in the critical first 20 seconds
*Use “social engineering” to get the inside scoop on prospects
*Turn around buyer resistance
*Have screeners, gatekeepers, and assistants working for you
*Get stalled prospects to take action
*Stay motivated and avoid morale-killing rejection!
Most of the time, cold calls don’t work and end up wasting everyone’s time. Smart Calling gives you a new and better way to approach prospects and win sales. Order Art’s book today and start Smart Calling.
Get exclusive bonus gifts, e-books, and recordings from authors and experts like Zig Ziglar, Jill Konrath, Bob Burg, me, and many others when you order Art’s new book today.
Go here right now and get details about purchasing the book and receiving your special free gifts.
Profit Builders Named One of the Top Ten Best Sales Coaching and Training Companies
Mar 25, 2010 Sales Coaching, Sales Training, Surveys and Polls, coaching salespeople
Can I make a humble plug here? Okay, we’ve earned some bragging rights and I was just excited to share this news with you. My company just received a nice accolade and recognition for being named one of the Top Ten Best Sales Training and Coaching Companies by Selling Power magazine.
Here’s the announcement below from Selling Power:
“One of the few great generals in history who never lost a battle was the Russian general Alexander Suvorov, who explained the roots of his success with his memorable motto: “Train hard and fight easy.” The sales profession is fortunate to have effective thought leaders who have created powerful sales-training and development solutions that help sales managers and salespeople improve their skills. And better skills translate to more valuable customer relationships and increased value to the company’s bottom line. These 10 top sales training solutions can help you and your company create more sales than you ever thought possible.
Profit Builders
Keith Rosen is fanatical about increasing your sales. That’s why almost half of the Fortune 1000 companies and the top companies in six major industries chose his training and coaching solutions. Profit Builders addresses the specific challenges that are unique to your company and then moves beyond traditional training by coaching your salespeople around best practices and best thinking to develop true champions. While Keith’s programs and books have won numerous awards, his bragging rights are earned through more sales and long-lasting results. www.profitbuilders.com
You can see the entire article here, listed in alphabetical order.
Tags: management coach training, Sales Coaching, sales management coaching, Sales Training
VIDEO: The Right Sales Attitude – Becoming A Sales Champion Starts With How You Think
Mar 19, 2010 How To Sell and Sales Tips, Sales Coaching, Sales Training, Videos, coaching salespeople
Professional selling and the ability to prospect effortlessly is a combined result of who you are, how you think, and the way you come across, not solely a function of what you do.
Imagine for a moment that each person looks at life and more specifically, cold calling, through a certain set of lenses or a set of beliefs that define our perspective about life, our career, and the events that we experience.
There is a saying I heard early on in my sales career, “Selling is a transference of feeling.” Although this is true, consider what happens if the feeling you are transferring to your prospects is the wrong feeling because your beliefs or thinking are coming from a negative, fear based, limiting, or self-serving place. If you are prospecting because you need to close more sales in order to save your job or to make enough money to pay your bills, you can bet that your prospects are going to pick up on your underlying intentions and run the other way.
Consider one of the objectives of a cold call or a sales presentation: to create a feeling within the prospect that stimulates interest and motivates them to take the next step and hear more about what you have to offer.
Therefore, it’s critical that you are transferring the right feeling and attitude to your prospects.
Here’s a video that supports this core philosophy – sales champions are created from the inside out.
Tags: coaching for managers, coaching salespeople, Sales Coaching, Sales Training, video
VIDEO: Fatal Coaching Mistake. Managers, Share Ideas, Not Expectations
Mar 12, 2010 Executive Coaching, Videos, coaching for managers, coaching salespeople, training for managers
It is a fact that if you’re a boss, manager, or executive responsible for managing people, you are their superior. And, therefore, you have a certain degree of influence over how your staff feels about certain things.
Managers and executives have the power to shut down a conversation or open up a dialogue. Quite often, they don’t realize how much of an influence they have over their staff and how influential they can be without even trying. When a manager takes a strong stand or position and makes a statement like, “Here’s the solution” or “Here’s how it is,” it removes any opportunity for others to contribute a different and potentially better idea.
There’s a difference between sharing an opinion or idea and sharing an expectation. It’s one thing if the manager or boss shares an opinion that allows the dialogue and flow of the conversation to continue moving in a positive, collaborative direction. It’s entirely different when the manager shares an expectation with a strong agenda or ultimatum behind it.
An opinion or idea from the boss opens up further conversation. An expectation shuts it down.
In this video, I discuss this approach managers can take so that you will be more likely to get a response that encourages unfiltered collaboration and multiple contributions.
Tags: coaching for managers, coaching salespeople, management coach training, training for managers
Why Managers Don’t Ask Better Coaching Questions – Stop Coaching In Your Own Image
Mar 12, 2010 Executive Coaching, Sales Coaching, coaching for managers, coaching salespeople, management articles, training for managers
A few posts ago, someone posted a fair and relevant question which I thought was important enough to re-post front and center.
It was in reference this post: Coaching Questions Part 3 – Questions To Get People into Action That Drive Desired Results, which you can read here.
Here is her question and my response follows.
“Keith- I’m a huge fan of yours, let me say that first so you don’t get mad at me, but every single one of those questions above 1-12 would infuriate me if I ever had my vp of sales ask any of them. And I would feel dumb asking my reps too! I don’t get it.”
The truth be known, many managers don’t get it – at least not initially; until the blind spot is exposed and placed in their line of vision for them to see. And please keep in mind, their inability to see this blind spot has nothing to do with their acumen, experience, abilities, commitment to their team or intelligence and everything to do with one of the common traps that management has tendency to fall into which is due to the fact that coaching is often counterintuitive.
Here was my response:
Thanks for the comment! Much appreciated. Why would I get mad? Keep your comments coming! I don’t expect everyone to agree with everything I write. Besides, if I post stuff that everyone agrees with, then I’m not doing my job! Just like I told a client today; “If you plan on doing what you did yesterday, aren’t open to challenging your current way of thinking and are able to see every blind spot on your own which is getting in the way of better performance (you can’t self diagnose when you’re in the middle of the game), then what do you need me for?”
Back to your question. I was very mindful when posting these questions that they may not work for everyone and are distinctly positioned for specific situations. As I wrote in this post, “Remember, treat these questions like a buffet. So, take what you like and leave what you don’t. Depending upon your situation and the individual you’re coaching, every question may not work for everyone. Conversely, since we all looking for new and better results, take some of these questions out for a test drive, as you may not know how effective they are until you try them out.”
So, who are these questions for? Well, probably not for your top performer or the person who’s self driven and accountable. These questions are for the salesperson who may be stuck, either in follow through, in their own story and excuses or in taking the necessary actions to better their performance. For the manager, getting on your soapbox and preaching what needs to be done gets old fast and doesn’t work for the long haul.
Which is the point of these questions. So often, managers see the problem, see what needs to change in order to fix the problem and as such, get into the tell mode of dumping the solution on their people. Conversely, these questions find the gap, or what is missing either in the person’s thinking, skills or resources and deepens the level of accountability that every manger is looking to instill, preventing the salesperson from using more creative excuses to justify their performance!
I’m guessing that you personally, (I don’t like to make assumptions) don’t fall into the category of the underperformer? So yes, in that case, these questions certainly would not fit for you.
Conversely, be mindful that, just because they don’t fit for you, doesn’t mean they won’t fit for anyone or for another person on your team. After all, just like in selling, you don’t want to sell the way you buy, that is, instilling your values and decision making process on the customer, assuming they think and process information the same way you do. You also don’t want to coach the way you like to be coached, because then you’re essentially coaching in your own image (building robots vs. respecting each person’s individuality and where they’re at).
Look at the spirit behind each question. I have hundreds of coaching questions that I use, and it’s not only about having the right questions, but when to use them and with whom that makes the difference.
Does this make more sense now? Let me know!
Tags: coaching for managers, coaching salespeople, Executive Coaching, management coach training, management tips, Sales Management
VIDEO: How To Leverage The Power Of Fear to Become Unstoppable
Mar 5, 2010 Career Advice, Executive Coaching, How to Manage Your Team, Live Responsibly: Life Tips, Great Living, Sales Coaching, Videos, accountability, career coaching, coaching for managers, coaching salespeople, cold calling, training for managers
Do you allow fear to paralyze you or have you made fear your greatest ally? Does fear hold you hostage, preventing you from being more of who you are and what you want to achieve? Have you ever been in a position of action, yet felt powerless to take those steps you need to take to live your greatness, achieve better results or make the best choice because fear had it’s grip over you?
Are you driven by what you want most; your dreams, goals and passions – or are you fueled by fear, consequence and what you worry may happen or occur in the worst case scenario?
How do you manage fear? Do you embrace it or resist it?
In this video, discover how you can leverage fear and make it your greatest teacher so that you can become unstoppable.
Tags: career coaching, coaching for managers, coaching salespeople, Executive Coaching, life coaching, Sales Coaching, video
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