Making sales calls to people you barely know is one of the most difficult tasks to navigate in business. Your success hinges on how you open the conversation, and you’ve only got 5 seconds to identify yourself, identify your organization, and determine if you are speaking to the right person.
Once that’s out of the way, you’ve roughly got 5-10 additional seconds to describe your service or product in a compelling enough manner that they’ll want to stay on the phone with you to learn more. That’s a lot to accomplish in 15 seconds, and sincerity is crucial!
Ironically, the majority of salespeople lead their calls with a common greeting that couldn’t be more transparently insincere—shooting themselves in the foot from the word, go.
Here’s the self-defeating dialogue. Try not to cringe as you recognize yourself in this scenario.
Salesperson: “Hi. My name is John Raymond. I’m with Accent Recruiting. How is your day going?”
Prospect: “Uhhhh…my day is going just fine. Who is this again?”
How many times have you awkwardly opened an initial contact call with some version of “How’s your day going? We should all feel lucky for not getting a response like: “Why the hell do you care how my day is going? You don’t even know me.”
On top of the fact that this question is 100% disingenuous, it’s a lead-in that sparks all kinds of negative associations, as it’s often used in personal relationships to segue into delivering bad news or into requesting a favor.
Oddly enough, even though we all bristle at this smarmy lingo when it comes our way, we still indulge in opening sales calls with these same hollow phrases. I’d like to offer an alternative:
“Hi, my name is Chris Harris. I’m with RefuseOrdinary, and I’m wondering if you’d be able to help me.”
Do you hear the difference? It’s an honest inquiry—not the language of a used car salesman. “I’m wondering if you’d be able to help me” invites the response: “Sure. What can I do for you?” and paves the way for you to tell them about your services and intentions.
I want to be clear—this is not a tactic for snagging a huge chunk of air time in order to peddle your wares or to set up a meeting. Contrary to the dictates of mainstream sales trainings, the point of any initial prospecting call is to determine whether or not the prospect is open to exploring more about you and what you do. It’s important to understand this subtle-but-significant difference.
Over the years, sales and development trainings have insisted we maintain control of our business interactions and of all parties involved, which walks a fine line of coercing, leveraging, or otherwise manipulating people into doing what we want them to do.
In contrast, focusing on “getting to the truth” (as Will and I call it) is an approach by which you deliberately let go of control. In the context of a sales call, you imbue the other person with the authority to decide whether or not they want to continue with the dialogue. The truth you’re seeking is best discerned by asking yourself: “Does this person perceive my idea, product, or service as relevant and valuable, and has she deemed it a good use of her time to explore a deeper conversation about it?”
There’s no applied pressure, no word-crafting to create a sense of urgency for a meeting, no persuading the contact to purchase something he or she might not want or need, no attempt to direct the conversation with the intention of arriving at an end point of your design.
I wrote an article last year about how to proceed successfully in these situations, and you can read it here. (If you want to dive even further into this approach, check out our e-Class “Truth Dialing: No more intimidating, sleazy, pushy sales calls.”)
Beyond the words we use, the manner in which we communicate conveys our intentions—and it does so, primarily, on an unconscious level. Simply having a clear intention to do business with someone can easily be interpreted as: “This person wants to control me.” As extreme as that might sound, it is a common reaction when one is approached, unsolicited, to engage in a business arrangement. Unfortunately, consumers have come to expect the worst in sales situations, largely due to years of being steamrolled by aggressive sales tactics.
If you are serious about approaching all your business prospects with a greater level of integrity, you’ll need to loosen your grip on the steering wheel of these interactions, set aside your self-serving interests, act with genuine consideration and respect—and allow the consumer to make up his or her own mind about your services. If your potential customers find relevance and meaning in what you’ve got to offer, they will naturally want to learn more—and they will ask you for more information.
The fact is, we are long overdue to turn the shady image of our profession around in the minds of the general public. There is no need to force or ingratiate in order to make a sale. Your wares and intentions should speak for themselves. Let them!
