Phone Sales Anyone?

Here's what phone closing requires

A: Lots of numbers
B: A little Tenacity
C: Rebuttals
D: Tie Downs
F: Practice
G: A Great script
H: Willingness to step out of your comfort zone and be a little assertive.

You are right people close on the phone every single day... You just have to be a little more focused on the prize thats all and have a great script, and a dedicated telemarketer. Call centers do it all the time, the only difference between an 18 year old that closes 5 credit cards per and you is this:

"Will". He has none. He has to stick with it till he gets it right, but you and I have a "choice", and for most of us, when it dont come easy, we make up something else we have to do.

If it requires any assertiveness, and we we feel uncomfortable we go chase another shiny object. I can train a person in a call center to close on the phone like a clock within 3 days, almost regardless of their personality type...but they dont have a choice in the matter unless they want to lose their job, plus they have peer pressure because others are doing it around them, plus they cant say it doesnt work because they are watching others do it.

Yes, it happens everyday in a million booths all day long... We tend to be a little "cushy" online.

Online, its a little harder to train people because they dont owe you anything, and they dont have to listen to you.

On that note:

I dont see why mobile people ARENT closing on the phone with the $250 price range most of them work within. The main reason I think is because it may not come easy the first couple of days, and we dont like to push ourselves too hard, for many it takes a supervisor to do that.

Once you get it though you could close mobile like a clock Im sure.

The big thing thats great about phone closing is that it makes you feel like a champion, once you learn to do it and break the ice you can do it all day...and you are like a cat in a chicken house! The world is your oyster.

Edit: another thing: "Hours". 8 of them.

If the telemarketer doesnt close one in the morning, then he closes 3 in the afternoon, but if "WE" dont close one in the morning, we come back to the warrior forum and tell everyone it doesnt work. lol

Cant think of how many times I had a slow four hours and told myself "I guess Im having an afternoon day...and sure enough I'd start hitting it like crazy after lunch. Most wont do that.

You can close alot bigger deals on the phone too, it just requires some call backs and faxes, building the pipeline...

I havent talked about this alot because I feel like for most people they need something easy to see fast easy results or they quit, appointments dont require anything but "Hey Im out giving free quotes whats a good time to stop by for a few minutes..." but you have to talk a little to phone close and be able to get past your greeting more than once in 50 calls, also use some techniques that may be a little uncomfortable at first.

the main technique is about redirecting someone from their objections and steering them back to the pitch gently so you can get through your whole pitch more.

Newbies tend to have a little trouble getting past the greeting, and since I cant be there to train with "online" people, (personally Im only referring to my experience), I just tell them to go the hi probability route so they can get some results and have faith to go on.

Alot of people say no at first but if you get through your pitch they say yes. So phone closing is more about getting through your pitch. Easy, but not as easy as high prob appointment setting at first until you polish your pitch and can get through it nicely - Easi-er because you feel ten feet tall once you get it, and you are a true phone sales person.

Shouldnt take more than a day or two if you put in the time and dedication.

Great thread.

Thats a great post John and I hope it's the start of some good conversations about this. I believe that the best outside sales people are sucessful on the phone first. Just my opinion, but my opinion is based on experience. I should clarify that I'm not saying I'm GREAT.....I'm talking about what I've seen many people do.

I have very little desire to get out on the road and give a presentation based on an appointment that may have been made out of courtesy. I like when I get a call from a rep who is clear about his intention. If he or she has something to sell, I don't want to chat about the weather.

There's a lot of the old school of sales that I've never agreed with. Things like find a common interest to chat about, admire the trophy shelf, and all the rest of that. When you go on a sales call you know why you're there, the prospect knows why you're there, and a successful business person is appreciative of a salesperson that gets to the point.

As I said in my first post, a premium is placed on time, and if a salesperson respects my time, I will respect their time as well. There is no better time saver then an effective sales presentation on the phone by a skilled rep who knows how to ask for the order and make it easy for the prospect to buy.

As always, John has great advice. Persistence is key, yet it is very easy to give up after a lousy morning. It also takes doing it day in and day out, which becomes a grind. It's very easy to get distracted with other things and then the day is over.

If you find yourself having difficulty doing the one call close, but still don't want to travel to a face to face meeting, I would recommend cold calling for the appointment close, but then having the appointment being a remote presentation.

You can use free screen sharing programs, like Join.me (http://join.me) and give your presentation from your computer. Since your product is under $100 and demos really well online, this might be a good solution rather than trying to close on the first call.

Just another option to consider.

-Ben

Online demo is not only a great idea but it is also another respector of time. There are a lot of products that are under 100 (per month) that I believe could be sold over the phone as long as the presentation is precise and to the point.

Speaking for myself, I much prefer to make a purchase over the phone simply because I know a face to face meeting can be a real time killer.

Finally, here's a pet peeve of mine and I would love to see some HONEST feedback about this:
So often I hear people say things like "I get dozens of calls everyday from telemarketers" or "I can't sit down to dinner without some ***** telemarketer calling me" etc.,etc.

I have to believe that I am not so out of the ordinary that the norm wouldn't apply in my life. I'm only going to address this point from a business point of view. Since I don't have a landline, I can't speak about getting calls at home but.....

My current position is Director of Marketing for a fairly well known law firm. I don't hide who I am, my name and business number is easily found in directories, I answer my own phone, so no screeners to deal with. What I'm about to say holds true for other positions I've held over the years in which I was either the DM for purchases or a player that had to be involved in the decision. Not to mentionn a number of businesses which I owned.

In all this time, I NEVER had more then a couple of calls a day from sales people. I certainly never received 15 in a single day, or even a week. So let's stop scaring phone sales people away by letting them think we're getting bombarded all day with scatter brained telemarketers. It's simply not happening.

I received an email today that was similar to many that I receive from people promoting their web and/or seo services. I found this one particularly annoying because they spent MY PPC money to get to the site.

The email went on to explain how they had difficulty reaching my site because it wasn't optimized as a mobile website.

Here's a tip to the Web Designers and Seo people trying to sell your services this way....don't tell me what bothers you about my web presence, newsflash...I don't care what bothers you. See that phone that you want me to pay YOU to put ME on, how about making use of that number pad to call me...after all you already cost me 12 bucks..... and on top of all of this, you want ME to call YOU if I'm interested in your offer? Here's my reaction to that: grow a pair!

Look, I'm going to be honest with you about this, I have to get back into sales again for reasons that really don't matter, but it's a choice I've made. I have as much phone fear as anyone does, it's been a long time since I've made a cold call and I know it can be a bit daunting to pick up that receiver and say "hello"....but I happen to believe that it's a matter of respecting the sales process and profession.

I respect my prospect enough that I want to call and tell them what I have to offer, and I think any business person who has acheived any level of success didn't get there by quickly dismissing every salesperson that contacted them with an offer that could help their business in some way.

In my career, when I found myself in a sales situation and a prospect dismissed what I had to say without giving me the opportunity to tell my story, I never thought for one moment that they were thinking some horrible thing about salespeople. I thought they were a poor business person and moved on.

Being a salesperson is a great aspiration. I'm glad that I find myself in a position where I have a great deal of re-learning to do, and glad that I found this forum to exchange ideas (best 37 dollars I've spent in a while). When web designers have no more webs to design, and seo gurus are all seo'd out (please..it's sarcasm... don't tell me that it won't happen) there will still be things that must be sold. I'll be able to sell them....you'll be looking for the next adsense book.

So when someone asks what you do and you reply "I'm not a sales person, I'm a web designer" it tells me that you don't understand that the important part of what you do is the sales part.

i own a debt relief company and we only do our business by phone :-) so your not alone

I think what prospects object to is not an idea that they're being bombarded by sales calls (though they may think they are--and if they do, that's what's true), but rather that their life is going to be pointlessly interrupted by a bad salesperson. I remember a former IT president I used to work for (as BizDev Mgr--our offices were separated by a thin wall) would get calls, and after he hung up he'd should out "Now that was a good sales call!" or "That wasn't the way to do it", and then we'd talk about it. Like others have said, maybe 5 calls a week came in.

I've been on other forums and encountered people who felt that ANY cold call was an interruption to their day and they'd just hang up. There's little point in trying to convince that person that there could be value in the call, but as long as the process is being carried out poorly by an untrained salesperson they're going to be right.

One of the roles I've held (for four years!) was credit manager of a national electrical wholesaler. There, I had to make a lot of calls to discuss the very touchy subject of money--often with contractors who were under a house or in the middle of a wall and playing with killer voltage. I don't know about you, but a call from a credit manager can be a scary experience. Now I was always nice about it, but I kept the moral right out there and in front of the contractor: after all, *they* had taken the material and *we* didn't have any money for it yet, right? This is one of the things I retain as a salesperson when I'm calling. The moral right. I am not calling to interrupt: I'm calling to get some feedback on whether this person has any urgent, emotional problems in their business that I could solve. Try this out, it's a very comfortable place to come from!

First off, great topic! It's really good seeing so many other perspectives. When I first went into business for myself I started a entertainment service business. A business that I'm still in now just because I like it.

One of the things that I have observed is that most people have no idea how to call someone and ask for a sale. There is no strategy to their approach. It is like the blind calling the deaf because that is the kind of results you will be getting if you don't use some basic strategies.

I sell entertainment packages for $300 to over $1000 for a single event. If I was to just whip out a phone book and start calling everyone and saying something to the effect of, "Hey if your throwing a party this week I can hook you up with some great entertainment!" I'd get hung up on almost every time.

But if I start looking online for Community Events that are coming up and checking the papers to build a list of organizations who are doing events and put them into a list now I have a Red Hot list of people who are looking for what I have to offer. My out of the blue phone call is now very relevant.

After I have the list I carefully script out my call. I start by talking about their event. How I found out about it and then gathering more information. Then I tell them what I do and how I can make their event even better.

You also need to have specific answers for their objections and a strategy to keep them talking after their objection is made. Here's a good tip I got from Zig Ziglar, their first objection is usually not the reason they not ready to buy.

I still put $1000's in my bank account from cold calling. My number 1 tip for cold calling is to make sure that the calls your making are relevant to the people you are calling. My number 2 Tip for cold calling would be to study it and learn how to do it the right way. One of the best books on cold calling I've found is "Cold Calling Techniques That Really Work" by Stephan Schiffman.

"if you'll give me an open ear for 30 seconds, if what i say has some value for your business, we can have a conversation about it, if it doesn't, we can just part friends...fair enough?"

Kirby's points are good. I recommend an adjustment to the "bad time?" question. First, definitely open with it. But say: "Is this a bad time?" or "Is this a bad time to talk?" or even "Bad time?"

Don't say "have I caught you" because that has the hand-in-the-cookie-jar implication.

And yes, have a 30-second commercial, which I call your core message. Need some help? Check out my sig and/or PM me and I'll be glad to take a look.

A few months back, I did a few days of barging in with free qr codes offer (with my own site and code added at the bottom of the proposed ad) plus the possibility of a mobile page or mobile site. And it was in a busy commercial street of a pretty big suburban area.

I hit it up with a friendly - and nice looking :p - girl working in a tanning salon (who strangely was pearly white!). I asked her if it's true they get a dozen sales people a day barging in... and she said YES.

But, there's a but here, most of them were so horribly bad it didn't matter. They came to peddle clothes, belts, video games and other goods that were probably stolen, all kind of unrelated stuff. Basically trying to sell to the people working, not to the business itself.

So if you present yourself right and have an offer that could benefit them, you stand out.


Now I don't think peddlers abound in telemarketing as on the streets, but most ARE bad and only trying to hard sell, often using a script like a robot - and even they will make sales, so...

And as for closing a sale on the phone, it's been done many times. I agree it's harder that shooting for an appointment, but like described in this thread, we can send them to a webpage, video, etc, and give them a lot more meat than just the phone call. And small items like many of us sell are well suited for sales over the phone.

Good discussion. And thanks to Warrior Ben for his join.me link! I used teamviewer before, great software, but the license for business use starts at $700 so I had stopped using it.

I always hated cold calls even when I did a few hundred a day back in my old business.

So now I just find people to promote me for free ;-)

Much easier.

But I am moving to just doing webinars to get clients.

Dr. Dan, with all do respect I think it's great that you found a way around cold calling, but this thread is about phone sales. Granted, like any other type of sales there is cold calling involved, and by its nature, the volume of prospects that can be reached by phone would by design lead to more cold calling than other types of selling.

Having said that, I would not want to see this thread move towards finding ways around using the phone. Again, not my intention to be rude or dismissive, only to try and keep focus.