Does this even makes sense?

I agree with Art and would ad over delivering on the product you require so that your customer views you as a mate who has done him a huge favor, which is the case if you have a great product.

Someone much wiser than me, but I cannot remember who, said that you should only sell something that you truly believe in and that you know it will be a great benefit to your potential customers and that if you fail to sell then you should feel guilty because you have let your potential customer down by not being able to get him benefit from the purchase and he has genuinely lost out as a result.

Paul

What's happening when you call? Do you get shut down at a certain point? Let me know and I might be able to help you.

As you know, I use the "Doctoring for Pain" approach at the beginning of my process. The prospect has to be open to participating in the process, however! Some people are just not in the right frame of mind to do this, and that's why we ask if it's a bad time before we start. Then we deliver a 30-second commercial to lay some typical pain points out there, and see if any resonate with the prospect. If none do, we try one or two more techniques, and perhaps that will get them to open up a little.

Remember all prospects lie. They do it to protect themselves from getting ripped off by bad salespeople, and you and I do this too when we're prospects. So they aren't just going to open up and tell you their deepest, darkest problems. How you begin the call has everything to do with whether there IS a rest of the call or not.

You can't force people to talk to you. But you can run a consistent sales process, and behave a consistent way (attitude!) that will let the people who are OK with opening up a bit talk to you.

Generally, at the start and end of the call we, the salesperson, will talk more than the prospect. There is the first up front contract to set up, and the 30-second commercial to deliver, before we can ask our first question.

Then the prospect should talk much more than us. 70% them vs 30% us.

At the end of the call, if it's a fit, it goes back to us because we have to set up the ground rules and expectations for the next discussion. That could be the next step in the sales process, or fulfillment.

The process can blow up on us, though, if we bring headtrash into the call. Headtrash is negative ideas about ourselves. Remember, the prospect knows nothing about us except what we show them. We walk in and bring all that baggage with us about our past and present, and our fears...and we create a hole or point of concern with defensive walls around it. The prospect senses this immediately and begins to hone in on it. Eventually they discover it, because we are trying so hard to hide it, and Game Over. This may be what's happening for you right now. To stop it from happening, you have to leave your headtrash outside.

People attach too much of themselves to sales calls. "Rejection" on a sales call is not rejection. It's just a No, or Not A Fit. Big deal. They got what, 2% of you? A voice and some words from the other end of a phone line? What is that? Nuthin'. "YOU" did not get rejected. It was just a quick call. You don't even know that other person. Rejection is when your girlfriend of two years says "It's just not working out." Get some perspective.

What questions can you ask to be like a doctor, and be perceived that way? Check out this thread. And this one.

Commonly, people confuse prospecting with selling. The two are very different. When you use the phone to dial prospects, you are prospecting. You are trying to determine Fit. If it's not a fit, big deal. If it is a fit, great; NOW you can sell. But what do people do? Get all bent out of shape if it's not a fit, and feel rejected. Isn't that plain silly?

Half the people you call, on average, won't be in. So why feel rejected about that?! Half the people who pick up the phone can't actually talk right now. So why beat yourself up about that? I have to deal with those same numbers. They're just a part of the game, and have nothing to do with me. Someone who doesn't know those numbers gets all upset and comes back to the forum, furiously trying to change every variable under the sun about how they're calling--but these changes WILL NOT MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE AT ALL because the averages remain the averages!! What you can affect are the conversations with the half of the people who do pick up, and can actually talk right now.

If you are having trouble selling by phone, the solution is probably that you have to make more dials and talk to more people. How many good conversations are you having for every time prospects pick up?

Most newbies need something like 10 or 20 pickups to have one good conversation. Remember that half of the pickups can't talk right now. So it's like 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 possible conversations turn into something good. That means you have to make 20 - 40 dials to get one decent conversation.

My numbers are not your numbers, and for me it's more like 1 in 6 dials on average becomes a good conversation. 3 won't be in. 1 or 2 can't talk right now. And the one that's left becomes my prospect, and we have a good conversation: I qualify them In or Out, and either result is fine. I keep dialing because I feel good about dialing, I'm having great discussions, and when it's Not A Fit I'm not getting my business involved with individuals I should not be getting involved with. Every result is good and every step is a win.

Being like a doctor is effective and ethical. However, your call has to start off right, with bonding, rapport and credibility, for your prospect to have a chance of opening up and starting to share The Dreaded Truth with you. People don't like to talk about their weaknesses. They don't advertise them. They would often rather avoid the elephant in the room and cherry pick something easy and low-gain instead. It takes skill and a consistent method to allow prospects to feel comfortable enough with you in a short time to open up. It's not often going to happen just because you called. Fortunately, it's also a skill that can be learned relatively quickly...within a couple weeks.

Well, I didn't expected the thread to turn this way. I just wanted to bring on the surface the two schools of selling - numbers based and trust based. I have gone thru the first one and all that I can say is that it is way harder to work that way because rejection kills, and I do not know what kind of mindset you should have not to be affected by this in any way. Jason, I understand what you say and this is good for everyone but it does make sense to be flexible for changing each and every details in what we call today "cold-calling" it's just a matter of own testing and what fits you may not fit me. Please don't get me wrong, your advice was just on-time and I do recommend you to anyone just starting out.

Hey Marcelu,

Try breaking up your posts into smaller sections if you want more people to read and respond to them,

All I ever see is a wall of text which is very hard to read, most people wont say this to you, they just skip your posts.

For the past few months, I did "trust" based sales as you call it and it has significant drawbacks.

it is very slow --- a lot of time is spent on each prospect (the SOP is 3 meetings in my case). A needs analysis is done in the beginning, etc.

That's also 3 opportunities to say no or delay or BS or forget about what was said,etc.