Do You Often Hear, "Call Me Back in a Few Months From Now?" Here's WHAT YOU ARE DOING WRONG!!

One thing I've used to prevent the "Call me later" stall is to "make it seem that my prospect is Exclusive"!

With a program where there are only ONE of each type of business, I can easily use the "Exclusive" approach;

"Hello Bob....I'm putting together an "x" program and I'm looking for ONE (Chiropractor, Dentist, Retail Business, Carpet Cleaner, Pizza Restaurant...etc) I thought I'd give you "First Shot" at this. Would you have a "quick-minute" this afternoon at 2, or would tomorrow morn at 10 be better?"

"Looking for ONE" - in his category suggests I WILL be contacting competitors!

"First Shot" - also indicates I WILL be contacting competitors.

"Quick-Minute" - is my way of implying the meeting will NOT take much time.

Don Alm

Wow nice share bro. Thanks a lot for the good information

Ben, once again a great thread and some great advice.

Won't repeat what has already been said, just a quick reinforcement that wen you hear this concern, 99% of the time it indicates you haven't done your job and this response "masks" another reason the prospect is not convinced to buy. Either the prospect wasn't pre-qualified, or there isn't enough perceived benefit, or you haven't asked for the sale at the right time.

In any case, try to isolate the issue: "Is it that I you can't see how (what you're selling) will have an immediate benefit, or is it that I haven't explained the value of (your solution) well enough?

Ask some more questions, re-state the prospects earlier pain (which of course you discovered): "Earlier you mentioned that your most pressing issue is ______. . . if I can show you how we can help you get ______, would you be willing to move forward with our solution?"

Hi JudeS,
Back in the late 70's and through the 80's, I owned and operated a company called Automated Data Supply. We manufactured and distributed products and supplies for the mainframe and mini mainframe computer industry. Anyone remember "disc paks?". We manufactured printer ribbons (3000 lines a minute printer ribbons) and had disc paks and many other needed supplies privately branded. Our products were sold direct to the end users and our clients were big. Companies like Bergan Brunswig, Coca Cola, Boeing, Ford Aero Space, and so many more. My sales room ran three 6 hour shifts on the phones. Now we also had 3 to 4 rep's in the field at any given time as well. Point is, almost all of our initial contacts were made by phone. We got in touch with the people that were the decision makers, the Data Processing Managers. We had solid methods of getting past the gate keepers and finding (through them) who was the go to person.

But today, JudeS is correct about the raised level of difficulty with getting to the right people and contracting with companies like that. The gate keepers are more sophisticated today, and often there are multiple individuals in on the decisions. There are also some very sophisticated companies out there we would be competing against. However, when you mention "large corps", you reference too large a crowd.

When I look at companies today for prospective offline clients, I can't limit myself to small "mom & pop" businesses either. The prime "feeding ground" for us, IMO, has companies in the 2M to 40M annual revenue crowd. They offer enough budget to allocate to services we provide as well as a wider spread of diverse business models to apply our trade to. These may seem like big numbers, but to clarify a bit, a Pizza Shop in my area may do well over a million a year. I know of two in my area that have several locations each and are serving up over 100 pies a day per location (averages). When I order a pizza, and 2 dozen wings, I pay around $35 plus tip. I know, I know, there are plenty of cheap pizzas to buy elsewhere. Yet these two vendors are, none the less, serving up over 100 pies and over 250 orders of wings a day (averages). That puts each of their respective stores at over 1.3M per year in annual revenues. One owner has 3 locales and the other has 5. That means one vendor doing almost 4M and the other over 6M in annual revenues. I have two local small car dealers that have annual revenues over 22M each, and guess what, they recommended me to some out of state dealers I am in discussions with now. There are plenty of businesses in this revenue spread in my local area of around 650k people in 5 counties. All within an hours drive.

There are exceptional methods, tactics, and strategies for getting past gate keepers. The most important thing to remember is you need these gate keepers and sometimes you need to groom them. I have trained many phone sales people, and I can tell you there is far more involved in the gate keeper relationships than I see reported here in the forum. They are often your number one goal. You can get all kinds of info out of them that will make getting to the decision maker(s) a smooth transition.

One of the referred car dealers has 5 locations (five different brands). Their annual revenues are around 108M (averages) combined. This includes Sales, Parts, and Service. They were perplexed because each of the respective brands wanted them to utilize the corporate brand marketing departments provided through the brands for the dealers online marketing. The dealer found that this didn't work in his favor, he had too many uncoordinated efforts going on that seem to definitely raise brand awareness, but didn't raise the public's awareness of the dealer in the fashion he wanted.

People like this often look to outside consulting firms for alternative propositions. You just need to structure a relationship with the gate keeper, have a plausible manner in which to introduce yourself to them and have a prepared plan based on a cursory reverse engineered report of their current online activities. When you can speak intelligently of your field of expertise, do it in a short and effective manner, have collective data of your prospects current marketing, then you have the makings for a first contact with some of the larger firms one might normally cast as "too big" to tackle.

T J