There’s one area of sales that everybody hates to do…Cold calling – the dreaded task of picking up the phone and calling someone they’ve never spoken to before. Why? ?Because they’re afraid of being rejected.

So What!

Here are three questions to ask yourself:

1. What’s the worst thing that can happen? You get hung up ?on, or somebody could yell at you. (You could hang up on them!)

2. What’s the best thing that could happen? You could get ?an appointment, close a sale, and make some money.

3. What’s the most likely thing that would happen? You speak ?to the person and they aren’t interested. You get voice mail. ?You get blocked by a gatekeeper.

When I first started out in sales I was whining about ?getting rejected. Pauline Novak my trainer grabbed me by the shoulders, looked me straight in the eyes, and ?said, “Jeff, if you aren’t being rejected, you’re ?not trying hard enough!!!”

If you figure that only one of every hundred prospects will do business ?with you then your challenge is to find a hundred leads, work them ?as fast as possible, find the one person who buys, throw the ?other 99 names away, and find another list of 100 names.

When you speak with someone who says NO, ?that’s not rejection. It’s confirmation.

Three things happen when you overcome your fear of cold calling:

1. You close more of the phone-in sales because you respond to their inquiries immediately.

2. You create more opportunities from your warm calls because you follow-up with the people you met at your networking events.

3. You stumble on some very nice pieces of business because ?you called on someone who just happened to need the things ?you sold at the moment you called.

©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

I was sitting at my desk diligently working on another success essay when the phone rang. Being programmed like Pavlov’s dogs to answer an incoming call hen the bell rings, I picked up the phone – interrupting myself (not a very good time management technique) – and said, “Hello, this is Jeff Mayer.”

“Is Jeffrey Mayer in?”

“Yes. This is he.” [You can always tell when someone is reading from a script because they don't listen to you when you answer the phone.]

“Who is calling?”

“My name is Tom James. Am I interrupting you?” [You should NEVER say, "Am I interrupting you?" because it's a negative question. Say "Do you have a moment." instead.]

“Yes Tom, you are interrupting me. Why are you calling?”

“I’m with ABC Copier Services. I’m going to be in your neighborhood tomorrow afternoon and would like to stop by for a few moments to tell you about our new machines.

“Would 1:00pm work for you. Or would 3:00pm be better?” [He's offering the Alternative Close to try to get an appointment, but hasn't asked a single question to attempt to qualify me as a prospect.]

“Thank you for calling, but I’m not available tomorrow.” I replied.

“Well…  I’ll next be in your neighborhood on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week. Do either of those days look better?” [Tom began to stammer and stutter. Probably because I wasn't following
the lines in his well rehearsed script and he didn't know what to do or say next.]

“No they don’t.” I replied and then ended the conversation with, “Thank you for calling.” and I hung up the phone.

I’ll bet Tom has conversations similar to mine all day long. Everybody hangs up on him. Nobody wants to schedule an appointment with him. No appointments. No sales. No business.

Why? Because he has lousy telephone techniques.

For Whom Is This Convenient?
Think about this for a moment: Tom said he was calling on me because he would “be in the neighborhood.” This made it convenient for him.

I was just another stop on his milk run. I would be somebody who could fill in an empty spot on his calendar.

He was hoping he could get in front of a ‘live body’ so he could make his presentation and tell me about all the wonderful features of his new machines. He didn’t much care if he wasted my time.

When I said I wasn’t available he replied, “I’ll next be in your neighborhood on Tuesday or Wednesday…” He didn’t offer to make a special trip to meet with me or ask me what day I may be available to meet with him.

Imagine how I would have felt if he had said, “I’m going to be in the northern suburbs, but would like to meet with you and would be happy to drive down to Chicago to show you our newest machines?”

That means he’s going out of his way to make his sales call. He’s making me feel SPECIAL.

Face-Time Is Wasted Time
I know every sales manager wants his sales people to have face-time with his customers. But I think that’s the wrong goal. You don’t want to have face-time with everybody.

You only want to meet with people who have a strong interest in buying.

Think about this: Eighty percent of the time spent in sales meetings is wasted time – probably 90 percent when time spent in the car going to and from the meeting is included – because you’re using that first meeting to determine whether or not you’ve got a prospect.

How much more productive – and successful – would you be if you could determine whether or not your prospect had any interest in your products BEFORE you met with him?

Ask Better Questions
Time is your most important asset. You can’t afford to waste your valuable selling time meeting with people who aren’t viable prospects.

You can qualify your prospects – and leverage your time – by asking great questions on the phone to determine their level of interest BEFORE scheduling a meeting.

Then when you met the first time face-to-face it’s really your second meeting because of the time spent qualifying the prospect during the initial phone call.

Tom could have asked me questions like
* How many copies do you make a day, week or month?
* How many machines do you have in your office?
* How much time is spent by your people walking to and from their desks to use the copier?
* How often does your current machine need service?
* Do you own or lease your machine?

In my case, I only make a few copies a day and have no need for a high end copier. If Tom had in fact come by, it would have been a complete waste of his – and my – time.

You’ll be much more successful if you take a few minutes to qualify your prospects over the phone, and then schedule a meeting, instead of trying to schedule the meeting and then qualify them during your face-to-face interview.

- Jeffrey

©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

Mark Cuban is a very smart businessman. He was featured in a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal.

A Bit of Background
In the 1980s he formed a company that helped small businesses link their personal computers. In 1995 he and Todd Wagner, a college classmate, had an idea: Use the Internet to allow sports fans to hear local broadcasts of their favorite teams even if they are far away.

They named the company Broadcast.com.

During the next few years Mr. Cuban signed up hundreds of media outlets who allowed him to send their broadcasts over the Internet.

Many of them didn’t even know what Internet rights were worth, but signed up anyhow.

One of his most successful ventures was producing a Victoria’s Secret webcast that attracted two million users.

In four years of business, Broadcast.com’s revenue never exceeded $25 million a year. Yet in the go-go climate of the late 1990s, the company went public, commanding a multibillion-dollar market value.

Mr. Cuban’s shrewdest moves came as Internet mania was at its zenith. He and Mr. Wagner began talks with Yahoo, urging them to acquire Broadcast.com.

Yahoo took the bait. In March 1999, Yahoo announced a $5.7 billion stock-swap acquisition – just before the market peak – for a company that had 330 employees, a handful of contracts, and no hard assets.

This gave Mr. Cuban a paper profit of $1.7 billion.

Mr. Cuban hedged his bets so he could keep his profits from the sale of his company. He bought put options, locking in a high selling price for his Yahoo stock – $183 per share. In effect he was betting against Yahoo stock. A bet he won big-time.

In the fall of 1999 he began selling his Yahoo stock.

Three months later – in January 2000 – he purchased the Dallas Mavericks for $280 million. A team that was a perennial loser both on the basketball court, and financially – having thousands of empty seats for each game.

Today, Mr. Cuban is riding high. His Mavericks tied for the best record in the NBA this past season with a 60-22 record.

And, most importantly, the Mavericks drew sellout crowds – 18,147 spectators – for all 41 of their regular-season home games. A franchise first.

He Hired A Sales Team
How did Mark Cuban fill up his basketball arena with 18,147 people for 41 games? He hired a team of sales people who were instructed to get on the telephone and sell tickets to basketball games.

The Mavericks’ sales team works out of a former warehouse on the edge of downtown Dallas. About two-and-a-half miles from the Mavericks’ sleek new American Airlines Center.

Sitting in gray cubicles are dozens of Mavericks ticket salespeople who are incessantly dialing the phone. On the wall in huge letters is a favorite Cuban slogan: “Every minute of every day is selling time.”

When Mr. Cuban became the Mavericks owner, the team had five people selling season tickets. Not enough the boss said.

He hired George Prokas, a former buddy to run ticket sales. Mr. Cuban told him: “I don’t care if you have to hire 18,147 sales people and give them each one seat to sell. I want the house sold out every night.”

Mr. Prokos bulked up the sales force to 20 people. He handed them Yellow Page listings of attorneys, car dealers and other likely buyers. He told his new hires to make 100 outbound calls a day.

Mr. Cuban – always the salesman – would occasionally work the phones himself. On more than one occasion he told his sales people to stop gossiping.

“Who’s writing the check when you do that?” Mr. Cuban repeatedly snapped. “If you aren’t talking to someone who can write a check, you’re wasting time.”

The strategy worked. The team has been winning and revenues have grown 2 1/2 times, to $100 million from the $40 million when Mr. Cuban purchased the team.

Mark Cuban has a simple business philosophy. “I try to put everyone in a position to succeed,” he says. “But I don’t believe in rewarding people for just doing their jobs.”

When ticket sales representatives recently matched their quotas, he didn’t throw a party. Instead he says, his message was: “Good. That’s what your supposed to do. If they hadn’t met quotas,
they would be told to look for work elsewhere.”

Five Daily Success Activities
Here are five Success Activities you should do every day to make yourself more successful:

1. Search for new customers.
If you want to be successful you’ve got to look for new customers. The lifeblood of any business is finding – and keeping – new customers.

2. Get on the phone.
The most effective way to find new customers is by getting on the phone. Though there are many ways to collect prospect names, you ultimately need to pick up the phone and call them.

3. Have a daily target.
You must have a target for the number of people you’re calling. There’s a huge difference between calling new people you’ve never attempted to reach before and calling a person who you’ve left
a dozen voice mail messages that were never returned.

Calling the same five people every day isn’t going to make you successful.

4. Schedule time.
Block out time on your calendar to make calls. Schedule an appointment with yourself to make calls every day.

5. Stop fooling around.
Don’t waste valuable phone time doing miscellaneous paperwork. Use the time to get on the phone and find more customers.

- Jeffrey

©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

What’s the “easy” way to make a living as a salesperson? How can I make lots of money without having to call on people? How can I get people to call me, so I don’t have to call them?

These are the types of questionsI’m asked every day. It seems that everybody’s looking for that wonderful sales secret that will turn them into sales superstars, without having to work.

If you find that secret, please share it with me.

For myself, I’ve found that the best way to make a living in sales is to use the telephone. It’s the most cost-, and time-effective tool you have.

Learn how to make the phone work for you and you’ll become a huge success. Fight the phone and you’ll be looking for some other type of work in no time at all.

Like it or not, sooner or later you’ve got to speak with your customer over the phone.

Maybe it’s a:

* Cold call, where you’ve never spoken before; or
* Warm call, where you’ve been introduced by a mutual friend or you’ve already met the person; or
* Phone in, where the person calls you and wants to do business with you.

Obviously, phone ins are the most desirable types of business generating activities. But they don’t happen by accident.

Phone-Ins
If you want to have people phoning you and wanting to buy your products, you must create advertising, marketing and/or promotional campaigns where people hear of you and want to learn more about what you can do for them.

If you’re not actively getting your name in front of potential customers your phone will never ring.

You have to position yourself in the mind of the customer that you’ve a product or service that they would find of value. This is something that companies spend thousands, tens of thousands,
or tens of millions of dollars on.

Look at the amount of money Proctor & Gamble; General Motors, and Microsoft spend on television, radio, newspaper and magazine advertising.

If you don’t have that kind of money to spend, you can mail out postcards, form letters, electronic newsletters – like this one, and create a Web site.

But just because you’ve done all of the above, doesn’t guarantee that anybody will respond to your advertising, marketing or promotional activities.

Surprisingly, even though sales people ‘dream’ of getting phone-ins, many of them never get around to picking up the phone and calling these people back.

How many hot leads do you have laying on the top of your desk that you haven’t ‘pounced’ on?

What’s keeping you from picking up the phone, closing the sale, and putting some money in the bank?

Warm Calls
The next best type of prospect is a warm call. This could be a referral or someone you met at a conference, convention or a networking event.

But what are you going to do with those business cards you’ve collected? Put them in the lap drawer of your desk? Add the person to your database? Then what?

If you’re going to wait for the person to call you, it will probably be a long time before the phone rings.

It’s still your responsibility to pick up the phone.

Studies have shown that the most successful networkers are the ones who follow-up with the people they meet.

Cold Calling
This is the one area of sales that ‘everybody’ hates to do. Calling on someone who they’ve never spoken to before. Why? Because they’re afraid of being rejected.

So What!

Here are three questions to ask yourself:

1. What’s the worst thing that can happen? You get hung up on, or somebody could yell at you. (You could hang up on them!)

2. What’s the best thing that could happen? You could get an appointment, close a sale, and make some money.

3. What’s the most likely thing that would happen? You speak to the person and they aren’t interested. You get voice mail. You get blocked by a gatekeeper.

When I first started out in sales I was whining about getting rejected. Pauline Novak, my trainer, grabbed me by the shoulders, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “Jeff, if you aren’t being rejected, you’re not trying hard enough!!!”

If you figure that only one of every hundred prospects will do business with you than your challenge is to find a hundred leads, work them as fast as possible, find the one person who buys, throw the
other 99 names away, and find another list of 100 names.

When you speak with someone who says NO, that’s not rejection. It’s confirmation.

Three things happen when you overcome your fear of cold calling:

1. You close more of the phone-in sales because you respond to their inquiries immediately.

2. You create more opportunities from your warm calls because you follow-up with the people you met at your networking events.

3. You stumble on some very nice pieces of business because you called on someone who just happened to need the things you sold at the moment you called.

Letters & Faxes Don’t Close Business
With these thoughts in mind, I received this e-mail from Sally who is telling me her tale of woe:

“I’ve a bunch of prospects for my services and I’ve mailed 20 letters to these companies to introduce my firm to them. Nobody has responded to my letter of introduction, and believe me,
it’s a good one.”

Sally should be picking up the phone to call her prospects instead of whining to me. But if you’re running a business with only 20 prospects you’re in big trouble. You need to have a much larger universe of prospects.

The same day I got Sally’s e-mail I got a fax from Steve  promoting his company’s services. This is how the fax read:

To: Owner/General Manager
From: Steve Jamison
Re: New Corporate Customers

[The Please Reply box was circled.]

This was Steve’s handwritten note:

Business consulting services to small and medium sized businesses, and if so, I’d like to speak to the owner or general manager.
[He started with an incomplete sentence.]

We just finished compiling a group of prospects located in your area that are targeted to spend money on outside consulting services this year.

Your prospects are guaranteed and proven to be the quickest and easiest way to make more money with very little effort.

If you want new corporate customers, call me at 1-800-222-1234.  I would like to help you!

Thanks

Steve Jamison

I don’t know where Sally and Steve got the idea that they could get business by writing a handful of letters or sending out a bunch of faxes. It doesn’t work.

If you want to grow your business you’ve got to use the telephone.

Pounce on all your phone-ins and close the sale. Turn your warm leads into happy customers. And use the telephone to look for new customers.

Learn how to use the phone more effectively and you could double your business during the next twelve months.

- Jeffrey

©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

As part of your small business marketing effort you make calls to prospects. Working from your list of leads you pick up the phone to call a prospect. What happens?

80% of the time, the person you’re trying to call isn’t there. Of course you leave a message. Then what happens?

Usually nothing. You don’t get any return calls even if you make a hundred. Well maybe one.

What’s the one mistake most small business owners make marketing their business over the phone? They leave a message that pitches their products and services.

Trying to sell cold over the phone is the best way to ensure you won’t get a call back. Instead your objective should be limited to one thing. Focus on trying to get your prospects to return your calls.

Don’t try to sell anything when you leave a phone message.

- Charlie Cook
Small Business Marketing Guru

©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..