Chances are you are reading this because you currently engaged in customer generation and prospecting activity such as cold calling. Cold calling will have sharpened your communication skills and made you better at handling objections more effectively. It will have helped you create sales over the telephone or opened up much bigger longer-term higher value opportunities for you and helped you get sales and hit targets.
Although it’s getting harder and harder and there is more competition than ever with less money around than ever.
But you don’t need me to tell you what the consequences are of continuing an activity that is getting less and less effective if you continue with it.
The sales profession is divided at the moment and there is almost an online and offline debate going on about it. If you set Google to alert you to blogs and website including the words “cold call” and “auto cold calls calling” you will see exactly what I mean. You may have already been following it.
The way I see the so-called cold calling debate is a bit different to most. The argument seems to be missing the point. The problem at the heart of that matter is being missed and it’s certainly not part of the discussion so far. There is a bit that needs to be addresses because not many people acknowledge it and it is ten times more important to understand it than what delivery mechanism we use to deliver sales messages. When you get this bit you can do the next bit a million times more effectively – OK not a million but you know what I mean.
It’s the problem at the heart of all new business generation activity. The stumbling block we all face before we even get started on whatever sales activity we engage in. We need to rewind a bit. Look your not blind and I’m not either it’s just that most folks seem to choose to ignore it.
People hate sales people.
They cannot stand us. I’m a salesman and even I hate sales people. OK maybe not hate exactly but I cross the road when I see a sales rep with a clipboard. I can live without what ever they are selling and I have better uses for my time. If I need stuff I’ll go and buy it.
So why all this hatred?
People have preconceptions of and stereotypes of sales people such as,
Aggressive
Pushy
Obnoxious
Over Friendly/Familiar
Untrustworthy
Assumptive
Manipulative
Only want the sale/money
Persuasive
Don’t listen
Timewasters
Invasive
Disruptive
Everybody has a sales radar. This could just be someone phoning up in a cheerful voice. When the sales radar is triggered the defence mechanisms kick in. Everybody has heard the expression “the barrier goes up” well that is exactly what happens 99% of the time. I get suspicious about the 1% who welcome you because they are not normal man! Do they have decision-making power? Or enough to do? – Why did they say yes so quickly? – It alerts my raises my time-waster barrier!
When somebody sees you, as a salesperson, with the characteristics above – is that the best time to offer your product or service? When they are completely cold?
Look at the 4 main reasons people don not buy.
1. They don’t like you.
2. They Don’t trust you.
3. They don’t need it.
4. They don’t believe you.
So before even thinking about offering a product or services we have these major obstacles that we have to overcome.
So on a more positive note what are the main reasons that people do buy and what needs to be established first.
1. Desire.
2. Credibility.
3. Trust.
4. Rapport.
5. Liking.
6. High Perceived Value.
Sales people waste an enormous amount of time getting people to want their stuff. The reason there is so much focus on cold calling is because people want to get appointments. The belief is “If I just show them” what ever the product or service is that people will buy. Well the problem with that is that it still misses out the six points above.
When the six points are not resolved first the barrier is still up.
Think of it like dating if you go up to women and say Hi we should get married tomorrow – nobody is going to say yes to that – unless they are a bit unhinged or weirded out a bit.
People do not like to be sold to. People do not like being pressurised. People prefer to make informed decisions in their own time. They like to know exactly what they are getting into before committing.
This is why sales people convince, persuade and sell. Obviously persuasion is what selling is all about but it is desire that makes people buy.
Selling to people that don’t want to buy on the whole is a complete waste of time.
What I’m about to show you are the most effective tactics I can teach you. It’s pretty advanced break through stuff and it won’t be for everyone.
We are talking about creating prospects that are already predisposed to our products and services before we offer them products or services and try to sell to them. I’m talking about overcoming those 6 emotional drivers above (sounds better than six points right?)
I’m pretty certain that most sales people reading this will understand the value of having stuff like trust, and credibility and rapport established and that it’s a good thing.
This stuff is very different to traditional sales techniques. I mean it’s not 1990’s hard-sell pushy sales tactics.
Unlike before when we only had the telephone to communicate with our prospects now we can access our prospects minds completely.
Email/Sales Copy
Audio/Teleseminars
PDF Reports/White Papers
Skype
Podcasts
Videos
I’ve often heard business owners talk about expensive email campaigns or marketing – hilarious! The Internet is the cheapest and quickest place on the entire planet to communicate with your prospects.
My email marketing is done in house and costs £0.0066 to send one email. This relies on being able to find cheap data but it is out there.
So say a sales person earns £25k salary per year and there are 200 working days per year. That’s £125 per day just in salary. Say the sales person makes 100 calls per day and only gets through to 30%. That’s £4.16 per conversation.
Meanwhile I have sent 631 emails for the same cost by 10am and buyers with a need are already phoning me as my message got through to 80-90% of people instantly.
I’m getting way off track here – this wasn’t supposed to be about the costs – where did that come from? WTF?
So given that now we can completely access our prospects minds we need to understand the emotions that prospects go through when they are exposed to our stuff.
The approach is about not being perceived as a salesman – that’s a bad thing. So you need to sell without appearing to sell. This will get a bit Ninja and this is highly powerful stuff that will make your prospects skip past the negatives and the rational decision making processes that exist when the sales radar has sent the barrier flying up – so listen in.
I’m talking about very powerful, slow-burning information that is delivered bit by bit. I’m not talking about spending your time with prospects that don’t want or need your stuff – I’m talking buyers.
When we access our prospects minds – I know that sounds a bit weird – but if you think about it that is precisely what we are doing when we communicate. It’s not our ears that think and have feelings it’s neurological right – our brains.
So the objective through marketing is to create trust and desire for our products. We want to create a bond between our customers and us – we want to meet them where they are at not where we want them to be the minute we want them to buy.
Just like cold calling it would be unwise to do this in one big burst. I mean that would just be information overload. It would also be very salsey, which is the exact opposite of what works.
So what I am talking about are the slow-burning techniques that smoulder away. Creating desire and trust takes a little time but that’s cool because it is so much more powerful and effective than the salesy, cold call approach that has a 99 to 100% failure rate. Plus you can do this with much larger numbers of people.
Unlike auto cold calls calling we are not looking to sell to the people that don’t want it. We are looking to establish relationships and over come the emotional barriers that exist with the people that may want it if we get past the barriers to show what’s on offer and the benefits.
We are looking to engineer desire and trust in our prospects. So to do that we need to understand what the emotional drivers are within our prospects so we can engineer those feelings and get them to buy.
People buy from people that they like. They buy from characters so you have to become that character that they are interested in. You can do this ‘en mass’ through the channels you have available online.
The other thing is that people will be in a different mind-set when you communicate to them. For example, people’s sales radar is still pretty low when they are on a blog they will be looking for news and entertainment. When people are on the web they will be in a problem solving mindset or getting ready to buy.
Those are just two examples the point I’m making is that you need to communicate with prospects differently through different mediums depending on what mindset they are in.
I’m seriously out of time so more to come but before I go.
There are six rules of influence and persuasion that we can use to engineer focus and feelings. When prospects focus that determines what they feel and it’s those feelings that make people take decisions. When people make decisions they action.
WARNING – There is a lot more to this than I can put in one article. I’m sure there are ‘take always’ you can get from this but in order to integrate these techniques into you sales activity or business things need to be done properly.
If you are interested in learning about these principles and slow burning techniques you can get immediate access to my white paper “The Induced Demand Report” and learn all about them. So go right ahead and visit website
My stuff is not particularly well written, and certainly not literary masterpieces, I just promise simple, actionable content that works.
Enjoy : )
Dan