Often times, I have discussions with my colleagues and ex-colleagues, when we get-together. It is the same story & same concern, we always talk about; our performance & productivity at work. Which leads our conversation deeper and deeper to our sales calls. We talk about how successfully we made a sale and how badly we lost it. Speaking of those "Lost" ones....There were endless reasons for why we lost it or failed to prospect/qualify. And as I being one of them (Sales Rep), I don't stand much far from these concerns too.
For now, I want to talk about the most common response we hear everyday:
- Not Interested.
Not Interested : Often times, This is a response that we would hear within the first 60 seconds of the call! Have you ever wondered, why? Lets talk about what is going wrong here....
The problem here is, Most of us take "Not Interested" as an objection and talk all the fluff about what we've got for them. In the sales process, too many times we "think" a prospect is interested even before we find out the real details behind the interest. If a prospect tells you they're "Not interested", they're telling you they don't know you enough to BUY from you or whether not sure if they can rely on your service (which includes your credibility, Value, product/service). As important it is for the prospect to get to know you, it is equally important for the sales professionals to get to know them. To me usually this 'get-to-know' process begins even before I pick-up the phone. Go visit their website see what's on it, Who are they? What do they do???
Then comes the liveliest part, You call them!
Now, What do you do? How would you do it, right?
Ahem Ahem! I want to tell you exactly what I know and How I do it...But, since there are lot of people from different backgrounds following different selling process(s). I think it would be better for me to put in some basic universal steps and give you an opportunity to discover how you would patch it & implement it in your line of work.
So here we go:
- Set-up an objective of the call! (It could be for an appointment, demo, qualification call).
- Start with finding out the need behind their interest.
- Make sure you're talking to the right person or If he has access to the Decision Maker.
- Talk about the reasons that are causing 'Pain'.
- Structure a set of qualifying questions.
- Let the prospect talk and You control the call.
- Don't push the prospect to any sort of agreements, let them take a shot but keep the options open for them to make an easy choice.
- Always try to close the call on the next step of the process.
- Once you're off the phone, send a Thank you email as an open invitation for them get back in touch with you whenever they need.
- Follow-up promptly on agreed time as scheduled.
So get on now and add-in value to your time....
I'm still on the road to discover many more ways to do this effectively, Keep an eye on this post. Coz you never know, When I'm gonna add more pieces to this puzzle and you may have a major epiphany... [;)]
Cheers,
Muzammil Ahmed
