In the past I have reposted articles from Salesbuzz.com, an
e newsletter I subscribe to written by Michael Pedone. Today he has hit one out
of the park and I know it will valuable to many of you.
ENJOY!
SALES
QUESTION:
"How
Do You Deal with Anxiety Before Each Cold Call?"
Answer:
Cold call anxiety happens when at least one of these two
things is present:
• Lack of
confidence
• Fear of
rejection
You can psych yourself up all you want to make calls but if
you are constantly being rejected when selling by phone, eventually no matter
what you tell yourself or do to get all jazzed up before making the dials, the
rejections will continue and eventually selling won’t be very fun anymore.
And when selling isn’t fun, you’re in real trouble. Like,
“Can't make the mortgage payment because I haven’t hit quota in 3-months”
trouble.
You can try and find ways to stay positive in everyday
negative sales calls but that never addresses the real issue of what’s causing
the “rejection” (which causes lack of confidence and fear of further abuse /
rejection… it’s a vicious cycle)
There are two schools of thought on this subject:
1. Its part
of sales, deal with it or get out
2. Its
largely preventable (I’m in this camp and have years of experience behind me to
prove this scenario exists)
When your cold call rejection rate is high, instead of
accepting it as part of sales, why not ask yourself “why am I getting rejected
a lot?” and refuse the answer of “that’s the way sales is” because it isn’t.
There’s a difference between being “rejected” and a prospect
not being “qualified”
If your “rejection rate” is high, that’s a big arrow
pointing to your sales process (what you say, when you say it, how you say it,
why you say, who you say it to, etc.)
In essence, your game plan (sales process) isn’t working and
you need one that does.
The first place I would look to revamp your sales process is
within the company you work for… who’s the top sales person month in and month
out? Learn what they are doing and follow their sales process.
If that isn’t an option, find someone else who has already
accomplished what it is that you want to accomplish and learn from them.
The “A” Factor
Once you’ve found a sales process that produces the level of
results that you want, your confidence will jump and commission checks will
grow. But every once in a while you’ll still make a sales call and get a
prospect on the other end of the phone that will just rip you a new one.
I’ve seen too many salespeople (myself included) take a
working sales process that has made them lots of money just to start tweaking
the heck out of it because of one prospect that read them the riot act over the
phone. This is a mistake!
A mentor of mine taught me a long time ago to never let the
"A factor" change what you know works. When I asked what he meant by
the A factor, he said when a prospect is being an @ss! (Actually, he was a
little more verbal in his description, but you get the point)
Fix your sales process until you have repeated success with
it. And when an occasional call goes bad, you’ll have the confidence to know it
wasn’t anything you did and you’ll be able to move on to the next call without
an ounce of anxiety.
Michael Pedone
I hope this will help you and you have found it to be as
useful as I have.
Lorin
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