Mar/102
Prospecting series – The bane of the cold call
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Many subjects in sales elicit a strong, emotional, binary response from salespeople; none more so than the question of cold calling.
Some people swear by them, to this day. Others declare them dead, obsolete, etc. How can both of these be right?
Like most things in life, “is that good” is too simple of a question. Luckily for those of us who relish the beauty to be found in nuance, there is more to the cold calling question than a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. When done poorly, cold calls are painful on both sides of the phone. When done well, they just aren’t so bad. Sure it would be better to lie on a warm beach sipping from a cool drink, but then again you could say that about most things you do at work – that’s why you get paid to do them!
So if we are going to cold call, what should we do to make it work? Here are a few tips:
1 – Know what you are going to say in the first 20-30 seconds
You want to be able to deliver your call with confidence, and you must be sure that you say what you need to say in those precious first seconds when you actually have the attention of the person you called. You may be nervous, which makes it easy to screw this part up – so yes, you should use a script. Not a complex one, but a simple one. Not for the whole call, but for the first 20-30 seconds for sure! Read Stephan Schiffman’s book on cold calling to get some ideas, or send me an e-mail and I’ll send you an excerpt from my book that might help.
2 – Have the right reason for the call
I first started cold calling when I sold promotional products. At first, I told the person I was calling that the reason for my call was to suggest that we should meet in person so that I could demonstrate all of my great ideas. It was not so compelling, or effective. Later, I started calling people with a trade show coming up in the very near future, and I suggested that we meet so that I could help them come up with a good promotion for their upcoming event. Same basic idea, just more targeted and time sensitive. That was much more effective.
Your industry will be different (unless you happen to sell promotional products), but ask yourself – is the reason I am suggesting a meeting compelling to the prospect? If not, find a new one, and build your call script around it.
3 – Don’t sell on the cold call
Unless you sell via a one-call-close-by-phone methodology, the goal of the cold call is probably to secure an opportunity to talk more about the possibility of a sale. That might mean a longer phone conversation, a later phone conversation, or in most cases a personal meeting. Whatever the case, the first thing you need to sell is the idea of a sales conversation before you start selling your product or service. Once you secure agreement for a sales conversation, you are not on a cold call anymore, even if the same phone call continues as a sales call; you are now on a sales call, or on your way to a sales call in person at a time you agreed to met with the prospect.
4 – Be ready to close
Most of the time, the close of a cold call is an agreement for a meeting – so be ready to make that close before you pick up the phone to make the cold call. Have your schedule ready, and if you will meet them in person at their office, know where they are located so that you can schedule a meeting that fits in with the rest of your schedule. Once you are ready to set a meeting, don’t lose momentum by fumbling with your calendar.
You’ll need make a lot of cold calls before you can really measure results. Give it an honest try, and work smart. Then you can weigh in on the debate about whether they work or not, but from a position of knowledge, not opinion. Making five dials, getting one surly receptionist or one grumpy CEO on the other end and giving up is not a reasonable effort upon which to measure the effectiveness of this prospecting method.
If cold calling is impossible for you, there are a LOT of other ways to prospect. However, whatever prospecting method you choose, you’ll probably need to follow that up with a call to set up a meeting – which is a LOT like a cold call. At the end of the day, a cold call, a call to set a meeting, or a call to check in with a client after a long period of inactivity all have the same dynamics. Get comfortable with this kind of call, and find a way to be effective with it, and your career will move forward much more systematically than if you simply complain that this can’t work for you, and avoid trying to make it work for that reason.
Mar/106
The right sales mindset and success in social media – part 3 of a 3 part series
FREE TRIAL OFFER: Read the first 30% of my new book “Mastering Your Sales Process” FREE – delivered to your inbox immediately – please visit http://www.davidmasover.com/free-book-sample.html to register.
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This is the final installment in a three-part series about the right sales mindset for social media success. In the first blog post in this series, I talked about the importance of being a subject matter expert. The second installment in the series focused on how to position your expertise to help a prospective customer decide to allow you to influence their buying decision.
In this last installment, we tie it all together with the glue that cements business relationships on and off the web – trust – arguably the currency of social media commerce.
In the 2008 book Jump Point: How Network Culture is Revolutionizing Business by Tom Hayes, the author suggests that trust is the new currency of social media. In the book, Hayes describes an evolving internet business environment that he calls “The Reputation Economy”. This is indeed a double edged sword, as Hayes points out. On the plus side, it is exciting to believe that there are lower barriers to entry and success for even the smallest players. Size is no longer required to grow quickly, and into something significant in this new environment. On the other side of the sword, it can seem a bit scary for buyers. Without traditional entities to mediate and regulate person-to-person transactions on the web, how can there be a guarantee of performance and adequate identification of and punishment of cheaters?
The author Hayes postulates and I agree: the answer is trust. As demonstrated by the success of eBay and Amazon with their user generated systems for rating the reliability of sellers, it seems intuitive that as the online business environment encourages more small players (read: initially unknown and for the most part anonymous even over time), buyers will gravitate towards sellers and interest providers they trust. Trust will be a function of past interactions with the seller, by all buyers or prospects, and mechanisms for displaying this trust will become increasingly demanded and relied upon by buyers.
Today, those mechanisms are mostly content based. Outside of Amazon and eBay, many businesses and business people try to enhance their chances of convincing a prospect to buy from them without the benefit of a formalized seller-reliability rating system. So in these conditions, how do we earn trust? For this, we go right back to the sales mindset that I defined in Mastering Your Sales Process and in the first two installments of this post:
“I am an expert in my field. My job is to help qualified prospects make good decisions about solving problems using my product or service.”
When we embody this mindset in our sales efforts, in social media and elsewhere, we engender trust. People tend to trust those people who seem to know what they are talking about and who can demonstrate that. People trust those who seem to be motivated by the desire to offer assistance in a genuine way. Put these two things together, and you have our definition. Embody this definition, and you will be trusted.
Embodying the definitions means working hard to make yourself and expert in everything that has to do with your product or service, all of the ancillary issues (logistics, finance, etc.), and the business of your prospective clients.
Committing to a business style that focuses on solving real problems in an honest and genuine way means getting past just selling your product, and really working to solve the problems. You will be on your way when you reach the point in a conversation with a prospect at which you KNOW that your product or service is not right for them, and you know what to do next – unequivocally!
This embodiment translates to social media by being the philosophical foundation of your content and aggregation activities. Whether you are posting a blog, answering a question in a forum, or passing on a useful link – come from the place that says “I am an expert who is here to help”, and your content will reflect the right things to lead to trust from those who see your content.
If these embodiments are genuine and well executed, your prospects as well as your connections, followers, friends and whatever else they may be called in the social media lingo du jour will trust you. If they trust you, then you have established the basis for a business relationship.
If this is (all or part of) your goal in using social media, then start every interaction with the idea that:
“I am an expert in my field. My job is to help qualified prospects make good decisions about solving problems using my product or service.”
In this way, you will build the trust you need to take steps in the direction you desire, and your prospective clients will be happy to be along for the ride.
Feb/100
The right sales mindset and success in social media – part 2 of a 3 part series
FREE TRIAL OFFER: Read the first 30% of my new book “Mastering Your Sales Process” FREE – delivered to your inbox immediately – please visit http://www.davidmasover.com/free-book-sample.html to register.
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This is the second part of a three part series about the right sales mind set for social media success. In the last blog post, part one of this series, I wrote about the importance of being a subject matter expert. This week, I will cover how to position that expertise to help a prospective customer decide to allow you to influence their buying decision.
Imagine this: some salespeople actually think that it is their job to sell something to somebody. Now I won’t say that this is entirely wrong, but it is the same as saying that a hockey players job is to score goals. Let me explain what I mean here:
It is true that salespeople (and those who have a vested interest in them) like it when sales are made, just like hockey players and fans like it when (their team) scores a goal – but focusing on the goal alone is not how you get there – in sales or hockey. Lets start with hockey.
On average, generally speaking, there are about 6 goals per game scored in an NHL hockey game. These goals age generated by 12 players (6 per side including goalie) during 60 minutes of play. Without getting into a lot of sports statistics, it is pretty clear that a lot is going on during those 60 minutes that is not goal scoring. So if the job of the hockey player is to score goals, most of them are not doing their job – hence the problem with defining the goal as the job – true for salespeople as well.
A more useful way for salespeople to think about their job is reflected in the second part of the definition offered in part one of this blog, originally from my book Mastering Your Sales Process:
“I am an expert in my field. My job is to help qualified prospects make good decisions about solving problems using my product or service.”
This second sentence in the definition goes a very long way in filling in the gaps between goals, as it were. It is what the salesperson should be doing to get to the goal. It encompasses all of the steps in the sales process in between prospecting and closing. It covers qualification, needs analysis, proposal and objections – the meaty part of the sales process!
This perspective – that the salespersons job is to help the customer make a good decision is not only very validating for the salesperson, but in fact it is what the customer really wants from us. Because we spend more time with our product or service than the client does, we should know more about it than they do. If we are doing our job well, we are helping the prospect to flesh out problems they need to solve and to come up with the right solutions.
If we do this with the expertise we defined in the first post on this topic, then the client feels really good about buying from us, and we reach our goal.
So what does all of this have to do with social media? Pretty much everything!
Social media experts and users go on at great length about the “fact” that in social media, hard sales tactics are not welcome. OK, maybe that’s true, but it is also clear that people use information that they find on the web and on social media sites to help them make decisions about lots of things, including what to buy and who to buy it from.
The sales definition of “an expert here to help” bridges the gap between what users want and expect from social media and what salespeople hope to get done there: starting the process of making a sale that is closable. The way to do that is by living both parts of the sales mindset we have discussed, and learning to embody that in your social media endeavors.
If you are trying to sell using social media, then the thing you are trying to earn as a result of your efforts as the “expert here to help” is trust. Trust is arguably the currency of commerce in social media marketing. We’ll talk more about that in the final post in this series next week.
Feb/103
The right sales mindset and success in social media – part 1 of a 3 part series
PART ONE
In my blog post on January 13, I asked the questions “Does Social Media Marketing Work”. My answer was that it works best when it is driven by great content.
But what is “great content” in the context of sales? In other words, if your goal is to use social media to sell more of your product or service, what kind of content qualifies as “great”, especially towards reaching that goal?
I’ll attempt to answer that questions over the next three blog posts – why three? Well, the answer breaks up neatly into three pieces, and the answer is too long for a single blog post – even by my “anything under 1000 character is OK” standards! So here is part one: Why demonstrating that you are an expert matters.
In my book, Mastering Your Sales Process, I spent a few pages talking about the “right sales mindset” and why it is important. That right mindset is as follows:
“I am an expert in my field. My job is to help qualified prospects make good decisions about solving problems using my product or service.”
Before we start to take this apart, let’s get back to the question at hand – why is this the right mindset for sales success in social media?
Anyone who is using social media that might wind up buying from you as a result of doing so, is probably collaborating with others and evaluating multiple sources of information before making a decision. As such, you COULD position yourself in a corporate communications style of one-way, marketing speak (look at our great products, they do these cool things, etc.). This is the mode of communications that you see in commercials, corporate web sites, etc. However, it is not the right approach for social media.
In social media, it is best to not sell, but rather to help customers buy (arguably true outside of social media as well!). Consumers have become accustomed to hearing companies talk about how great their products are, and in the right context, that is accepted (although it may or may not be believed at face value). Social media is a different kind of communications venue in that allows two-way communication, and fosters more of a “discussion” format as opposed to a “presentation”. In a presentation, saying that you are great is usually not contested, if it is even possible (yelling at a TV commercial doesn’t count). In the midst of a conversation, it is not considered polite (or effective) to talk about how terrific you and your stuff might be.
So what does happen in a conversation that helps engender trust? In a conversation, a person who is an expert on the topic at hand will demonstrate their expertise by the content of their part of the conversation. If the topic is cardiovascular surgery, and you are talking with a cardiovascular surgeon, it will become clear during the course of the conversation that the surgeon has some idea what they are talking about, even if (especially if?) they don’t tell you how great they are at it. Rather, they demonstrate their expertise by addressing the subject knowledgeably. They demonstrate this to you by the way they engage in the two-way dialogue you are having.
If you want to have credibility about a subject in a dialogue, you must demonstrate, not announce your expertise in a subject matter. Once you have done so, you have made an important step towards having the ability to influence your dialogue partner. If they believe that you know what you are talking about regarding a subject that matters to them, and they are inclined to take action, they just might listen to an expert like you.
Step one in generating great content in the context of sales via social media is to embody the first part of our sales mind set: to demonstrate that you are indeed a subject matter expert regarding the subject at hand.
Step two – the subject of next weeks blog – will focus on how to position your expertise to help the prospective customer decide to allow you to influence their buying decision.
Jan/107
Does Social Media Marketing Work?
In my blog post last week I wrote about questions. I’d like to continue that theme, but from a slightly different angle.
In the last year or so, I have seen a similar question come up again and again in the Question and Answer forum on LinkedIn: Do social media venues such as LinkedIn / Twitter/ Facebook, etc. work as vehicles for generating business.
The majority of the answers provided in the forum, like those in most debates, fell onto one side or the other – yes it does, or no it doesn’t. With respect to this specific question, I had a revelation while watching a Disney movie with my kids over the holidays. The revelation was that the factor that makes social media work or not for a business is the same thing that makes the Disney machine work: Great content.
The idea came to me since we had just come back from a Disney on Ice show that introduced the kids to Ariel of The Little Mermaid (and to Disney Popcorn – profit center number 2 for Disney). We went home and later rented the movie (number 3). In the middle of the movie the kids asked when we could go back to Disneyland (number 4).
Disney is a great example of an effective integrated marketing company. Exposure to one kind of product leads naturally to interest in another.
Social media is best thought of the same way. It is infrastructure. Asking if Social Media works is like asking if plumbing works to deliver fresh water. This is really two questions. The first question is “does the plumbing work”. The second question is “will the water that comes through the plumbing be fresh”. Very simply put, the water will be fresh if it is fresh, the pipes are clean, and the pipes do their job and deliver it.
If you have content that resonates with your audience, and you can connect to that audience through the infrastructure of social media, then social media may help you reach your business goals. If you content is not interesting to the audience, then no infrastructure – social media or otherwise – will help.
As sales and marketing professionals, it behooves us to stop evaluating the potential effectiveness of tools and communication vehicles with binary questions based on someone else’s opinions. If we know our business, and know our audience, then we can use the tools that present themselves to us to reach them. From there, we need to connect via great content. If we fail to do so, then social media will work to help your prospects leave your content just as fast as they came.
So does Social Media work? Sure it does. Will it work for you? Depends what you put into the pipes, who you ask to turn them on and how you do it.
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