"COLD CALL SALES AND PROSPECTING CHECKLIST: 14 PRACTICAL STRATEGIES WHEN COLD-COLD CALLING" which had been here in four parts is now a short E-book, available via Amazon.
You can read it on a Kindle, or in various other E-reader formats, including your PC. Amazon offfers free apps to enable you to do that.
Order e-edition of Overcoming objections: why prospects DO NOT buy
Objections and questions as buying signals — cues that the prospect is ready to buy, or at the very least, nearly ready.
Sometimes, when you look through a prospect's question, or even what appears to be an objection, you find that they are subconsciously signaling their readiness to buy.
For example, you may encounter the question, "How soon could you install?"
"COLD CALL SALES AND PROSPECTING CHECKLIST: 14 PRACTICAL STRATEGIES WHEN COLD-COLD CALLING" which had been here in four parts is now a short E-book, available via Amazon.
You can read it on a Kindle, or in various other E-reader formats, including your PC. Amazon offfers free apps to enable you to do that.
Order e-edition of Overcoming objections: why prospects DO NOT buy
Telephone etiquette with the gatekeeper or secretarial screen . . . professional ways of speaking with, and maybe even winning the gatekeeper as an ally.
Continue reading Telephone etiquette with the gatekeeper or secretarial screen
Decision influencers: who are they, and how can you work effectively with them?
Even if the user, or the person in charge of an area, does not have the level of Authority, Need, and Dollars to be the actual Decision Maker, they may nonetheless be an important "Decision Influencer."
Continue reading Decision influencers: who they are, and how to work with them
Some questions and objections are so easy that you can safely respond to them
quickly and directly, and move on.
For our meaning here, that kind of "easy" question or objection is in an area
in which your product or service is strong, or that raise issues that you can
handle quickly without raising secondary concerns.
For example, if the objection relates to a misunderstanding on price that you
can set right by pointing to a catalog, do that and move on:
"The answer is yes, we do guarantee our installations for three years, the
longest in the industry, according to this survey in Industry Times which I'll
leave with you. Now, moving on to the issue of . . ."
But if the objection or question is more complex, then use the Four-Step process for responding to objections. Go to that Four-Step Process for handling objections and questions
Responding to an "easy" sales objection or question? Then handle it directly, get it out of the way quickly, and move on. See the section on handling easy questions and objections.
When you encounter more difficult objections and questions, it's best to work systematically through this Four-Step Process:
Continue reading Responding to more difficult objections and questions
First, what is cold-call selling?
Cold calling can be by phone, as you telephone prospects for appointments, or maybe to do some early research. (Telephone cold calling is a topic we'll be dealing with another time.)
What we'll be speaking of here are cold-calls made in person.
Suppose you're a consultant looking to sell your expertise as a trainer in a certain field— perhaps how to comply with new federal regulations, or how to improve the effectiveness of customer care departments. Since it's about training, you might think that the training department is the place to make your first contact.
Well, maybe. But, then again, maybe not.
You’ll find here free sales training articles and tutorials, checklists and sales tips, as well as links to our sales training books — all focused on Selling Face to Face.
The free sales training articles and tutorials here are adapted from the courses and workshops I developed on contract for the “sales universities” of world-class marketing companies such as Xerox in the United States and abroad, Kodak, Motorola, Sylvania, Bank of America, and others . . . as filtered through my own experience in marketing consulting services.
The aim is to provide practical sales training across the spectrum from beginners (starting up new businesses, or making career changes) to experienced sales people looking for fresh approaches, or hoping to gain the kind of professional selling skills they would have developed as attendees in big company sales training programs.
In the free sales training articles here, and in the related books, we cover topics including,