I know many salespeople are going to read that title and think I am absolutely crazy, and maybe I am. However it’s been my experience in two plus decades of consulting to inside sales groups that inbound calls are more frequently botched than cold calls generally perceived to be more difficult.

The primary reason inbound calls tend to be more difficult is that the prospect starts with control of the call and typically salespeople don’t know how to gain control of the call.

I submit to you that you must control the call if you are to have an “effective” sales presentation and process. Otherwise, you simply don’t get to tell your story and frequently don’t obtain the critical information you need about the prospect.

When a prospect calls in they usually have a bunch of questions which be begin to rapid fire at the salesperson. Once the salesperson begins to answer it becomes a freight train he or she cannot stop. Prospects fire question after question and then say they need to think about all of this information and will call back when ready.

The second thing that happens is that many salespeople are not competent questioners. If you listen to the tapes of telephone sales calls you will find that salespeople ask very few questions. This weakness tends to compound the difficulty of gaining control of the sales process on an inbound call.

Summary: The correct way to think about any sales call.

Remember that it makes no difference who dials the phone. On and inbound call you are still talking to someone you know nothing about. You don’t know if they are the decision maker, or have a clue about their environment and how your product or service might fit in.

On every call you need to take the process from the beginning. Thus on the inbound call you must tactfully gain control of the call and the direction it takes. Doing so on an inbound call will give far better results.

One of the worst parts about telephone sales is that because it’s not a physical appointment you are much more likely to get stood up. If you were showing up in the prospect’s office they would be forced to keep the appointment solid where in telephone selling you have much less control.

Let me share with you a simple little technique that I have found that makes a difference in how often you get stood up or end up in a phone tag.

Make an appointment.

Most telephone sales people do set up a time to call back. What they don’t do is start that conversation by asking the prospect to get out their calendar and put the appointment down for a specific time and allocation of time for the meeting.

When you make the appointment make the case that you don’t want to be playing phone tag with them wasting both your time and theirs. Ask if they would get their appointment book out and log the meeting allowing for X number of minutes so that you have time to complete the task at hand.

It doesn’t hurt to send an email on the morning of the appointment as a reminder as well.

I think it’s the part about making a deal out of it that helps. It’s doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it seems to save some missed meetings. Give it a try.

Time management is probably one of the biggest opportunities for most salespeople to get more sales.

With all the heated debate about call quality versus quantity I though I would share some valuable information about how you can increase your calls without dropping any of the quality issues.

The Biggest Time Waster

Besides simply not working the biggest time waster is the interruption.

If you simply focused all of your time management energy on this one area you would probably profit greatly.  Interruptions cost you lots of time. Some experts estimate that the average interruption cost you as much as 22 minutes to recover from.

What is an “interruption?”

An interruption, just to be clear, is a distraction of any kind from your current efforts. If you are making cold calls and some comes into your office to ask you about an order – that’s an interruption. If you are working on your forecast and the phone rings and you pick it up – that’s an interruption.

How do interruptions waste so much time?

Years ago I wrote and taught a time and territory management class for the American Management Association. In that course I had designed a drill to show how much time interruptions really waste.

In the drill there were two very simple tasks, read some text and alphabetize a list of words. In the first pass students would read on sentence and then switch to the list and find the first word in the alphabetization continuing back and forth until both tasks were done. In the second pass they would read all the text and then go to the list and alphabetize it.

The results were that most of the people doing the drill were about 30% faster at completing the tasks if they did them individually one at a time. The key to remember here is that this was a simple task and there was no significant set up or shut down to do the task.

In your sales efforts looking up an order can involve a number of steps. Then you must go through that order to find the information that needed to be checked. You may have to make some changes or corrections or write a note to the person asking about it. When you’re done you have to put everything back and return to the task at hand. The chances are you will have lost your focus on the previous task to some extent and you will have some ramp up time to get back on track.

Between these things you can waste a lot of time. If you are making sales calls you also are likely to lose your rhythm. If you were on a roll with the calls you may find that edge is now gone and you have to spend some amount of time getting it back.

Summary

So if you simply guard your selling or calling time and prevent interruptions you will probably have a much higher rate of production. You’ll make more calls, you’ll be sharper for a higher percentage of them and thus you’ll get better results.

As a sales manager time management represents a huge opportunity. Looking for ways to decrease interruptions to your sales team’s calling is a very profitable activity.

There is a very simple method to making your closing of business much easier. However, it is not so simple or easy to execute.

Before I tell you how to do this let me recommend that you consider buying Mack Hanan’s book “Consultative Selling.” This monster book has a method for selling that eliminates the pains of closing the deal. It does so because of the structure of the approach. One other note, this book is not for the faint of heart – it is a much heavier read than most sales books – be prepared to work at getting through it.

How to make closing much easier.

The key to making the close much easier is your relative position to the prospect in the selling effort.

The best position you could probably hold would be a trusted friend with expertise in that area. In other words if you were at expert at that product or service and a trusted friend of the buyer you would probably have the most leverage and the easiest close.

The worst position is as a salesperson calling on the decision-maker. This is a naturally adversarial position. Not only that, but you also have the chore of rising above all the competition.

There is however a third position you can take which is more powerful than that of the “salesperson.” That position is the one of the “problem solver.” The problem solver is seen as someone that is going to help the decision maker achieve a goal or objective.

This is the power of Hanan’s strategy, it starts the conversation with that premise and sells the ROI of the solution not the product or service.

If you can get the prospect to see you as a “problem solver,” someone who is going to help them figure out the best possible way to achieve their goal or objective, you are then in a much more powerful position and your effort to close will be far easier.

This position requires that you develop a great deal of trust with the prospect. The prospect must believe that you will only recommend what is absolutely best for their needs, even if that’s not your solution.

Unfortunately, in this post there isn’t enough space to really teach you how to do it. It took Hanan a whole book. And again I would recommend that book as a great strategy or if not right for your situation a great model from which you could develop such a strategy.

Most salespeople know you need to qualify the company and the decision-maker but don’t realize there are other very important things you should qualify.

In this article I’d like to talk about a couple of other things you should always qualify during the sales process.

Objections

Objections should always be qualified, not that prospect’s lie or anything (They’d never do that, right?) but often there are other things involved in objections that make this very necessary.

The first is that frequently objections are the result of misunderstanding and not actual problems with the solution you’re offering. If you don’t carefully examine objections you my find that you are giving credit to an objection that is simply incorrect data on the prospect’s part.

Secondly, the objection you get is very often not the real objection by a symptom of it. You need to very carefully pin the prospect down as to what the objection really is. One of the best ways to do this is to ask how they believe the objection is going to effect the solution they are looking for. This takes the discussion away from you and puts it back on something the prospect is expert on — even if the original objection is miss stated or incorrect, the answer they give re the solution will be accurate.

One of the most common things that happens with objections is the salesperson gets it wrong. I was doing a training for a group years ago and we were listening to a tape of the call and an objection on price. The salesperson made an assumption about the objection and gave an answer which didn’t address the actual concern at hand. He lost the sale because of it.

Questions

One of the most commonly missed is that you need to qualify questions. Whenever the prospect asks a question you need to qualify that question. The qualification of a question is the discovery of the reason for the question. If you know why a question is asked you have the key data to answer properly. The prospect’s basis for any question is going to be a lot closer to the sale than anything you might assume or even believe about what appears to be an innocent question.

Transactions

Next, you should always qualify “transactions.” A transaction is an exchange that takes place with the prospect, you’re going to send him something, she’s going to send you something, you or the prospect needs to do something for the other, or you are setting up a meeting or follow up of some sort.

Setting up a demo is one of the best examples of this. If you don’t qualify all of the parts of the demo you can completely miss the boat with the prospect. You need to know why they want the demo, what they expect to see, what they will do based on the success of the demo and much more. Forget to do this qualification of the demo you and you could likely waste everyone’s time.

Summary

Qualifying is a lot more than making sure the company is a prospect and the person you’re talking to is actually a decision-maker. Qualifying is the process of selling.

Today I would like to share with you two important telephone selling presentation techniques that will make a huge difference in your success if you use them consistently.

Secret #1: Use a reasonable volume when speaking on the telephone.

The telephone transmits the emotion in the voice perfectly, but often doesn’t transmit the data near as effectively. The truth is that it is quite often hard to hear clearly what people are saying on the phone. This may be due to poor line quality or more frequently background noise around the listener.

You don’t want your prospect to miss what you say or lose track of the conversation because they missed something. This is critically important on the phone due to the lack of control you have over the situation — if they lose interest they can quite easily make an excuse and leave.

When you speak into the phone use a volume equal to what you might use at a crowded dinner table. This way you will ensure that people will be able to hear you clearly. You don’t have to yell, but for most people you should up your volume a bit above your normal speaking volume.

Remember, that volume projects confidence, authority, and interest to the other person. Getting in the habit of using a good volume will help you in many different telephone situations.

Secret #2: The use of the “pause”

If you ever listened to Paul Harvey national radio stories “the rest of the story,” articles you know that Paul was the master of the pause.

Most salespeople don’t pay much attention to pauses but they can make a huge difference in what people hear and understand. If you don’t believe how important this is just listen to the pros tell jokes — it’s all about timing. You can use the pause for a number of things.

Pausing gives emphasis to what you just said. If you pause after something you can use that to let it sink in. You can use the pause and lack there of to re emphasize the good part over the bad.

Pauses are also great tools for insuring understanding as the pause let’s what was said register and helps the listener get it.

Finally, you can use pauses to manufacture interest as Paul Harvey did so often in his broadcasts. This is definitely a technique worth your attention.

Summary

Two small points but very powerful when it comes to selling on the telephone. If you listen to others on the phone, TV, or the radio and look for their application of volume and the use of the pause you will find a whole world of possibilities for improving your image on the phone.

From Flyn

If you are in inside sales management or know someone who is please see or send them to see the EVENTS page on this site (upper right corner of blog window) for a fantastic FREE web seminar I’m hosting on Friday on how to drive top results out of inside sales groups.

The first and most important part of a voice mail message is the unique selling proposition (USP). If you don’t have a very powerful USP you won’t get people to call you back. Click Here for the post discussing USPs.

There are two approaches to leaving messages. I will discuss the standard method, for a powerful alternative method see Daniel Parinello’s book “Selling to VITO.” Thought this is written and aimed at CEOs you can successfully adapt his method for just about any call.

The Standard Method

From the research and testing I’ve done on this subject, short concise messages do the best. Give your name, your company and your phone number followed by your USP, and conclude by giving the phone number a second time. You may also add at the end a reference to when you’ll try back. Remember to say the phone number slowly each time so that it can be easily understood and the person has plenty of time to write it down. Making it difficult for the person to call you back is not going to help you.

There are some who say it’s better not to leave a message. Not leaving messages can be dangerous if you are calling repeatedly to try to catch the person.

The problem is that your number and name come up in the caller ID and the decision-maker knows who you are. Decision-makers are very busy and don’t like to take calls unless they know who’s calling and what it’s about. If you call many times and don’t leave a message you become potentially a pest as you haven’t given the decision-maker the information he or she needs to make a decision on answering or returning your call. This will annoy many people so you want to avoid doing it.

Timing is everything. If you hit the decision maker at the right time with a good USP you will get a returned call. Sometimes if your message is strong enough you will get on the plate even thought your solution wasn’t currently top priority.

I recommend leaving a second message with a different USP a couple of calls later. After 3-5 tries in the course of a couple of weeks I would stretch out the next call to a couple of weeks and then reschedule for the future. You don’t want to be a pest, but you do want to be persistent – sometimes people are just busy.

From Flyn

If you haven’t seen my free inside sales management call coming 8/21, click the events page at the upper right corner of the page.

There has been a rather heated discussion in one of the groups re this very subject that was generated by the question “How many calls can you do per day?” So I thought I would write something on the subject.

First and foremost you must understand that these things are not mutually exclusive. You can significantly increase both quality and quantity of calls at the same time.

The motivation for this article is that it has been my experience in working with inside groups or even field sales people that make calls. I have found that they’re usually quite inefficient and thus don’t make near as many calls as they could in the same period of time and without degrading the quality of their effort.

Call Quantity

It is stupid obvious that if you make more calls (assuming you don’t change the quality) you will reach more people and make more sales. Most people don’t even do 60% of what they could do because they haven’t worked out how to be really efficient and effective. Here are some ways to do that.

When you make calls, just make calls. What I mean here is that switching tasks takes tremendous amounts of time. If you are going to make calls have all the researched ready to call names in front of you and JUST make calls.

Control the calls. It is your job to control the flow and direction of the sales call and process. Don’t let prospects wander or waste your time. Make sure you efficiently gather the information and forward the sales process. If you take the time to record your calls you will probably find they run from 10-30 percent longer than necessary just do to inefficiencies in handling the call.

If you work from a CRM product fill out the record as you wait and as if you didn’t reach the person. If you plan to leave a message indicated that, or put that you didn’t reach the person. You can have all of this done before the call completes and thus move much more quickly to the next call. If they do answer you can simply edit your notes as you chat to reflect the actual results.

If you aren’t going to leave a message for the person, hang up after the third ring. Most people will answer long before the third ring if they are going to – this will save you tons of time.

Dial one number after the next – don’t allow yourself to be distracted until it is time to break or you have completed all your calls. The average distraction will steal anywhere form 11-22 minutes from your calling time – that’s one conversation or multiple dials.

These are just a few things you can do without affecting the quality of your calls that will make a big difference in your call numbers. I hope you find them useful.

I will now move on to call quality.

Call Quality

Call quality is very important. Rushing through calls with prospect’s, especially in today’s world where it is so hard to get them on the phone in the first place, is a very bad idea.

Here are some key things you can do that will improve call quality.

Have a documented sales process or presentation.

NO, I am not telling you to read a script even though this is workable if you know what you’re doing and have the delivery skills.

What I am saying is that you need a very clearly and well thought out sales process. It is my contention that not having such a document is the equivalent of saying this process has not be well thought out. It’s like goal setting – if you don’t write them down, they aren’t goals but wishes.

Develop a powerful unique selling proposition (USP)

For insight on just what a USP is all about read this post (opens in a new window)

The point is that call quality is improved when you have a strong USP – you engage more people and the people you engage will be more interested in what you have to say.

Make sure you’re doing the basics well.

I spent 23 years consulting to the high tech industry in telephone sales and management and it is frightening how many simple errors people make. Here are some of the most common.

• Starting to sell before rapport is developed
• Starting to sell before the person you’re speaking with has be qualified
• Speaking in a casual voice
• Not answering specifically the question or comment made by the prospect (changing subjects) without addressing the fact you are doing so

These are just a couple of the most obvious things you can do.

One final note, regular training is the absolute key to producing high quality calls. For those of you responsible for or managing insides sales organizations I am putting on a free conference call next week on driving high performance in inside groups – Click Here (Opens in a new widow) for details.

Please see our events page for info on our upcoming FREE Telesales conference call.

In this article I’m basically going discussing “productivity.” Though it is an old cliche, prospecting, or cold calling, is a numbers game. This may be even truer today that it was just 10 or 15 years ago. By the way these techniques are totally valid and workable for any sales effort and not limited to cold calling. They are just more important for cold calling because of the nature of that game.

Why is this true? Because of the advent of technology and possibly the pace of business you’re simply going to reach less people each day. With voice mail and automated attendants decision makers can better protect their time and your access. Twenty years ago you would talk to more people than not. Today you’re lucky to talk to anyone at all in a whole day of calling – researched or not.

All of this makes it critically important that you play the numbers game with maximum efficiency.

The first secret here is “focus.” Focus is all about avoiding distractions during your efforts. When you sit down to make cold calls or prospect you MUST completely avoid any kind of distraction. You need to make sure you are ready to call and call without interruption.

Experts claim that interruptions cost a minimum of 11 minutes to recover from and many say that is conservative. That’s almost 20 percent of your hourly calling time eaten up by any interruption.

The second secret is “concentration” which is closely related to focus. In order to be effective and efficient you must keep your concentration on the matters at hand. When you lose concentration on your prospecting not only does it effect our efficiency but you also potentially loose your effectiveness in responding to the prospect.

You will find working fully focused with energy and concentration that you get on a roll – especially if you rack up a good call early in the effort. Once on that roll you’ll find that you begin working much faster than you were when you started. This is the right way to cold call or prospect or for that matter sell.

I suggest that you work in spurts of 50 minutes and then take a 10 minute rest. During the 50 minutes put all your effort and concentration on making the maximum number of calls you can, no sacrificing quality of course. Then take a 10 minute break and get away from your desk and the calling completely. Think about something else do something that is fun or relaxing, then get back for another concentrated period.

I managed a team years ago that I taught this trick to. Using this method they were able to make an average of 30 percent more calls than our peer groups and team members and they did it in 75 percent of the time. My group worked a solid 6 hours with total  focus and was able to make more calls that other team members working 8 and 9 hours per day. Why, focus and concentration. And by the way they had better results as well.

Finally I want to introduce “work flow.” Most salespeople and manager’s pay no attention to this subject. You will find if you work at the work flow of making calls that you can produce some incredible results. Here’s an example.

Most people would say that making 50 calls in six hours is a reasonable number. And if you just cruise along you can probably do this consistently. However if you test and work some work flow tactics you may actually double it.

First, most people answer the phone by the third ring, thus, is you don’t need to leave a message you can hang up on ring 3 without much risk.

Second, if you create a prepared voice mail message and learn it well, you can deliver that message with enthusiasm and more quickly and efficiently saving even more time.

Third, use time after dialing the number while the phone rings and the time you spend speaking to the gatekeeper to fill out the contact record as if you “didn’t” talk to the person with a note that you left a message if you are going to do so. You’ll be right 90% of the time and ready to move to the next call immediately.

If they answer, you can simply edit as you talk and you’ve lost no time.

Consistently using the above tactics you’ll be able to move from call to call very quickly. This will result in far more calls, messages, and contacts in the same period of time.

In fact, don’t be surprised if you double your call numbers (Which has to improve your results). You will also notice with this focused approach that the day moves much faster and you feel far better and less tired at the end of the day.

Surprise yourself, try it!

I am amazed at how few salespeople do a good job qualifying before making their presentations. I think failure to qualify is one of the most frequent errors made in selling.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about the primary qualification question which is usually asked like so:

Are you the person that makes the decision to buy…

Or

Who is the person that makes the decision to…

Or

What is your authority in the decision to buy…

All of these are basically the same question. Here the seller is asking the prospect directly if they are the decision maker or who that person would be.

I have found a much better and more workable approach is to rephrase this question as follows:

How does your company go about making the decision to buy (your product or service)?

This version of the qualifying question is far less threatening and at the same time more flexible.

When the prospect starts to answer you now can question his or her responses to clarify exactly who does what in the buying process. It is also far harder for the prospect to miss lead you about their own authority.