Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Aug 30, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
This past week, I was working with an inside sales rep on some coaching calls. He was having a real challenge, because receptionists were refusing to connect him with his target prospects. Upon listening to one of his calls, it was easy to see why. He was over-introducing himself, using way too many words when he didn’t have to.
I've never liked the word “gatekeeper,” because I’ve gotten so much help from the people at my prospect companies whose job it is to field incoming phone calls. They’ve got often demanding jobs, and I like to make it easy for me by making it easy for them. In my sales training courses, we discuss the differences between receptionists, who answer a company’s main telephone line, and Executive Administrators (EAs), who are essentially executive-level people that help the given executive run his or her sphere of influence. Generally speaking, you’ll be a lot more directive with a receptionists than you will with EAs, so today’s post is about some things to do (and not to do) when opening a call with a receptionist.
So let’s first look at how Bob (my rep) was opening his calls with receptionists, along with a response I actually heard:
- Bob: “Hi, this is Bob Brody from ABC Instruments, and I wonder if you’d be able to put me through to Sally Smith. This is in regard to introducing her to our company.”
- Receptionist: “Have you spoken with her before?”
- Bob: “No.”
- Receptionist: “If you haven’t spoken with her, I can’t put you through.”
In this situation, Bob’s opening immediately identified him as a salesperson that was cold-calling, and many receptionists have been trained to avoid putting these calls through. He also used weak terms, “I wonder if,” and “introducing her to our company,” which practically begs the receptionist to drop the cal, because it doesn’t sound authoritative enough. A better way to handle the situation is to sound more direct, and take control by not providing information you really don’t need to initially provide.
Instead, try this, simple and direct: “Sally Smith, please.”
A huge percentage of the time, Bob will get transferred immediately, because he now sounds authoritative. We made the correction during the coaching session, and he was amazed to find he got through the receptionist on every subsequent call on which we worked that day. Using this technique, he won’t get grilled by the receptionist most of the time, who, after all, has a lot of other inbound calls to process anyway. Sure, some of the time the receptionist will ask what the call’s about, but again, a short answer, like “development systems” is a whole lot better than being too wordy.
And yes, in some companies, especially smaller ones, the receptionist and EA are one and the same, so you’ll be asked one or two more questions. I’ve discussed this in previous blog posts, but if you’re making a cold call to a Director-level prospect or higher, you should at least be doing a web-search on the person’s name before the call, which can give you some terrific clues that will warm up your call, whether it’s to the prospect, or to the EA.
Will receptionists, though, keep it short and sweet, have a polite but authoritative tone to your voice, and you’ll have a lot less resistance. Add brevity with receptionists to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Tue, Jun 01, 2010 @ 10:44 AM
This past week I delivered an inside sales training course to a client that makes devices used to diagnose electrical problems. This company makes terrific equipment, has begun to take market share away from its biggest competitor (who owns 90% of the market), and has hired me to train their inside sales team to take over and own the market in one year. In a coaching session that occurred last week, we cooked up some bright ideas that the competition probably won't be using. I'm going to tell you what they are, but I'm not going to divulge the client or the industry to protect our program. I've been teaching the techniques we're using for years now, but there are a few new twists because of some tools we're using today that fall into the Sales 2.0 realm. So read on, and use them to take over your focus industry as well.
My client has sold many devices into the mining industry, but there are a whole lot of mining concerns that haven't yet bought its equipment. One non-client is pretty well known, but has gone through bankruptcy proceedings in recent years, and we suspected there might be new owners. We googled the company, and found a story about them on Wikipedia, giving the new name of the company. We then did a search in the "people" field of LinkedIn, searching for the name of the new company. And we found a TQM (Total Quality Management) director.
We cold-called the TQM director and told her that we specialized in troubleshooting devices for the mining industry, and she referred us to the right executive in charge of that function. We're now on a roll with that company. There are three very good lessons to learn from this story, and you can apply them all today. One is about turning a "horizontal" solution into a "vertical" one. Another is intelligently using internet tools that are still considered a bit non-traditional. And the third is that there's nothing as good as a great cold call.
1) The Vertical piece. My client specializes in a solution, not an industry. But because the company has sold successfully into the mining industry, it is a de facto expert in mining solutions that relate to its devices. My client's reps are going to call every mining concern in the country. And I predict they'll soon own that segment in the market, because they're experts, and they're telling new prospects about it.
2) The Research piece. To uncover data we had to know, we used Google, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn. Sure our target prospect had prior trouble. But like many companies, they've been bailed out. They changed the name of the company, and are geared up again and making money. LinkedIn enabled us to find an individual we couldn't have found otherwise.
3) The Cold Call piece. The rep I coached loves cold calling. He's completely fearless, doesn't give a fig about rejection, and has an attitude that in reflective of the fact that he won't let anybody kick him around.
We're using a number of superior techniques to take over an industry, step by step, vertical by vertical. I've just described three of them. Thinking out-of-the-box and being fearless are two of the supporting elements that need to be in place for it all to work, and my client's reps are already making huge strides in that direction. Add those three techniques to your Best Practices playbook, and go out and tackle an industry yourself, starting this week.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jan 04, 2010 @ 10:01 AM
Last week I provided 5 great tips for closing year-end business, from a list of my own favorite blog posts. But you voted on yours, too, and that's what today's post is about.
When I launched this blog in 2008, I did it with two objectives in mind. For one, I wanted to convey valuable elements of my telesales training curriculum to my subscribers, a good number of whom work for companies that would love to hire us to train their inside sales teams, but can't find the budget to do it in these tough times. My other objective was to help to elevate ethics and best practices within the high tech inside sales business, posts that are pertinent to sales management as well as sales reps. Particularly in the latter category, I've ruffled a few feathers, but that gets dialogue going and brings issues up that frankly need to be addressed in order for our industry to continue evolving. The blog's successful. It's been picked up on a bunch of other websites, and loads of people are using the material (even my competitors!)
Reflecting on 2009, I thought it would be of value to tell you what your colleagues were prioritizing when they read the posts that were written in 2009. Here are the top five, in order of page views. If you haven't read them in awhile, why not pick out the ones you feel might help you get a great start to the new year? Numbers 3 and 5 deal specifically with Management issues, while #s 1, 2, and 4 reflect techniques that can increase sales, starting this week:
- 20 Characteristics of a Superior Inside Salesperson
- 5 Most Common Price Negotiation Mistakes
- Increase sales through improved Daily Call Metrics
- 4 Common weak phrases that erode telesales success
- Increase sales by conducting an effective Telesales Employee Performance Appraisal
I'll keep blogging on techniques and issues I feel are critical as the new year unfolds. These are wonderful, exciting times to be in Inside Sales, and each new leap in the technologies we use presents new opportunities and challenges. Believe me, I'll write about them. I hope you'll add the techniques in the posts above to your Best Practices Playbook... and let's get started having a great year!
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Dec 07, 2009 @ 12:09 PM
I'd imagine most readers of my blog have at least developed a profile on the business networking website LinkedIn. But if you're not using it as an important part of your daily sales process, you could be losing sales. If you work a territory, you'd be surprised at how many of your prospects will know customers of yours. In the past we all found this out by accident, guesswork, and careful questioning. Today, the LinkedIn tool does a lot of it for us.
In my telesales training classes, I cover several of the free online Sales 2.0 tools that are becoming increasingly more important, and I'm coming to think LinkedIn (LI) is the best. Let me give you one real world example of how it can be used "out of the box," then discuss what you can do to ensure that you're working at optimum with LI.
Case Study: A network solutions provider
One of my sales training customers had been trying for months to get into a large prospect, to no avail. In a coaching session, we determined that he'd call a CIO at the company, someone that wasn't in the lead database. We found that person's name on Hoover's. Before he called that exec, he checked out his LinkedIn profile. Guess what! He knew one of our company's regional managers while that manager was employed in a previous company, working another territory. My rep made a quick call to the out-of-territory Regional Manager, and found out that he'd had a great relationship with that CIO. My rep was then able to make the call, and had a conversation. Without LinkedIn, the CIO might never have taken the call.
So let's investigate how to get LinkedIn working at optimum for you. Here are 6 great ways to get going for you right now:
1) Make sure your profile is as good as you can get it, detailing your professional background and successful accomplishments. These is essentially your résumé, and believe me, your prospects will occasionally look at it to get an idea of who you are before they trust you enough to buy from you. Additionally, if you're ever looking for another inside sales position, your potential new company will look at your LI profile before they bother with your actual résumé. Don't gloss over this important step.
2) Send a LinkedIn invitation to professional people colleagues you know well, or with whom you've had a business relationship, so you can link together. These would include your fellow Inside and Field salespeople, and all sales management within your company.
3) Call your customers that you have a working relationship with, have a conversation, then tell them you'd like to LinkIn to them. The best time to do this is right after the conversation. Caution! If you don't call first, they may perceive you as being too pushy, and won't accept the invitation. Besides, by calling them, you may also find other opportunities within his or her company that you didn't know about. If so, you've increased your sales.
4) When your invitation has been accepted, take a look at your invitee's connections. They may include people working at a company that you're trying to work with. If so, consider whether it might be worth calling your contact and asking how well he or she knows that person. If that's the case, you may get a reference!
5) When making a first time call to a prospect, especially to an exec or manager, take 30 seconds up from to check out his or her LI profile. You may discover you have mutual business associates or interests. Those can prove to be the best ice-breakers you'll ever have (see Case Study above).
6) This one's just a quick cautionary tip. Invitations from unknowns don't often result in links, and can be perceived as LinkedIn spam. Only invite people you really know. I get invitations from people I've never talked to, and I won't LinkIn to them. Most others won't either. There are other social networking sites that are great for popularity contests, but LinkedIn isn't: it's a business tool. If there's someone you'd like to know and LinkIn to, please call and say hello first.
I always check out someone's LI profile now before I call him or her. It takes hardly any time at all, and it's a great ice-breaker to spend thirty seconds or so at the beginning the call to talk about mutual acquaintances or interests. So if you're not doing all of this right now, start today. It's a great way to communicate better with your prospects, and you'll increase sales, too. And add using LinkedIn effectively and efficiently to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Aug 03, 2009 @ 01:15 AM
My colleague Art Sobczak asked me to participate in an audio seminar on the subject of "following up after initial sales contacts, and then continuing to follow up while in an active sales cycle, or to stay in contact if an immediate opportunity is not present." In other words, you've already had the initial conversation. Now what do you do to ensure you stay in touch in timely fashion? I cover this material in my telesales training courses, but preparing it for the audio seminar caused me to narrow it down to the 6 most common "staying in touch" errors I've witnessed. And here they are... any of them sound familiar?
1) Failure to wrap up the initial conversation with action items for the next call, and gaining agreement from the prospect as to what they are, and when you'll call back. At the end of the initial conversation, you'll know whether your contact is a valid prospect or not, according to your qualification criteria. If you've got some action items, discuss them with the prospect, and gain agreement as to when and for what reason you'll call again.
2) Failure to call back in a timely fashion. A "timely fashion" depends on the urgency of the sales situation, but if you have a "live" opportunity, you should be calling at least once a week to discuss progress and action items.
3) Failure to have an exciting, compelling reason for your next call. Your call should make the prospect happy that you called. Have a valid new response to one of his or her concerns, a new solution offering that will improve your prospect's life, or discuss some good news about your prospect's company that might positively impact your sales situation. If you're involved in price negotiation and have a new angle on pricing, make it exciting!
4) Failure to log conversation results and scheduled callbacks in your Customer Relationship Management system (CRM). None of us can remember much about a conversation after it goes away, so important points have to be logged so that you can remember. If your pres-sales tech support people or sales engineers have access to your CRM, they'll need that info too, when they call to assist you in helping to qualify or sell to the prospect. And be sure to use your automated call scheduler to remind you when to make your next call.
5) Failure to use creative contact techniques when your prospect hasn't returned your call. Maybe your prospect is difficult to reach. Maybe he or she just doesn't want to talk to you right now, when your caller ID comes up on his or her phone. You really do have to get through, though, to find out what's going on. Three creative techniques you can use here are:
a) Use *67 to hide your caller ID before you place the call.
b) Listen to his or her voicemail all the way through to see if he or she lists an alternative contact. If so, call that person, and ask him or her to find your prospect.
c) Upon getting your prospect's outgoing voicemail message, hit 0#, then ask the receptionist to put you through to someone in the department who can track down your prospect.
The three techniques I mentioned under item #5 are especially important when you have a proposal in front of the prospect. If you do, using the above techniques will rarely result in the prospect being upset with you, and will enable you to manage the sales process more effectively.
6) Not checking in at least once a quarter with good-prospect, no current opportunity people. We talk to these people every day. They are ideal for our solutions, but have valid reasons for not moving forward. You've done your ROI questioning, you're at a high level, but there's no traction. I ask these folks when they'd like me to call them back. If it's beyond 90 days, I'll call them at the 90 day period, as anything can change, and I want them thinking about me. These are the prospects I don't want slipping by, and they're always on my radar screen.
So those are the six "staying in touch" mistakes I most frequently encounter, but I could add a whole lot more to the list. To keep things positive, there are great things you can do too, that your competitors may not do. One of my prospects is a big baseball fan of a particular team. I found a fascinating article written on the other coast about his team, so I emailed it to him. I don't do this kind of stuff to sell them anything, I do it because I genuinely like my prospects, and try to brighten their days when they hear from me. There's a little bit of that element in #3 above.
So try to avoid the poor contact skils "deal killers" I've listed above, and add the solutions to your Best Practices Playbook. Now how about you? What follow-on call errors have you heard or experienced yourself?
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 29, 2009 @ 12:48 AM
One of the challenges in breaking a verbal habit is that it's nearly impossible to fix it by making your adjustment only while at work. In my telesales training classes, two of the most prevalent habits we work on correcting are the "you guys" and the "how are you today?" habits. And to fully correct them, you need help from the folks with whom you live (and play). Before we discuss "How are you today?" and its inherent problems, I want to review "you guys" for a bit. In the telesales courses I teach, I try to get people in our classes to stop referring to the prospect's company as "you guys", as used in "how are you guys addressing [the technology in question] today?" Especially when you're calling high, using "you guys" doesn't work very well in peer communication with a high level executive, and many women are resistant to that term at any level. "You guys" makes it sound like you're an adolescent, as well, and the prospect almost anticipates the word "awesome" to follow somewhere in the conversation. A better approach is to use the name of the company you're calling in place of "you guys", so let's say the company we're calling is called QED Technology. All you'd have to do, to sound a lot more professional, is to restructure your question by asking "how is QED addressing [the technology in question] today?", inserting the appropriate technology issue in the brackets.
So back to "How are you today?", the topic of today's post. It really doesn't matter too much whether or not you use this on a warm call, where you already know the prospect. Where it really hurts you is on a cold call. At an executive level, you will get hung up on frequently if you open a call with this question. In one of my coaching sessions recently, even though we rehearsed a better way to open the call, the rep did it anyway through habit, and got slammed immediately. There are a number of reasons not to begin your call with this shopworn phrase, but the main reason is that business-to-consumer telemarketers have been flogging it for decades, and it's associated now with getting interrupted by a telemarketer during the dinner hour. It's disliked so much that there's even an acronym for it (HAYT) because people "hate" the question so much from someone to whom they've never spoken. It's much better to open your call by saying who you are, why you're calling, and telling the individual what you need. In most cases, you need to know if there's a current initiative looking for a solution that your product or service can fix. Pretty good way to start a call.
But fixing ineffective communication habits often isn't easily done at work, so I recommend asking personal friends to help out. If you're in the HAYT habit on cold calls, ask your significant other, family, and friends to stop you whenever they hear you using the term when on the phone making personal calls. Chances are, you'll soon get tired of them nailing you, but you will break the habit. And once you've broken it at home, you'll pretty much have it licked at work.
It's hard enough to reach people these days, and you only have one opportunity to make a great first impression. Avoid using words and phrases that annoy people, and enlist the help of friends at home when you really need to fix the problem. A friend of mine once ran for Superintendant of Public Instruction on the platform of "inculcation of sophisticated spoken English." You don't need to go that far to be a great business communicator, but professional speech is terrifically important, especially when speaking to high level executives. Add that level of professionalism to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 15, 2009 @ 01:22 AM
I've written before on the critical importance of using strong professional verbiage to position oneself as a peer when calling high and talking to a prospect at the CXO, VP, or Director level. Asking permission ("Is this a good --- or bad --- time to talk?") and beginning the conversation with "How are you today?" are two things I strongly suggest you do not do on a cold call, because by doing so, you're giving the subtle message that you don't really have anything important to say.
Today, I want to discuss some additional weak verbiage that will erode your position as a peer to higher level prospects, namely the use of diminutive phrases that convey the feeling that you are not as important as the people to whom you're speaking. Four of the most common are:
1) "I'm just..." (as in "I'm just calling to see if you've looked at my proposal yet.")
2) "I'm new here." (or "new to the territory")
3) "Are you the decision-maker?"
4) "Would it be all right if I called so-and-so?"
Each one of the above phrases erodes the confidence that the prospect needs to have in you, and you stand to be in danger of losing the business to a competitive rep with more professional communication skills. Not only should you not use these phrases with high level prospects, you shouldn't use them with lower level prospects either. Let's discuss them individually:
1) "Just" gives you no justice. In my example above, it's more like a whine, and is reminiscent of how a child talks to a parent. Remove that word "just"from your telesales vocabulary to fix the problem.
2) Prospects like talking to "the buck stops here" reps that have all the answers, or at least project an image that they do. They don't care whether you're new to the territory, the company, or the planet, but they need to have confidence that you're the right guy or gal. Save "I'm new here" for bar talk, not business talk.
3) Who's going to answer that question with "no, I'm not the decision-maker"? Most of you reading this blog sell or qualify leads for companies selling enterprise solutions, where one individual rarely makes a unilateral buying decision. To get the information you're trying to get, ask "How does the decision process work?", and you'll obtain better information about all the people involved in the decision, and sound more professionally savvy as well.
4) Asking permission to do anything rarely invites a positive response, and when you're told "no", then you feel uncomfortable in going ahead and doing what you're paid to do, which is calling everyone in the decision process to ensure that you've comprehensively qualified the opportunity. You should have the philosophy that you'll call anyone at the prospect company at any time, and feel confident enough that you don't have to ask anyone's permission to do so.
Using professional verbiage is not only important in communications with prospects and customers, it's terrifically important within the sales department too, particularly when you're in close communication with field sales reps. As inside sales professionals, we fight an ongoing battle to prove to our field sales colleagues that we know just as much as they do, are as smart as they are, and can close as much business as they can. Many field sales people feel that if telesales people were really clever, they'd be working in the field instead, a prejudice many of us in the telebusiness industry have spent years in the process of changing. In my telesales training courses, I always find time to discuss the fact that inside sales has to be more efficient, more effective, and more professional than our field counterparts, because we've always got something to prove. And one of the best ways to do it is to use powerful, professional verbiage, and kick those weak phrases out of our vocabularies for good. Add powerful, no-nonsense terminology to your Best Practices playbook, and you'll increase sales and improve team communication at the same time.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 08, 2009 @ 01:00 AM
I'm conducting one of my telesales training courses this week for a network solutions company that has a challenge common to many inside sales organizations, namely cold calling into companies where there has been no prior telephone contact, at any level. In some cases, there are individuals that have downloaded whitepapers, attended tradeshows and seminars, or signed up for webinars, but in most cases, there has been no previous "touch" at all. In calling these companies, it's absolutely critical to mine the prospect's website for clues that can be used to turn the cold call into a warm call.
There are several critical things you can find by visiting your prospect's homepage, and you can do it all in three minutes or fewer (if it takes longer, you'll never meet your call metrics, so you have to know what to look for, and how to find it). You'll want to focus on your solution, and find clues on the website indicating that the prospect company could have a need. If you sell application development tools, for example, you'll look for indicators that the prospect is building applications; if your prospect is selling its own applications on its website, you now have additional ammunition you need to make a more meaningful opening call.
Here are a few classic web elements that are indicators that the prospect could potentially use a solution like yours, if you provide development or networking solutions, as an example. If you don't sell these types of solutions, you can use this as a template to create a list of your own "hot" web indicators for your solution. Look for elements such as these that you can refer to when engaging your new "cold" prospect:
- Bill paying capability
- Online account management
- Order entry
- Reseller portal
- Taxes or auto registration
- Shipment tracking
In addition, scan the homepage for any corporate news that could be valuable, such as acquisitions or mergers, or press releases or whitepapers mentioning the thoughts and ideas of upper-level management. This data will be critical when calling high, and again, turns your cold call into a warm call.
Your prospect's website is invaluable in telling you how the company makes its money. As I've said many times, prospects will only buy solutions if they will help the company to make money, or stop losing money. To build rapport and begin strategizing an ROI-based sales formula with your prospects, learn these three things from your website research:
- what product or service your prospect company sells
- who buys its products and services
- how its customers buy those products and services
And last but not least, check the Management page to determine the name of the appropriate CXO. It's better than any other source on the internet, because it's always current.
If you take the steps I've outlined in this post, you'll find your cold calls go a lot better, because you've taken some important steps that prove to your prospect that you know his or her company well enough to make an intelligent value proposition based on intelligence instead of guesswork. Remember to take 3 minutes or fewer per prospect (the more you do it, the more efficient you'll get), and add this powerful technique to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Apr 20, 2009 @ 02:03 AM
One of the things I preach --- and I really mean preach in my telesales training classes is you've only got one call to qualify your prospect. Just one. And when you get that person on the phone, that may be the only time you ever talk. Ever. We all know the frustration of calling back the same prospect that asked us to call back, and never being able to reach that person again. And all the voicemails and emails won't help, either, a vast majority of the time. So today I'm going to discuss a great sales tip to fix this, that works especially well if you're in the lead generation or lead qualification business.
Today's post is about prospects that try to get you off the phone as soon as you begin your opening. They're just going into a meeting. They were expecting another call. They're dealing with an emergency. They have dyspepsia or catarrh. Sometimes it's true, and sometimes it isn't. But you have to absolutely find out whether that prospect you're calling for the first time has a need for your offering. If he or she doesn't, that person is disqualified, and you don't have to call again. But he or she may, and that's what you absolutely have to discover before dropping this type of call.
So here's what you do. When the first-time prospect tell you he or she can't take your call, do the following:
1) Ask "Before I let you go, let me ask you this:"
2) Tell him or her in 5 seconds or fewer who you are and what you do.
3) Reference something that indicates that he or she might be interested. This could be that he or she attended a trade show, seminar, downloaded a whitepaper, or even something you saw on his or her company's website.
4) Ask if he or she will be looking into solutions like yours anytime within the "next few months."
This 4 step process works almost 100% of the time, because it's quick, gets you what you need, and often the prospect will actually have a conversation with you, provided there is an initiative to look into an offering like yours. Why does it work? Because you're honoring the "contract" that the prospect gave you at the beginning of the call. And that contract was "I'm busy, bug off." By responding with "Before I let you go, let me ask you this", you're telling the prospect that yes, you'll bug off, after one quick question. Even if the prospect is busy, that's a pretty good trade. So let me set this out in actual dialogue form, so you can see what it looks like. And let's say you sell in-circuit emulators, for example's sake:
Prospect: "Hi, this is Sandra Bannerjee"
You: "Hi Sandra, this is Geoff Alexander from Atron, and..."
Prospect: "I'm sorry, this is a really bad time to talk, can you call me next week?"
You: "I'd be happy to, Sandra, but before I go, let me ask you this. You attended our seminar on debugging the 680X0 series of processors, and I'm wondering if you'll be looking at buying emulators for those processors any time within the next several months?"
Prospect: "Yes we will."
You: "When do you have to have them on board?"
Prospect: "Real soon, but I can't talk right now."
You: "OK, Sandra, who can I talk with right now that can discuss some of the specs of the project?"
Prospect: "Lee Kiley is the Project Manager, go ahead and give Lee a call."
I could go on ad infinitum about where I'd take the conversation from here, but bottom line, you took a call that was going to be worthless, and turned it into something. You found an opportunity, and got a referral. And if you do this on every one of these types of calls, you'll be spinning your wheels less, generating more leads, selling faster, and be spending less time calling the same prospect over and over. But do remember "the contract." Add "Before I let you go, let me ask you this" to your sales vocabulary and highlight it in your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Mar 30, 2009 @ 12:57 AM
Probably the question most often asked in my telesales training courses is "How can I get more people to answer the phone in the first place?" With the proliferation of Caller ID, virtually everyone at every company can see who's calling, and they do make judicial decisions about which companies they're going to take calls from. If you've made a couple of calls and your party never picks up, go ahead and leave a good voicemail (what's a good voicemail? I'll cover that in a separate blog article within the next week or so). If your interesting, efficient, and brief voicemail isn't returned, call again, but this time manually disable your caller ID, and you'll be pleasantly surprised at how often your party answers the phone.
How do you disable caller ID? Every phone switch has its own system, so talk to your internal IT folks to figure out how to do it. I use AT&T, so I hit "*67" prior to making the non-caller ID call. I then get a second dial tone, and I'm off to the races. I have been amazed at the rate my contacts have increased. Your own IT people will be able to either do a global override, in which all outbound calls are masked, or give you a code that you can use with discretion. I don't recommend global override, as your company will have many customers and prospects that will want to take your company's calls. Use the individual override code instead, and you'll find that you'll reach more people, thereby leaving fewer voicemails and emails (I'll be writing about emails in the next few weeks, too). To sum up, here's the formula I recommend:
1) Make two "normal" calls. After the second, leave a brief voicemail.
2) If no response after a day or so, call again, overriding your caller ID.
3) If no response after 3 "override" attempts, send an email.
And don't forget to listen to your prospect's outgoing voicemail message all the way through, as he or she will tell you if he or she is out of the office, on vacation, or if there's someone else you can talk to. Through this 3-step approach, you can accelerate the process of having conversations with prospects fairly dramatically. Add it to your Best Practices playbook, and let me know how it works for you.