Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

Make better cold calls by ending the “How are you today?” habit

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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.