The Sales Blog Mailbag always brings something interesting. Today, I received this: “I need your motivation. Whenever I make outbound sales calls I get cold feet. The result is that I end up losing interest from the prospect.”
This salesperson doesn’t need motivation. She needs confidence. Here is how she can get the confidence.
Planned Dialogues
The primary reason that salespeople lack confidence when making cold calls is that they don’t have planned dialogues. It’s difficult to be confident when you don’t know what it is that you are going to say, how you are going to resolve your prospect’s concerns, and what commitments you need to gain.
Planned dialogues provide you with excellent language choices. Continually refining your language choices allows you to improve what you say and improve your effectiveness. Planned dialogues also provide you with guidance and direction that your sales interaction is supposed to take.
I have never understood the resistance to planned dialogues. Why wouldn’t you want to capture the most effective language choices? Why wouldn’t you want to rehearse the most logical and compelling ideas that would allow a prospect to agree to meet with you? This doesn’t mean that you can’t be creative when confronted with a novelty, but you don’t need to be creative on every call.
Planned dialogues build confidence.
A Compelling Message
Why are you on your prospect’s phone? Do you have a message that your prospect is going to find compelling?
One of the other reasons that salespeople lack confidence is that they don’t have a compelling message. In order to be confident, you have to be able to help your prospective client. You have to have a message that they find compelling.
Your message can’t be about you. It can’t be about who you are, your product or service, or your features and benefits. That time has passed. Your message needs to help your prospective client know exactly how you can help them produce better results. What are the challenges that they face that you are going to help them tackle?
You need a compelling message that resonates with your client, piques their curiosity, and gives them confidence that spending time with you is worth their while. And speaking of spending time with your prospects . . .
A Commitment to Gain
Your confidence is greatly improved by knowing what commitments you need to gain from your prospect. The planned dialogue and a compelling message make it easier to ask for and gain these commitments, but you need know what you are asking for and you have to ask for it.
Sometimes, the reason that you are uncomfortable asking for commitments is that you don’t feel that you created enough value to deserve the commitment (that’s why you have to be a value creator). Or it might simply be your own resistance to asking for and obtaining commitment. Maybe you are too soft, or maybe you haven’t yet embraced that you are in sales.
Helping your clients produce better results requires that you ask for an obtain commitments. Your prospective clients need you to know what commitments you need from them in order to help them produce the results that they need—and they need you to ask for those commitments.
If you want to be more confident in cold calling, you need planned dialogues, a message your prospective clients will find compelling, and the ability and willingness to ask for the commitment that you need in order to help your prospect produce better results.
Questions
How important is confidence to selling well and to cold calling in particular?
How do planned dialogues help build confidence?
How does having a compelling message and value proposition help to improve your confidence and produce results?
What commitments do you need to gain? Do have the ability and the willingness to ask for them?
