To succeed in sales, you need a growth mindset that will allow you to persist after being told no. You also need to be determined to continue when you hear nothing.
Your contacts receive more email communications they can read. Your prospective clients avoid phone calls and emails because they are time-starved and must reserve their time for their priorities.
You probably don’t respond to every email and answer every call to your cell phone from an unknown number, so you understand why your prospects don’t respond to your cold outreach. If you feel like no one wants to talk to you, there are several variables you can work on to improve your results.
Start with Your Mindset
When you tell yourself, “No one wants to talk to me,” you are flooding your mind with negativity and lying to yourself. Unless you believe that your contact is responding to all the calls and emails they get from every salesperson in your territory, it can’t be true that they are avoiding you.
If you lie to yourself, you are better off telling lies that will allow you to continue pursuing your contacts and your goals. You would be better off telling yourself that every one of your prospects wants to talk to you and that they need your help improving their results. You need a positive, optimistic mindset.
Intestinal Fortitude
Intestinal fortitude means you have the courage and determination to do something difficult or unpleasant. Intestinal suggests that you must gut it out. Those with a high level of intestinal fortitude have an advantage over those without it because it allows them to continue to do something unpleasant or difficult without giving up.
In B2B sales, no one succeeds in reaching their goals and objectives without persisting long enough. The more difficult it is to get a meeting with a client, the better. Because it means that once you win their business most of your competitors will give up any pursuit, frustrated by your client’s unwillingness to communicate with them.
You will never get what you want if you don’t continue to pursue it. There is no reason to give up, as you will prospect anyway.
The Value of Your Conversation
In The Lost Art of Closing: Winning the 10 Commitments That Drive Sales, you will find a sales rule called the trading value rule. This rule will help you get a meeting with your dream client by offering them a conversation they will find valuable.
All you need to do to make it more difficult to acquire a first meeting is to suggest that you can help your client improve their results before you have ever spoken to them. They already know that the value of the conversation will be a waste of their time. The trading value rule has you offer a conversation that would create value for the client. For example, you could offer something like an executive briefing on the current environment and the forces and trends creating industry headwinds. Instead of offering a stale and uninteresting conversation about your company and how you can help, you offer them insights valuable to your contacts.
In B2B sales, the discovery call has been completely commoditized. By trading value for your contact’s time, your request for a meeting is a novelty.
Your Confidence in Communication
If you don’t believe you belong in the room, your contacts will not believe it, either. Humans are tuned to recognize when a person isn’t sure of themselves. Any uncertainty in your communication will be communicated to your contact.
The future of sales has salespeople requiring expertise. Your contacts are seeking people with the insights and information they need to make a decision that will help them generate certain outcomes. You must convey your confidence through your communication, something much easier to do with your voice than over email.
One of the advantages of the trading value rule is that it improves your confidence that you can and will create value for your prospective client in the first meeting.
Your Conviction in Communication
The greater your conviction in your communication, the greater your chances of securing a meeting. Like your confidence, your conviction is transferred to your contacts. It is easy to recognize that a person doesn’t believe what they are communicating.
When you are certain that your prospective client will benefit from the sales conversation, both your confidence and your conviction are heard and felt by your buyers and decision-makers. You can’t fake conviction. You need to feel it in your heart.
Why No One Wants to Talk to You
Remember that the salespeople who have called on your contacts in the past are the reason why no one wants to talk to you. When contacts feel that a meeting was a waste of their time, they are not eager to take a chance on another salesperson. Your contacts have rarely experienced a value-creating sales conversation that generated an excellent sales experience. This is why they try to avoid a pitch for a meeting that doesn’t promise to be worth their time.
However, one reason you believe no one wants to talk to you is because you believe that is true. This comes from the way you feel about yourself and your ability to help your client with their decision to change. If you don’t believe you know how they can best make the change that will improve their business and their results, they won’t believe it, either.
It has never been easy to get a meeting. When you have confidence and conviction, your clients can sense that you are trading value for their time and that you can deliver something important in the first meeting. You will need to adopt these practices as your contacts are overwhelmed by communication and underwhelmed by the sales experience. If you want people to talk to you, you need to reverse these patterns and shift their expectations.
