Selling over the phone is quite different in 2018 than it was in the last decade. That said, it's as alive today as it was back then. It simply requires a much more fine-tuned approach. My personal experience has taught me that about 7.5 hours are required to land one appointment or referral through cold calling. That means that salespeople are technically able to generate a new lead daily. For most companies who use cold calling approach, this isn't bad at all.
Below are uncommon tactics that helped me to significantly improve my conversion rate over the phone. These tactics are quite effective for business to business (B2B) phone sales and I have personally used them.
Start With A Command
Why? Simple. I want to ask them to comply to a small request so that they are subconsciously primed to the idea of taking instructions from me. So that later in the call, when I ask for a bigger commitment (the sale), they will already be pre-framed to the idea of accepting my request. It’s a nifty little hack that has helped me to drive my sales call.
Asking someone to turn up the volume of their phone so you can hear them better and priming them for a later request is not considered a manipulation. You are simply using human psychology to your advantage to persuade a prospect to see the value you bring to them. Robert Cialdini researches this idea of anchoring and starting with a small request and then asking for a larger commitment later, in his famous 1984 book Influence.
End Every Sentence With A Question
By doing this, you control the conversation. It’s important to have total control over the conversation because otherwise, you won't be able to lead the prospect to close a sale. The moment you let them ask questions, you begin to lose your frame of the conversation and they begin to lead the call. This is a tactic that I picked after I started recording and listening to my sales calls.
Let your customers vocalize their pain points and admit their own strengths, weaknesses, resources, obstacles and more. This is a solid tactic for getting them to sell themselves on your solution. Make them admit to you that they need what you are trying to sell. Otherwise, they will feel like they are being sold to, instead of buying. No one likes being sold to.
Oren Klaff, in his 2011 bestseller Pitch Anything emphasizes the importance of controlling the frame of any sales pitch. Frame control is about getting people to see your highly differentiated service as value and worth the high price, by seeing through the same window. Frame control is giving someone a lens to see what you see. The moment you start losing control of that frame and the conversation drifts toward price, the meeting is over. Unless you have done a great job of getting the prospect to experience the different emotions needed to close a sale, you will likely lose the sale and will rely on the prospect’s charitable traits to make the sale still happen.
Let Them Commit To Making A Decision By The End
This way, you are making sure that before you get too far into the call, you are asking for a pre-commitment contract to ensure you do not end up without a closed deal. If you cannot close the sale while the prospect is still on the call, you will likely lose the sale. This tactic has helped me to close clients almost instantly after I started applying it. Until I started taking this approach, I used to never hear back once the call was completed.
So, I begin by asking early on in the call: “Hey, so this call is really all about you. I want to be respectful of both your time and also mine. And I want to make sure that I can provide you with as much value as possible. So, I am going to ask you a few questions which will help me understand where you currently stand. These questions will also allow us to figure out any obstacles or resources we may not have discovered. So, if by the end of this call, we are able to pinpoint your specific needs, and we decided that we are a fit to work with each other, can we agree that we will make a decision?”
Some people think that they will hurt my feelings by saying no, so they say things like, "Oh, I need to think about it." But I want them to be straightforward and let me know right away. If they say no, it is likely that they are not a serious buyer.
Go onto the next call.
