Write Before You Speak
I was at my father’s house yesterday just spending time with the family and spending time with a friend that I hadn’t seen in over 2 years. He’s moved out of state and started a family elsewhere so not much time to get together anymore. While we were hanging out, though, we played a great party game called Buzzword. Essentially how you play is this: divide into two teams (we did guys versus girls), then one player from team 1 reads a card that has a Buzzword and 10 clues. The players read the card to his/her team so that they can try to guess the answer to each of the 10 clues. On one turn the guys’ Buzzword was “horse” so the answer to each clue had to include the word “horse” in it. We went through the clues fairly easily and had a good time but the best part was when my friend answered the question “Common knowledge…” with the answer of “horse knowledge.” Oh we had a blast laughing over that very easy mistake because of course the correct answer was close to that “horse sense”, which everyone has heard of. We didn’t let that go for the rest of the game. In a way it took away some of his credibility during the game, even though it was all just good fun.
I think this applies to us as well whenever we are cold calling a new prospect. We get caught up in the excitement that this person might be interested in buying from us. Or we just get all excited about digging in and making a lot of cold calls today to reach our goals. Either way, we end up just making it up as we go along. Too often salespeople tend to just go with the flow when it comes to presenting their business, products, or services when a little forethought and preparation can go a long way. Write down what you plan to say in advance. Spend time thinking about the potential objections that will come up during the call. Make sure you have a specific purpose or goal to achieve for every call you make. And most importantly don’t deviate from achieving that goal. If your goal is to get an appointment then get to the goal quickly and handle objections as they come up in order to get the appointment.
Taking just one or two hours to write down objections, product/service presentations, ways to present your price and close the sale are worth more time than any amount of cold calls you could have fumbled through instead. So take the time because if you don’t you will lose credibility almost immediately. If you do, you will have confidence and reach your goals faster than you think.