Always Get the Customer’s Name Right

There’s nothing more off-putting in a sales approach than a salesperson misspelling or mispronouncing your name. If the salesperson can’t be bothered to learn something as basic as your name, it sends the message that he doesn’t care about you as a person, and it certainly gets the relationship off to a bad start. In e-mails, double check that the customer’s name isn’t misspelled or mistyped. For telephone or in-person approaches make sure you’ve figured out how to pronounce the prospect’s name during your preapproach research. Ask contacts who might know (a receptionist, for instance, or your referral source) if you are unsure. And if the prospect has a difficult name, and you can’t get a confirmation on pronunciation, avoid using his name in your opening lines.

Always Listen

As sales consultants Andrew Sokol and Ike Krieger say, during a sales call, “Don’t be interesting; be interested.”^[1] In other words, don’t try to impress your customer by spending a lot of time talking about your qualifications or how wonderful your company or product is; instead, show your prospect that you are genuinely interested in getting to know him and in understanding his needs. The only way you can do this is to listen. Ask questions and then let your customer do the talking. During in-person sales calls you should engage in active listening, which was discussed in Chapter 5 “The Power of Effective Communication”. Show the customer that you are really listening by adopting a listening posture: look the customer in the eye and lean forward or incline your head while she’s talking. In any sales approach you should restate the essential points your customer brings up, both to check for accuracy of understanding and to show that you are paying attention.^[2]

Listening is one of those skills that is easier said than done. While people naturally want to talk, they feel most appreciated when someone else is listening. That’s when people open up and share their goals, wants, and needs. Salespeople are often known for their ability to talk, but it is listening that makes the best salespeople.

You might think about listening as something you do in person or on the telephone, but listening is also a strategy online. Author and sales trainer Shane Gibson has coined the term “Listening 2.0” to describe the need to “listen” to the online conversation before you begin broadcasting your message.

Be Ready with Your Elevator Pitch

Have you ever heard the term “elevator pitch”? It’s a concise description of a product or service that should take no longer than an average elevator ride.^[3] Every salesperson has an elevator pitch for the product or service he is selling. That way, he can tell people about his product in under sixty seconds, and it’s a perfect way to start a conversation or phone call and helps to make a good first impression. In fact, everyone from a CEO to an entrepreneur has an elevator pitch about her company to tell potential investors, shareholders, and other stakeholders. Most listeners don’t have the time to hear all the details about a product or service in the first minutes of a conversation so the elevator pitch provides just enough information so the audience knows what he is talking about and wants to know more. In other words, “An elevator pitch is an overview of an idea, product, service, project, person, or other solution and is designed to just get a conversation started.”^[4]

Your elevator pitch comes in handy when you are making an approach on the phone or in person. It’s the perfect opportunity to tell someone about your company and product or service in less than sixty seconds so that you can engage her in conversation. Remember, an elevator pitch isn’t a sales presentation; it’s simply a way to begin an interactive conversation and get to your ultimate goal—a meeting with the decision maker.

Do Give Your Name and the Purpose of Your Call in the First Twenty Seconds^[5]

Your prospect will probably decide whether or not he is interested in what you have to say within the first twenty seconds of the call, so it’s best to be direct and get this essential information across early on. You might say something like “This is Shamika Lorenz from Selling Solutions, a firm that specializes in helping businesses reduce their selling costs, and I’m calling to let you know about an upcoming seminar for small business owners in your area.” Such directness also conveys honesty and lets your prospect know that you won’t waste his time.^[6]

Do Prepare a Script for Your Opening Statement

Because you want to get your prospect’s attention in the first twenty seconds, it’s important not to stumble over your words or sound like you are rambling. After you have given your name and the purpose of your call, offer a reference point based on your preapproach research. For example, “I read that your start-up has recently opened a new downtown location.” This will personalize your approach and help establish your credibility. Next, lead into a general benefit statement^[7] that will address your prospect’s “what’s in it for me?” question.

Do Ask “Is This a Good Time?”

Keep in mind that asking for permission helps build trust and allows the customer to feel like she is in control of the call.^[8] However, it’s important to think about the way you phrase your question. It is always easier for people to say yes to a question than to say no, so when you open with something like “Did I catch you at a bad time?” all your customer has to do is agree with you (“Yes, this is a bad time.”), and the call is effectively over. On the other hand, if you ask whether this is a good time, a yes response will work in your favor.^[9] Your customer is only likely to say no if this really is a bad time, and if that happens, you are well positioned to say “I understand. Would Monday at 10:30 be a better time to talk?”^[10]

Don’t Start Off by Asking, “How Are You Today?”

This common greeting is one you probably use without thinking twice about it. But opening a sales call this way over the phone (when you are contacting a busy stranger who doesn’t know why you have called) can be off-putting and will probably come across as insincere.^[11]

Don’t Launch into Prolonged Explanations

As sales coach Sharon Drew Morgan says, “Your prospect is obviously not sitting by the phone waiting for a call from you.”^[12] You want to be personable when you call, but you also want to keep in mind that for busy decision makers, phone calls are interruptions, so the more business oriented the interruption, the better.^[13]

Leaving a Voice Mail Message

Sometimes it is difficult to reach the person by phone. Although it’s a good idea to call back at different times of the day to see if you can catch the person, it is also a good idea to leave a short voice mail to introduce yourself, your company, a brief reason for your call, and when you will call back.

Do Write a Number of E-mails in Different Styles and Tones

Online marketing expert Daegan Smith suggests crafting about fifteen different e-mail templates so you can choose between them when you want to get in touch with a prospect.^[15] You can think of it a little like building up your wardrobe so that you have different things you can wear on different occasions: you wouldn’t wear the same clothes to a baseball game that you would wear to a business meeting. You also wouldn’t send the exact same communication to all your prospects. The bottom line is that you want the e-mail to be as personal as possible.

Do Send a Well-Written E-mail

Keep in mind that an e-mailed sales approach is still a first impression, even though the communication doesn’t involve any immediate contact. While the e-mail should be personal, it should be more formal than the personal e-mails you send to friends. You want to sound knowledgeable and credible, which means paying close attention to your word choice and style. Give the e-mail the same attention you would give to a business letter. This also means reading the e-mail several times before sending it to check for spelling and grammar mistakes, just as you would with any other business correspondence.^[16]

Do Follow Up Persistently

Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get a response to the first or second e-mail you send. In B2B sales, it often takes about twelve e-mails before contacts reply, so be persistent.^[18] If your prospect doesn’t respond right away, it doesn’t mean that he isn’t interested in what you have to offer—just assume that he is a busy person with plenty of other distractions that come across his desk every day. If you continue to send your e-mails regularly, eventually the message will register on your prospect’s “radar screen.” Of course, you don’t want your e-mails to be an annoyance either, so consider including an “unsubscribe” option somewhere in the body of the message for the prospects who truly aren’t interested so that they can request to be removed from your e-mail list.^[19]

Don’t Send E-mails That Look Like Templates

Again, the goal is to make your e-mails as personal as you can. If you have a number of e-mails drafted, select the one that seems most appropriate to the specific prospect(s) you want to target, and include your prospect’s name in the heading and body of the e-mail.^[20] This will set your message apart from the average, impersonal “junk” e-mail that people get regularly.

Do Make a Comment When You Add a Prospect as a New Friend

According to marketing specialist Leslie Hamp, even something as simple as “I noticed we were on the Webinar together, and I’d like to add you as my friend,” will work.^[23] The point is that you want to give your approach a personal touch. If you just go out and friend all your prospects without making the effort to engage with them, they might not accept your friend request in the first place, and even if they do accept, they may wonder who you are and how you found them. Or worse, they may soon forget about you altogether. You can think of the networking tool as a facilitator, something that gives you the opportunity to connect, but it is still up to you to do the work of socially interacting and leveraging your connections.

Do Aim for Quality over Quantity

There are so many new and interesting social media programs available that it can be tempting to join multiple sites; but if you are a member of more than two or three social networks at one time, you will probably find your efforts spread too thin. You can get the most out of your social networking by focusing on regular contributions to the few networks of which you are a member, rather than by trying to maintain your profile and connections on a number of sites.^[24]

Do Contribute to the Community

In social networking situations, just as in face-to-face interactions, you want to build a good rapport by earning the trust and respect of your customers and colleagues. This means considering ways you can participate in and contribute to the online community, rather than simply using the social networking sites to promote yourself or your product. As virtual office administrator Sue Canfield says, “Social networking needs to be about building relationships—not primarily about self-promotion.”^[25] For instance, if you decide to start participating in a news-related social networking site like Digg.com (where people post links to and comments about news stories), start rating and commenting on other users’ postings before you begin bookmarking your content there.^[26]

Don’t Let Your Language Get Sloppy

As with e-mail approaches, pay attention to your language. Use a higher level of formality when you contact business prospects than you would use when you send social networking messages to your friends; avoid slang (like “u” for “you” or “btw” for “by the way”).^[27]

Don’t Make a Sales Pitch

Even though a social-network approach looks different from an in-person or over-the-phone approach, the purpose is the same—establishing rapport, building trust, and helping your customer discover needs and opportunities—so avoid making your sales pitch during your initial contact. For instance, returning to the example of the Web site design specialist, assume you added ten of your fellow Webinar participants to your social network. Maybe your company has made a short YouTube video that offers advice on incorporating blogging capabilities into business Web sites, so you send a message and link to your ten new contacts: “I thought you might be interested in this video.” In the video’s description on YouTube, you can post a link to your company Web site or blog where you make a direct sales pitch. This way you are offering your prospects valuable information without coming across as pushy. If a prospect is interested in pursuing your services, he has the resources to follow up on his own.^[28]

Do Use a Strong, Attention-Grabbing Opener

You want to get your prospect to like you in the first minute of your sales approach, and you want to give him a reason to keep listening to what you have to say. Be up front: introduce yourself and explain the purpose of your call (including the general benefit statement you have prepared) early on. Then, as in any sales call, ask permission to continue.Tom Reilly, Value-Added Selling: How to Sell More Profitably, Confidently, and Professionally by Competing on Value, Not Price, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 138. Your opening might sound something like this:

You:
Hello, Aaron. My name is Janeka Jones from iFX, a provider of e-commerce solutions.

Aaron:
Hello.

You:
We met at the South by Southwest conference in Austin last week. You mentioned that an area of growth for your business is personalized apparel. The personalized jerseys you offer on your Web site are really unique. In fact, I ordered one this weekend, which gave me an idea about how we can help you reduce your order processing time. Is this a good time to talk about your business?

Aaron:
I’m running off to a meeting in a few minutes, but I always like talking about my business.

Aaron:
I’m always looking for ways to get the product to my customers faster, but I really can’t afford any additional order processing costs.

You:
I can understand that. My idea can actually help you reduce your overall operating costs and improve your processing time. Since you are on your way to a meeting, would it work for you if I stop by on Tuesday morning so we can talk more?

Aaron:
Let’s see. Tuesday morning at 10:30 looks like it works for me.