Coffee is SOOO not for closers anymore
…nor are the cookies for the “Boss Baby” fans out there. But I digress (already!)
Listen, in today’s modern sales era, we don’t typically get face-to-face meetings. This is when closing was king. We can assume our contacts are busy and they are hiding from us behind their phones. I mean, how often do you pick up calls from unknown numbers or known vendors?
That means the BIG SKILL for inside sales (and smart field/channel sales) isn’t the close, it’s the opening! It’s Moneyball folks, you can’t close what you can’t open. OK, I mixed metaphors there. It’s about getting on base with our intro.
My team and I listen to about 1000 phone calls a year, and we’ve categorized the majority of sales intros out there into six horrifying and all-too-common bad-intro buckets.
- “Show up and Throw up.” Seriously, I played an actual example of one of these at a conference and we had to fast forward it for time. The customer didn’t talk for 2:24. Guess what he said when he did?
- “Good for You.” Congratulations on being my Account Rep. Did that seriously warrant a call to waste my time?
- “Yeah, that’s my Value Prop.” There’s a time and place for your two-second pitch. The intro is NOT it.
- “Get out of Jail Free.” Don’t ask them if they’re the person who handles purchasing decisions for your service. Who in their right mind would say “Yes! (And I love vendor calls!)”
- “The Setup.” I’m not sure who invented the “That would be of value to you, right?” pitch but I want to scream every time I hear it. It just BEGS me to say no. “You want to save money right?” STOP!
- “The Touchbase.” Don’t touch my base. Ever.
Sales Call Intros that Work
The good news in this litany of bad is that intros are easy to fix. How? Put your customer at the heart of it. Lead with what’s in it for THEM and not you. Sure YOU want to introduce yourself, but why should THEY care?
In two sentences you can get their attention AND lay out the purpose of your call. How? We call it the “SWIIFT℠” intro (So, What’s in it for Them?). This is what I covered in my webinar for BrightTalk. I dug a little deeper & provided tools to help you fix intros at your office. Click here to download the recording.
OH! And I collect these now. Send me your hilarious examples of my top 6 offenders. We’ll edit the names to protect the guilty. Yeah, I’d love to hear your good ones too – AND how many more at-bats you and your team are getting. Check out our business development training to learn how fixing intros raised close percentages up to 300%!
So let’s get out there and play some ball! Oh, but now while drinking coffee right? Oh, whatever.