9 Ways to Improve Your Credibility

2 Comments »59 Seconds to Sales Success, Sales Best Practices, Sales Successtags: credibility, follow through, gatekeeper, listening skills, precall research, product knowledge, punctuality

May 29

Last week I wrote a slightly sarcastic post that focused on the negative aspect of credibility in sales.

Today’s post takes a positive approach and offers tangible ideas you can use to improve your credibility as a sales person.

1. Arrive early for calls and appointments

Let’s face it…punctuality can be challenging at times. Meetings that run over their allotted time, traffic delays, construction, etc. can make it difficult to arrive on time for your sales calls. However, when you arrive late for an appointment you not only run the risk of losing your credibility, you also stand the chance of losing the sales opportunity.

My suggestion is to plan your schedule so that you arrive at least 15 minutes early for every sales call, meeting or appointment. This can certainly be challenging if you schedule multiple appointments in a day. However, if you add buffer time to each meeting and the necessary travel time required to get from one appointment to the next, you can reduce the likelihood of arriving late.

This not only helps you arrive on time, it also reduces your stress and gives you time to mentally prepare for the upcoming meeting.

2. Research your prospect’s business or company

Regardless of how busy you are, invest a few minutes gaining an understanding of their business, their customers, and some of the business challenges they face related to your product or service BEFORE you contact them. In most cases, a quick Google search or browse of their website will achieve this goal.

Be careful not to fall into the trap of investing hours of time research a company instead of making your calls. I remember talking to one sales rep who admitted that she spent more than 40 hours researching one prospect. That was definitely excessive!

3. Spend most of your meetings or sales calls listening

Telling is selling…at least in some people’s minds. However, this approach prevents you from engaging your prospect in a meaningful dialogue, and generally speaking, it is ineffective.

It is much more effective to give the other person the majority of the airtime, even if you are doing a formal sales presentation. If the objective of your sales call is to present a product, structure your presentation so that it gets the other person involved. Checking in for questions or asking them to comment are two simple ways to achieve this goal.

4. Don’t interrupt your customers and prospects

It’s okay if your customer interrupts you to make a point or ask a question. However, you need to resist the temptation to do the same, especially if you possess a Driver-style personality.

Interrupting someone to make your point is a selfish behavior and it usually prevents you from learning more about the other person’s situation. When you encounter those situations, bite your tongue and wait patiently for the other person to finish talking before interjecting your comment.

5. Tell people only what they need to know about your product, service or solution

Contrary to popular belief, your customers and prospect seldom, if ever, need to know everything about your offering. This may be difficult to comprehend if you are an Analytical type individual because I know you believe that an abundance of information is critical in order to make a decision.

However, very few people need to know all the details, specs, features and bell and whistles. You can be much more effective by discussing only the elements of your offering that are relevant to each particular customer or prospect.

6. Follow through

Most sales conversations require some type of follow up or follow through. When you fail to execute the follow-up steps, you will be seen as someone who can’t execute.

If you make a promise or commitment to someone, make sure you do what you say you will do, when you say you will do it. Schedule it in your Smartphone, Outlook calendar, or DayTimer (does anyone actually use these anymore?) and then execute it.

7. Pitch your offering after determining if a need exists

Too many sales people still make the fatal mistake of pitching their product or service before they have uncovered a need or demand for it.

You can increase your credibility as a sales professional by asking well-thought-out questions to determine a prospect’s potential need for your offering. Even if your research has determined that a need exists, you should validate it by asking a few questions.

8. Regularly update your product knowledge

This can be difficult, especially in businesses where the life-cycle of many products is shrunk or in industries that have rapidly developing technology.

It may be impossible to become highly knowledgeable about all of your products; however, investing time to update your knowledge is a good investment of time. Talk to your engineers or product specialists.

9. Befriend the gatekeeper

I know many sales people who will say or do almost anything to get past the gatekeeper in order to connect with a key decision maker. However, this type of manipulative approach seldom pays off in the long run.

When I worked in the corporate world my desk was across from the Vice President’s executive assistant and it was interesting to watch how she responded to people trying to connect with our boss. The most successful people enlisted her help, treated her with respect, asked her questions, and in some cases, treated her like she was the actual decision maker.

What do you think? Are there other behaviors that can help you improve your credibility? What do you do to gain credibility?

Why Companies Hate Sales People Who Cold Call

8 Comments »B2B, Cold Calling, Prospectingtags: cold calling, cold calling tactics, gatekeeper, sales pitches, voice mail

Apr 29

Bring up the subject of cold calling with a group of sales people and you are assured of a lively conversation as they lament about the challenges associated with this task.

There is no question that it is difficult to connect with the right person in a company. It can be frustrating dealing with gatekeepers, receptionists, and executive assistants. Not to mention that decision makers seldom return voice mail messages. And, if you happen to connect with them, they often brush you off before you get a chance to tell them about your product or service.

A few months ago I wrote an article called Why Salespeople Hate Cold Calling that prompted a lot of feedback. Many of the comments were from sales people who offered their personal hesitations about cold calling. One of most common complaints was the lack of return calls they received and the way they were treated by their prospects.

However, let’s turn the tables for a moment and take a look at cold calling from a company’s perspective. Many companies hate sales people who cold call. Here are six reasons why.

1. The sales person is uninformed.

While people in sales will argue that one purpose of a cold call is to gather information about the company, employees in that organization will tell you that calls like this only demonstrate that the caller is uninformed and ill-prepared. Very few people in a company have time to answer basic questions that could be found on the company’s website.

2. The call is an unwelcome interruption.

Virtually every cold call is an interruption and because most employees are extremely busy, the calls are unwelcome interruption. Certainly, some people will say that if you don’t want to be interrupted that you should not answer your telephone. However, when the call originates from an inside extension, the natural impulse is to answer the call. This leads us to our next point.

3. The sales person uses manipulative tactics to make contact with the decision maker.

Because of the challenges associated with cold calling many sales people resort to using a variety of tactics to connect with the key decision maker. These can include asking for a different department and then asking to be transferred or misrepresenting who they are or the reason for their call. It may also include how they represent themselves. Here are two examples.

a. An executive once told me that a sales rep called and told his executive assistant that he was a close personal friend of the decision maker.

b. A sales rep called my office inquiring about one of my training programs only to pitch me on his products.

These types of approaches may work—once or twice—but ultimately they cause decision makers to become more skeptical about accepting receiving calls from people they don’t know.

4. The company has no use for the product or service that is being pitched.

Some sales people will say that the purpose of their call is to determine whether or not their product or service is applicable to the company they are calling upon.

5. The sales person refuses to take no for an answer.

Certainly persistence is an essential sales skill. However, hanging on like a pit bull and refusing to take no only serves to piss off the other person. And any chance you had of meeting or connecting with that person goes down the drain. You need to know when to let go and when to hang on.

6. The sales person is rude to the receptionist, gatekeeper or executive assistant.

Although this is the last point on the list, it is one of the most important. Too many sales people treat the gatekeeper with disdain or like a second-class citizen. These individuals fail to realize that many gatekeepers can influence who the decision maker meets with.

So, what does this mean for you as a sales professional?

It means that you have an uphill battle.

It means that cold calling is becoming increasingly more difficult.

It means that you need to avoid using the tactics mentioned above. Cold calling is not easy but you can stand out from the crowd and separate yourself from the competition by doing your due diligence before you make your calls and by acting like a true professional.

Planning a Sales Meeting or Training Program?

I help sales people master sales conversations so they can win more business and increase their sales. If you’re planning a sales meeting, conference or event and need an engaging & informative speaker, call me at: 905-633-7750 or Kelley@Fearless-Selling.ca and we can discuss what type of program would help you achieve your goals and objectives.