BY Jessica Helinski
Mastering phone sales motivation can be difficult for today's sales reps. After all, you all have many ways to reach out to both your current and prospective clients. Email, social media, texts, and videos are a few of the most popular examples of your outreach options. But sales reps should still be able to pick up a telephone and expertly ask for a meeting. “Yes, there are now many alternative prospecting avenues available to the astute sales person,” writes Sean McPheat for the MTD Sales Training blog. “However, in most sales processes, cold or warm, you still have to make a call.”
Here's Some Phone Sales Motivation
The longer you go without mustering up your phone sales motivation, the more daunting it may feel to actually make sales calls. And the less you make sales calls, the more out of practice you will become. Eventually, it may even get to the point where you will miss out on opportunities because of your phone sales phobia. McPheat encourages today’s sales reps to make the effort to call prospective customers, and then shares three things you should keep in mind when doing so.
Tip Number One
McPheat's first tip may seem counter-intuitive: Do no try to sell your product or service to the call's recipient. Avoid the temptation to make a quick pitch to whoever picks up the phone. Instead, you need to focus solely on “selling” the sales appointment or meeting. Often, when asked for a meeting, prospects make a buyer’s objection, stating they are not interested due to pricing or need. This triggers the urge to sell, but doing so is not the wisest choice. “Why on earth are you trying to close the sale at this stage of the sales process?” asks McPheat. “Neither you nor the prospect should even be thinking about making a buying decision at this point! Be careful not to fall into that trap.” When this happens and you need phone sales motivation, you need to, instead, emphasize that you are not asking for their business, but rather just a meeting. Your only goal during the phone call is to get an appointment made. So, you need to build up and sell the value of meeting with you and leave promoting your product or service until later.
McPheat’s other two tips are just as easy to implement and just as important to mastering phone sales motivation. By integrating these suggestions and actively making phone calls, you will set yourself up as a well-rounded sales rep. You will also capture the opportunities left behind by the sales reps who only communicate digitally!