There’s really only three things that endanger a salesperson’s ability to close. Lack of leads. Lack of faith in the product. Lack of experience. Even if you’re a bad salesperson, if you have a good product that you belive in, you’ll make sales. Unless, you don’t have any leads. Then you’re screwed.
Dream sales jobs are hard to find. And when you do land a job that has good leads, good products and great service, they pay less, because they got all the good stuff and can pay lower. Most of us take on difficult sales jobs in hopes of being able to earn higher commissions. After all, the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.
As salespeople, the truth is, we spend more of our time tracking down leads than we do actually selling. Between prospecting and follow up, our schedules stay full and out time is never enough. Then it seems, when we do finally get leads, we can’t get ahold of them. It’s as if our profession makes us choose one struggle or the next!
When you do finally get a lead machine in place that sends you steady flows of new leads every day, you run into a new problem; getting in touch with the leads. My #1 job, if you want to know, is helping salespeople get leads. Then when they get leads, they struggle to make contact. The hardest part of the sale is the first contact, once it’s established the rest is hit or miss.
I’ve listened to 1000s of sales calls and observed dozens of different sales processes. In my personal, but not so humble experience, I always notice 1 or more of 3 key reasons leads don’t respond to salespeople. I’ll break it all down for you.
1: You Sound Salesy – Plain and simple, if you seem like a salesy douchebag, you will not get a response. If your first contact includes “it’s Ryan, a salesman here at…” you will not get a response in most cases. The public fears salespeople. I always say “hide the salesman” until you no longer can.
The best approach is to come out with a question so it illicit a response. You don’t want to sound like you talk to damn much either. Keep it short like this “Mr Smith, it’s Ryan with BFA and I have your inquiry. I was wondering, what are you looking to get help with?” Notice my question is very vague, but I’m asking them if they want help right up front. That’s called trial closing.
2: You Sound Like A Bot – Now is not the time to sound like a robot. The consumer is hip to auto-responders, phantom callers, robo-dialers, sly-dialing and all that. If they think you are a robot, they won’t feel the need to respond, because no one sane talks to robots. If your voicemail, email and texts sound like that robot chick from Small Wonder, no one is gonna give you their time.
Add the human element into your communication. Add something about current conditions, news, music, movies or something that lets them know you’re a real person trying to solver their real problem. In a world full of robots, you must stand out as human. It’s ok to be normal, human, funny and still professional at the same time. Show your style and make it worth their while.
3: The Offer/Reward Sucks – If you’ve got a BS offer and the leads don’t get what they were expecting, you can expect the leads to never contact you. I met an insurance salesman once who was paying a shit-ton of money for leads but never could make contact with them. I asked him to look at his ad campaign and it was them giving away 5 iPads in some drawing contest. The people were not leads, they were kangaroo contestants. When they found out they didn’t win, they wanted nothing to do with insurance salespeople.
The best way for you to structure an offer, because in reality, an offer is the first impression, is to follow this pattern; “How To Get X Without Having To Do Y” X= what they want Y= what they don’t want. Follow that path and then give them they “X” they want as the reward for signing up. If you do what you say, you’ll have a better contact rate.
For most salespeople, all three of these factors are in their hands. If you’re not in charge of who makes the offer, then you’ve got to really go hard on the first two. The key is to seem like you’ll be fun to work with, are professional and knowledgable enough about the product you’re selling. That’s the winning combination.
If you’re crushing it in business and sales and you are looking to level up with like minded people, I’d like to invite you to join the network that can help you fix all your business problems. It’s called “The Entourage” and you can get all the details at www.breakfreeacademy.com/entourage
