Please Don't Hang Up! Three Techniques to Connect with Prospects

POST AN ARTICLE

Featured Sales Blogs

In Partnership Wth:

DiversityJobs.com

JustJobs.com

MAIN MENU

Please Don't Hang Up! Three Techniques to Connect with Prospects

Written by Mike Brooks

More Gravy
One Sentence to Establish Immediate Rapport

What’s the first thing that goes through your head when you get a call from a sales rep? If you answered, “I can’t wait to get them off the phone,” then you’re not alone. In fact, when a telemarketer calls me up at home and says those words that immediately identify them as a sales person, the “How are you today?” line, my first thought is, “I’ll be great as soon as I get rid of you!”

One of the biggest mistakes sales reps make who have to call prospects – either to set an appointment, generate interest, or qualify and then send information – is they don’t acknowledge in any way what is going through the prospect’s mind. Let’s face it, everyone you call has a reaction to being intruded upon, and each of them is having a similar reaction to the one that you and I have.

If you want to successfully connect with your prospect, and earn the precious few seconds it takes to establish rapport and generate some interest, then you must put yourself into the mind of your prospect and enter the conversation that’s going on in their minds. If you don’t do this, then you will be pitching and pitching and the prospect will just be waiting for you to take a breath so they can blow you off.

Three Techniques to Connect with Prospects
So, what can you do to enter this conversation? Incorporate the following three techniques the next time you make a cold call, and watch your call times improve, your confidence grow and your sales and income soar.

Technique number one: If we all know that what’s going on in your prospect’s mind is, “Oh, no, not another sales rep”, then why not acknowledge this? Try:

“Now _________, you probably get a lot of these kinds of calls, don’t you?
Well if you’re like me you’re probably wishing you hadn’t answered the phone right about now, so let’s make a deal: I’ll ask you just two quick questions to see if what I have can actually help you (do whatever it is your product or service can do), and if it can and you’re interested, we’ll continue, and if it can’t or you’re not interested, we’ll part friends, is that fair enough?”

Technique number two: Many times what’s going through a prospect’s mind is that they are too busy to listen at that moment, so they just use the overall brush off of, “I’m not interested,” and this usually gets people off the phone. Here’s how to enter into that conversation:

“_________ if you’re like me you’re probably busy doing a million things so I’ll make this brief. Let me just ask you two quick things and if we find that we’re a fit and you’d like to know more than we can talk about it or we can schedule a time when it’s more convenient, is that fair?”

The nice thing about this technique is that it acknowledges that they’re busy but it gives them the option of spending more time with you now if they like what they hear.

Technique number three: This third technique is something I learned from a good friend of mine, David Frey. I’ll let him tell it to you straight:

When I first started out in marketing I needed to make some quick money.
At the time, there was a rash of mold infestations here in Texas and mold remediators were having a heyday. I knew they were hungry for good, solid leads.

And about the same time I came across a way to generate leads using telephone autodialing. So I bought an autodialing system, installed it in my home and started generating leads for mold remediators. Yes, I admit it. I was one of those pesky, annoying autodialing demons.

It Worked So Well That I moved into generating leads for the mortgage industry. At the height of my lead generating business, I was autodialing 12,000 people in the city of Houston every day out of my little home office. You should have seen all the telephone lines coming out of my wall.

It was crazy!

From all those calls, I would generate about 5 good, solid leads a day (which actually made me a lot of money).

My Eurika Moment! I wasn't happy with only 5 leads a day so I started testing new scripts. I thought to myself, what's the first thing that I do when I hear an autodialed message? I HANG UP! So I added 4 words to the front of my script and KABOOM!

My leads QUINTUPLED….to an average of 20 leads a day with the same amount of dials. Wanna know what those 4 words were? They were simple.

"Please don't hang up"

That's it. I added, "Please don't hang up" at the beginning of my script and my leads quintupled!”

For all of you out there who use an autodial, I recommend you trying this technique. Once again, it’s effective because it gets you into the mind of your prospect.

Think about what you’ve learned today as you go out and make your cold calls. Always ask yourself: “What is my prospect thinking, and how can I speak to that?” If you do, you’ll make a much better connection and you’ll end up making more sales!

Mike Brooks
		About the author:
		With over 20 years of inside sales closing experience, Mike Brooks has been billed nationwide as Mr. Inside Sales. Once a bottom 80% producer, Mike learned and perfected the skills of Top 20% producers and became the number one sales rep out of 5 Southern California branch offices. Author of the hot new book,The Real Secrets of the Top 20: How To Double Your Income Selling Over the Phone, Mike's proven techniques, strategies and skills are used successfully by companies in industries such as securities sales, high-tech sales, pharmaceuticals, equipment leasing and other business to business applications. Mike combines proven, current tactics and skills with personal experience to provide a motivational and practical presentation. .