Stop Cold Calling and Start Closing 100% of Your Sales Presentations

Written by Tyler Wilson

Cold calling salespeople have a tough life for the most part. I know this because I’ve been there making call after call and knocking on door after door. When I happened to make a cold call I was met with rude responses, unqualified prospects, and gatekeepers at every turn.

Luckily I stopped all that before I quite selling forever!

And if you’re in the same situation I suggest you start looking for an alternative to your cold calls very quickly.

“But what do I do?” you may ask.

Well the answer is quite simple; customer attraction and qualification!

Lets start first with customer attraction.

Customer Attraction

Did you know that you’re in business for yourself if you’re a salesperson? That’s right, I don’t care if you started your own company or you work for the largest corporation on the planet, if you are a salesperson that makes a commission from your efforts and not a set salary then you are in business for yourself. So start acting like a business!

Do you have a website? No? Why not? Every business should nowadays.

Do you have your own phone and fax lines? Only a cell phone? Well you still need your own fax line because just about every business does and they are really helpful devices for sending contracts.

Do you have your own marketing? What? “I’m not in marketing I’m in sales” you say? Well your business isn’t going to get very far with that strategy.

All kidding aside as a salesperson you need just about everything a real business needs because you need to bring in customers and make a sale. Think of yourself like a business that your present company hired as a consultant to bring in customers, because that’s exactly what you do.

Businesses have all those websites, blogs and marketing plans going for a reason; they bring in business! They attract customers and they get the phone to ring. And that’s exactly what you need to do; get the phone to ring!

This is not as hard as it sounds. It just takes doing.

So OK, lets say you get this area handled. What’s next and how do we close 100% of our sales presentations?

Well the simple answer is qualification!

Qualification

Every time you go out on a sales call and you don’t close the prospect I want you to ask yourself this question, “Why did I meet with Mr. or Mrs. Prospect?” You ask yourself this question because obviously your prospect either wasn’t a good fit for your product or service or he/she wasn’t ready to buy. Either way you shouldn’t have met with them.

Now of course I know a couple prospects will slip through the cracks because customers aren’t always honest but you should do your best to meet only with prospects that have an extremely high likelihood of closing. Which means your qualification process must be good and thorough.

And your qualification starts with your customer attraction. If a prospect responded to your marketing and picked up a phone to call you then that’s a start. If a prospect asks buying questions like “how much does it cost” then they are a little more qualified. If you can give almost a full sales presentation over the phone and they respond positively to everything, even a trial close or two then they are just about ready to meet with you (assuming you just don’t close them over the phone instead).

But at what point do you meet with your prospects? Well that depends on you and the type of product that you sell. It will take some trail and error but after asking yourself a couple times, “why did I meet with Mr. or Mrs. Prospect?” because you didn’t come home with the order, soon you will have your own system for qualification that will have you almost to a perfect closing ratio and you’ll completely stop wasting your precious time on bad prospects.

But I can already hear a couple of those whiny salespeople out there saying something like, “But a 100% closing ratio is impossible” or “I don’t have enough leads to only sell to the highly qualified ones” or even “But if you’re closing 100% of the time that means there’s a lot more prospects that you should be talking too, you should get rejected a certain amount of time if you’re selling enough.” And I say hogwash to that!

1. A 100% closing ratio isn’t impossible just because you’ve never done it.

2. If you don’t have enough leads then you need to work on your customer attraction skills and ramp it up!

3. And you’re right, if you’re closing 100% of the time there’s more people on your list that will buy even if you don’t think they’re qualified enough. But who cares! If you are making enough money and don’t want to work any harder than you are, then just stick to the really good prospects and let the other desperate, cold calling salespeople fight over the rest.

So to recap; attract customers, qualify them before you meet with them, and then sell to them very successfully. And then cold calling and chasing prospects will be a thing of the past.

Good luck.

Tyler Wilson -
	Tyler Wilson is a specialized sales trainer that teaches how to stop cold calling and how to make more sales now. He is also the owner of the website http://www.ColdCallCrusher.com. For free sales tips and videos please visit ColdCallCrusher.com Read More >>
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Websiteblog