Why Executives Wont Take Your Call > NetSparsh - Viral Content you Love & Share

Home
>
Sales
>
Why Executives Wont Take Your Call

Why Executives Wont Take Your Call

Do you hang up on telemarketers? 9 times out of 10 I do.

Why do we do this? I hang-up because I am afraid that they are going to waste my time.

Telemarketing is a tough job. Most of the people who do it aren't given enough training to excel at it. Companies take the sink or swim attitude in hiring here.

As a result, you, I, and everyone else receive a lot of bad telemarketing calls. It's to the point where we expect the calls to be bad. We are conditioned by experience to assume that they will suck.

This conditioning by bad telemarketing makes it very difficult for the business sales professional to get through to c-level business executives. I had an experience recently that made me think about this. The events took place by email rather than by phone, but the psychology around the events is the same.

I received an email offering me a free "special report" on eSelling using streaming media technology. I get so much spam these days I am not sure if this email was spam, or if I was on their opt-in or opt-out list. Doesn't really matter though, I decided to respond as the email caught my interest.

I clicked on the link to get the special report. I was taken to a lead form webpage to fill in my personal information - name, address, phone number, etc. Minutes later I was downloading the special report and printing it out. Well done on their part I thought.

I read the special report. The first few pages were great. It spoke my language. It talked about how technology isn't usually designed for selling, but that theirs is.

Then I read the next section of the special report.

This section explained what their technology was and how it worked. It told me all about how the internet uses web pages, web servers that are "stateless", blah... blah... blah....

Yawn...

They lost me.

Let's go back now to when I filled in my personal information on their website download page. On their webpage, I didn't enter a phone number, even though it asked for one. Like you, I have been conditioned to expect that most sales pitches I get will suck. I did not want another sales call that would waste my time.

Getting me to download and read their special report, was the equivalent of getting past the gatekeepers and the voicemail screen to speak to the executive. They had my interest until they bored me with tech-talk that I didn't need to know at that point. Then they lost the sale.

The same thing happens when we try to get through to exec's. They are afraid that you are going to waste their time. So they put up a lot of screens to keep you out.

It is nearly impossible to come up with set of sales persuasion techniques to get past every screen every time. You can improve your percentages though, by following a simple formula.

When cold-calling executives focus on these three things:

Benefit gain,
Pain elimination,
How easy it will be to get these from you.

Be specific about the potential benefit gains and pain elimination. Tell them that one of your customers saved thousands or millions of dollars by working with you (using a real customer success story that you have verified of course).

Do not discuss how your customer got these benefits. And avoid identifying yourself by the type of product or technology that you sell. If you make either of these mistakes, you have given your target something to pigeonhole you with. Once that happens, you lose the opportunity to keep the conversation going long enough to establish whether there is even a problem of his that you can solve.

You want to be specific about the cause and magnitude of their pain, yet vague about just how you will eliminate it. You only need to show that you *can* eliminate it. You do this by relating the specific benefits or pain gained or eliminated by one of your customers.

All you want to discuss at the beginning of your call is what they can expect to get from doing business with you and how easy or quickly they can get it. Make the gatekeepers your allies. Treat them with respect by assuming that they know as much as your target exec does (they often do). Use the same approach with them, and you are much more likely to get put through to the executive.

Save the "how it works" discussion for your meeting with the lower level people responsible for making it work. Otherwise, you may never get that opportunity.

Shamus Brown is a Professional Sales Coach and former high-tech sales pro who began his career selling for IBM. Shamus has written more than 50 articles on selling and is the creator of the popular Persuasive Selling Skills CD Audio Program. You can read more of Shamus Brown's sales tips at http://Sales-Tips.industrialEGO.com/ and you can learn more about his persuasive sales skills training at http://www.Persuasive-Sales-Skills.com/

In The News:

This RSS feed URL is deprecated, please update. New URLs can be found in the footers at https://news.google.com/news

Forbes
Lack Of Diversity Will Cause Your Sales To Decrease
Forbes
There are a few examples of how diversity will affect your sales negatively. If you're in a predominantly Asian geographic area or an area with a large Asian population, then you're going to need to hire someone with the same background. There are a ...

Wall Street Journal
US Existing-Home Sales Stalled in August
Wall Street Journal
U.S. home sales stalled in August, highlighting a growing disconnect between the sluggish housing market and the strong economy that is powering stocks to new highs. Existing home sales fell in August from a year earlier, the sixth straight month of ...
US Sales of Existing Homes Unchanged, Trailing EstimatesBloomberg
Existing home sales unchanged in AugustCNBC
Existing-home sales hold steady as housing market begins to find some balanceMarketWatch
Finance and Commerce -Reuters -Kitco News
all 371 news articles »

Bloomberg
Chip Stock Anxieties Revived as Micron Sales View Misses
Bloomberg
Micron, the largest U.S. memory chipmaker, sank 5.7 percent in pre-market trading after forecasting fiscal first-quarter sales of $7.9 billion to $8.3 billion. That fell short of the average analyst estimate of $8.45 billion, according to data compiled ...

and more »

New Edition of HME Sales Book Offers New Insights
HME Business (press release) (blog)
Industry sales and management coach Ty Bello, RCC, the president and founder of Team@Work, has released a new edition of his HME sales guide “25 Sales Tips You Can Learn From Your Mother.” First released in 2011, the book takes common lessons ...

Journal & Courier
Alcohol sales: What's the policy when teens are in tow?
Journal & Courier
The question: How do alcohol sales work with children who are under the legal age of consumption in tow? To find an answer I borrowed Bangert's daughter, Olivia, for an evening of grocery shopping spread across several stores in Tippecanoe County with ...

Medical Marketing and Media
2e Creative acquires Indiana marketing, sales agency Fire & Rain
Medical Marketing and Media
Along with adding Fire & Rain's sales expertise, the agency is also growing its geographic reach. Boden established a 2e office in San Diego, and the firm also has staffers based in New York and New Jersey, where many pharma clients are based. While ...

Forbes
PS4's 'Spider-Man' Just Broke God of War's Sales Record With 3.3 Million Copies Sold In 3 Days
Forbes
It's been a hell of a year for Sony, coming in the wake of a hell of a console generation. The PS4 has been the clear sales leader this generation from the start, partially because it avoided Microsoft-like stumbles at launch, partially because it's ...

and more »

Scientific American (blog)
Would Lowering Fuel Economy Standards Boost Car Sales?
Scientific American (blog)
Auto shoppers looking for a bargain could soon be in luck. The Trump administration wants to relax fuel economy standards (that's how far your car travels on a gallon of gas). Doing so, the administration argues, will cause the prices of new vehicles ...

Variety
San Sebastian: 'An Unexpected Love' Continues to Roll Out Sales (EXCLUSIVE)
Variety
The U.S., China, Italy and Germany are now under discussions, said Guido Rud, at its sales agent, FilmSharks Intl. Starring Mercedes Moran and Ricardo Darin, and Darin's first production credit at his new label Kenya Films, “An Unexpected Love” is ...

Dollarama: Back-To-Back Quarters Of Slower Same-Store Sales Establish A Trend
Seeking Alpha
Dollarama is the largest dollar store chain in Canada with over 1,170 stores. The company delivered another weak quarter due to disappointing same-store sales growth rate. Dollarama should be able to continue to grow its top and bottom lines through ...

Google News

Why Executives Wont Take Your Call

Sales Sales