The secret to successful sales phone calls

Video transcript

Hi there, Julia Ewert – The Negotiator here.

Something I’m hearing at the moment with lots of businesses is that they’re either hesitant to make sales calls or contact their prospective leads because they’re fearful of what they might be told, or they just don’t know what to say.

Here’s what you don’t want to say though when you’re calling up your prospective leads, “Hi there so and so, I’m
just calling to follow up and see how things are going for you.”

This is very very bad!

Don’t say that to people because the response you normally get is, “Oh yeah, things are going okay, or they’re not going okay or they’re going great, but we’ll just put things off for a while until the world gets back to normal.” And you then say, “Okay, well that’s understandable. If I can help you just give me a call, but otherwise I’ll talk
to you again soon.” And then you normally would call back in one month.

Not helpful.

The first step to making any cold call or any warm call or any check-in phone call with any prospective customers is you must have a plan for your call. What is your objective on that phone call? Is it to introduce your self? Is it build upon the current relationship that you have, or to enhance that relationship? Is it to build your expertise? Is it to ask for business? What is the purpose?

You cannot just jump on a call and just see how things are going. It’s not helpful. I have a phrase that I use often is, “If you wing it, you won’t win it.”

So if you want to do well with the sales calls or you want your team to do well with their sales calls, they must have a plan for what they’re going to say.

Get them to take some notes and they can put them in front of them that they can reference on the phone call. And then, once they work out what the objective is, whether it’s to make sales or build expertise or introduce themselves, the phone call will be much easier.

I hope that helps.