Beyond Persistence

I’ve been steadily refining my cold-call pitch, as I spend a couple of hours a day, three days a week, on my mini-project to sell my new service to companies that are not existing clients.

I got to thinking what happened almost everytime I arrived at a first meeting one of my telesales had arranged for one of our more established products.  It dawned on me that the initial front chat was pretty much always the same; “I don’t really know what this is about but your caller was persistent….”

Yuk.  So I began to wonder what needed to happen to change such a damaging situation.  What could I do to make sure someone not only knew what the meeting was about, but was in fact looking forward to it.

Then one of Selling Power’s newsletters arrived in my inbox (which I began to half-read as Wimbledon drew to a close for the day in the background).  And the answer struck me.   Salesreps are, apparently, useless at ‘discovery’.  They don’t ask questions around the problems that they solve.  Instead, they blindly keep pitching benefits in the hope that they can beat the prospect into submission.  I felt like this is what must have been happening in my world.

So, I decided to test this out.  I ditched the format learned almost 20 years ago.  No explanation of what I do.  Gone the listing of a key benefit, not even transcribed as a deliciously tantalising number.

In their place, a simple question asking if they had a similar problem to one that I know that I’ve made a thing of the past for my customers.  The early signs are promising.