If you are prospecting by telephone then you have to be extremely careful what you say in your opening few lines. Old style Telesales Training used to say you had 30 seconds to make your case. In today's attention deficit society you will be lucky if you get more than 7 seconds to make your case. So what can you say in such a short time to grab enough attention to be invited to the next stage of the call? When I started out in sales, I read everything I could from Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins. Twenty years ago they pioneered attention getting lines such as: “If I could show you a way to reduce your operational costs by 27% and increase profitability by 33%, you would be interested wouldn’t you?” In there day these were ground breaking ways to open calls. Times have changed and lines like this are old hat. Use them at your peril. You see they have been used by too many salespeople (and too many bad ones) for too long. People you call would have heard them a million times and they are just plain old cynical towards them. So what do I recommend you use? How about something simple like: “Hi, Mr Davies?” and then pause and let the other person respond. They will obviously respond with a yes. “Mr Davies, I’m not sure if this is relevant to you.” This is delivered in a confident clear voice. This works on many levels. Firstly it is non threatening and you are not jumping down the other persons throat telling them what you can do for them. Especially when you know very little about them yet. Secondly, it plays on psychology because most people will either be curious to find out what might not be relevant and also some may also be thinking “I will be the judge of what’s relevant for me!” So now you are effectively in a conversation. You can now deliver your high value impact statement. This may go something like this: “We have just worked with ABC Corporation (maybe a competitor) where we reduced their staff churn from 29% to 19% which has saved then well over $500,000 in 6 months. How relevant is staff churn in your business?” Now you have name dropped a competitor, mentioned a performance improvement, a $ value saving and finished off with a question which invites an opening to the next stage of the conversation. Forget old used and abused Telesales Opening Lines and use the human approach as shown above to significantly increase your telesales success rates.
Article Source: http://bizymoms.com/business
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