Like it or not, the phone pitch is still a large part of sales. Plenty of reps spend their days on the phone, pitching the same product day in, and day out. How do they keep from sounding robotic? By approaching each conversation as an attempt to gather secret tips for the most effective sales pitch. If you listen closely, the prospect will tell you exactly how to close.
Don’t Monologue
It’s a fundamental truth in sales: you need to talk less than you think you should. The prospect should be talking the majority of the time throughout the call, which means that you likely need to curtail your natural tendency to jump in and fill the silence. Sales folks are naturally sociable and eager to fill a gap in the conversation to keep things moving smoothly. But when you’re talking, the prospect can’t tell their story. And their story is way more important than your sales pitch at this point, so get to that first.
You also can’t listen with your mouth open. Well, you can, but you’d look pretty dumb. So while you have your mouth shut, you need to be actively listening to the prospect, thinking up questions you can ask, and listening for clues about their difficulties, pain points, and desires.
Develop an Effective Greeting
The first ten seconds are crucial. The prospect uses these seconds to decide if you’re worth talking to. If your greeting sounds like a typical sales rep, you’re more likely to get rebuffed by a caller assuming you’re a spammer or scammer. On the other hand, you need to maintain decorum: “yo dawg” won’t fly.
Your goal is to establish a professional and comfortable conversational tone in the first few seconds. Write out your introduction and try multiple variations to determine the best opening line, both in terms of meaning and your performance.
Separately, you need to give the prospect a reason to keep listening in the first ten seconds. What will make the prospect want to stay on the phone with you? Did they submit a query to your website? If so, lead with that fact, since they’re far more likely to stick around for a call that they initiated. Are you able to give them a better price than previously? That’s a good fact to front load.
Whatever you think will pique a prospect’s interest for the phone call, ensure you’ve got that information up top. Afterward, the call can take on a more organic but still structured shape. Don’t let the conversation veer wildly off-topic unless you see some value in the digression in terms of rapport or relationship building.
Ask Insightful Questions
Asking questions is critical for closing successfully. You need to engage the prospect and hear their story, so you can properly understand how your product can help. Dumping a verbal feature list on the prospect won’t cut it. Instead, you sell them the story of how your product will help with their problem.
The only real way to discover their problem is to be inquisitive. Most folks are more than about the things that annoy them. It shouldn’t take too much prodding for the beans to spill, and commiseration builds camaraderie between the prospect and sales associate.
Here are some questions you can use to prompt a more detailed telling. Fill in generic terms like “system” with the business area your product targets, like logistics or manufacturing:
- Oh, I bet that was frustrating/interesting/difficult/easy/unexpected/etc.
- What’s your current system like? Do you like it?
- How long does the XYZ process take for you?
- What’s your least favorite part about XYZ?
- Has anything exciting happened recently?
Find and Remove Pain Points Them
The fastest way to make a sale is to make a friend, and the fastest way to make a friend is to lend a hand. During your conversation with the prospect, listen for their pain points. These are issues in their current system that cause them trouble, whether they’re just annoying or actively harming productivity.
Listen, and think about how you can take away their pain. Is there some feature of your product that would remove the problem? If so, now is the time to bring it up! Even if the product doesn’t address that particular issue, you might be knowledgeable enough about the area of operation to offer a practical outsider’s perspective, which, if correct, dramatically improves the client’s perception of you. If you can find a way to remove that pain, you’ll get major credit for a real improvement in your business’s day-to-day operation.
If you’re having trouble getting at the pain points, here are some conversational prompts. Replace generic terminology with appropriate language, and improve them in any other way you see fit.
- What do you like about your current process? What do you dislike about it?
- We help companies do XYZ. If you could do XYZ, would that change your business?
- Is XYZ a problem for you? We’ve been working with a lot of companies like yours, and we see that XYZ is a problem frequently.
- If you could magically change one thing about your current system, what would it be?
Establish a Clear Next Step
Let’s say the prospect is with you. You’re crushing this call, and they’re responding with good energy and genuine interest. It’s time to wrap up the call, and you need to make sure the prospect knows their homework. What’s the next step they need to take to get this wonderful product in their life?
Establish that next step clearly and obviously, both by phone and through email, so you don’t lose prospects to confusion or uncertainty. For example, if they need to schedule an appointment, direct them to the scheduling tool with a clear and concise email. If they need to submit additional information, email the web tool for capturing that information. If there’s no response after a few days, follow up to make sure you don’t lose the prospect’s attention before the deal can be closed.
