“The goal here is to do something different than what every other salesperson is going to do that just calls them back and tries to call them back repeatedly.” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 311
What will you do when your prospects hang up on you?
Join the conversation below and tell how you handle “not interested” people.
Blissful Prospecting
Jason Bay on LinkedIn
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Jason Bay from Blissful Prospecting is back with another prospecting tip. Here he is:
Jason Bay: What to do when a prospect hangs up during your cold call, I actually get asked this question quite a bit and I think there’s a lot of bad advice out there on this because it’s deceitful and it’s not being empathetic towards the prospect at all. And acknowledging the fact that they hung up on you on purpose. So most of the time when a call disconnects in a cold call after you start to get into your pitch, the person hung up on you on purpose. So I think the thing to think about first before you decide how you handle this is from the prospect’s perspective, “Like what’s going on.” So one of those things, this is probably going on for them as they probably get a cold call a lot, right? And they probably get called by a lot of people that aren’t adding value. Like, hopefully, you are and are just on the phone wasting their time. And they didn’t give their phone number out. And a lot of people have direct dials now and they’re getting hit up on their cell phone and they might’ve thought that you or someone else, like a client or a prospect that they could work with or someone at the office. So take in mind that people are not expecting these calls. There’s some annoyance there from previous calls that they’ve gotten and they may have thought that you were someone else and, and you know what? They’re humans too. So maybe they’re just having a bad day. So when you approach responding to this, the first thing that you should or should not do is call them back. So they hung up on you. They don’t want to talk to you if you have their email address, what I suggest you do is crafting an email that shows some of this empathy and also talks about why you wanted to reach out to them so that you can differentiate yourself. Because the goal here is to do something different than what every other salesperson is going to do that just calls them back and tries to call them back repeatedly. And I want to give credit to someone, Stephanie Parsons, who is the CSO at Roy Kings, and she commented on one of my LinkedIn posts about how she handles it. And before I give you her example here, I want to just talk about in general what that email might say. So one of the big things to, like I said, taking consideration is that empathy piece. So I think we should go in with the assumption that we caught them at a bad time, going with the assumption that they probably don’t like it when people call them unexpectedly or that they thought we were someone else and going with the assumption that they just might be having a bad day. So the way that that email might sound, and actually I will give Stephanie’s a, her response here, she said, “Hey, the way that I respond to this is, Hey, I, send must’ve had a crazy morning because he just hung up on me. Exclamation Mark. I wanted to talk to you about blank. Let me know if you have some time.” And I really liked that and she said it. She has really good success with that. So I would add a couple of things and it might sound something like this, you know, “Hey Jason, you just tried calling you and it looks like you hung up on me. Like no big deal. I imagined you get a lot of cold calls from salespeople like that, you know, maybe don’t know a lot about your business or they get straight to a pitch and, and I don’t know, maybe you’re having a bad day. And again, that’s totally okay.” But what I wanted to talk with you about is how we’re helping this specific client with a challenge that’s very similar to the types of challenges that we hear companies like you having. And here’s an idea of what we could talk about in a call and I would give a little explanation of, “Hey, how we can help you do this, strategies we can share to help you accomplish this. Two ways that we’re helping clients like yours overcome this particular challenge.” Like, “Hey, is that something that would be a few minutes worth a few minutes of your time to chat?” So acknowledge and use empathy there that they probably are either not having a good day, they get called unexpectedly and maybe they thought you were someone else and show that you’re not trying to be manipulative and hide who you are in any way. So let me know how this approach works. I’m really curious to hear about what your approaches to handling “not interested” people that hang up on you and don’t really give you a chance to talk, and we’d love to hear how you handle that and if this a trying, this works for you.
Scott Ingram: Like Jason said, we’d love to hear how you handle getting hung up on. Feel free to add a comment on this tip’s page at DailySales.Tips/311 Then be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip from Jeff Bajorek!