“When we are transparent about our flaws, we draw people in, we build trust, and we speed sales cycles.” – Todd Caponi in today’s Tip 319

Are you REALLY giving buyers what they need in your proposals to make a confident decision?

Join the conversation below and follow Todd on LinkedIn to get your own copy of The Transparency Sale!

Todd Caponi on LinkedIn
Todd Caponi on Twitter
The Transparency Sales Website
The Transparency Sale Book

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Todd Caponi is back. Todd is a top-rated keynote speaker and trainer as Principal of Sales Melon, LLC and he’s also Managing Director of Chicago’s VentureSCALE. Here he is with a proposal tip:

Todd Caponi: Hey everybody. Todd Caponi here, author of The Transparency Sale, and I want to talk to you about your proposals for a moment. So as we’ve talked about in past Daily Sales Tips, we as human beings are driven or drawn naturally to try to predict what our experience is going to be like when we’re buying a product or a service. It’s why so many of us, 96% plus look at reviews before we make a purchase of medium to high consideration that we’ve never bought before. And 82% of us specifically seek out the negative reviews, first. We hear the marketing, we hear the pitch we’re trying to get, they’re real good vision of what our experience is really going to be like, which is why we trust negative reviews. We can read them, look at them and say, “All right, this applies to me, or this doesn’t apply to me?” When everything is painted as perfect. We as buyers, as consumers are actually drawn to do more homework, to go explore and investigate beyond the claims of the organization and of their sellers. It’s a matter of fact, in 2017 Gardner put out a study that looked at buyers and what they do during a buying process and as it turns out, only 39% of their time is spent talking to you, talking to your competitors or talking to their internal buying groups. As it turns out, 61% of their time it’s spent investigating other ways, talking to references, talking to friends who might have experienced in your product category, going and looking at reviews and the tech space. There’s companies like G2 Crowd and Trust Radius that these organizations or these buyers are looking at. And now with Glassdoor, they’re actually trying to look at what is your culture like because they’re not just buying a product from you, they’re buying your people. And I’m willing to bet that if you go to Google right now and write down what is it like to work at and then put in your company, the first thing that’ll pop up are Glassdoor reviews, which is really, really interesting. So when thinking about our proposals, are we creating the perception that our products are perfect and our proposals. I know that was a lot of P’s there, but unfortunately, proposals, the way they’ve historically been written are written as though our products are perfect and only paint a positive picture to make proposals really valuable to a buyer. Paint the picture of what you might not be good at, what they’re not going to get as a part of their investment that they’re making. What might a little bit lacking at this point? Maybe even post some positive and negative reviews and your proposals. From a brain science perspective, we know it works. I would love for you to try it because knowing the brain science around how decision making happens when we paint a picture of perfection, we actually push people away when we frame our products as imperfect. When we are transparent about our flaws, we draw people in, we build trust, and we speed sales cycles. That’s 61% that Gartner talked about is not a foregone conclusion if you’re giving the buyer everything they need, which I believe can take place in proposals as well as every human to human conversation that you have. So give it a try. I would love to hear how it goes and good luck!

Scott Ingram: Now do yourself a favor and follow Todd on LinkedIn and go get your own copy of The Transparency Sale. You’ll find links to do both of those things and you can see the video version of this tip at DailySales/Tips/319

Then be sure to listen tomorrow for the final part of Jeff Bajorek’s 16 part You Don’t Have a Closing Problem series. Thanks for listening!

“So when approaching this, remember tonality is extremely important.” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 318

What is your best way to open a cold call?

Join the conversation below and connect with Jason on LinkedIn!

Jason’s LinkedIn post
Blissful Prospecting
Jason Bay on LinkedIn

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listing to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Jason Bay from Blissful Prospecting is back with not just one tip, but a whole series of ideas. Check this out:

Jason Bay: So I wrote a post on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago about cold calling and particularly how to handle not interested. And it turns out that a lot of people have very strong feelings about cold calling and a lot of the conversation went to, well how should we open a cold call? What’s the best way to open a cold call to avoid hearing, not interested. So I got a lot of responses from that and I want to share some of those responses with you. And what I’m going to share today is 10 cold call opening lines to use and then five ones that you should avoid. And as I do this, I’m going to give credit to people that have popularized these opening lines and really push them. They may not be the people that came up with them cause it’s really hard to come up with and look at who created them and to give them credit. So I’m going to do my best there. So when approaching this, remember tonality is extremely important, tonality is more important than what you’re saying, although both what you’re saying and how you say it is important. So I’m going to do my best here to give you the right tonality. So these opening lines are going to come after. “Hey, Jason was blissful prospecting” and then you’re going to go into these lines. So you should always introduce yourself with your name and your company. All right, so the first one popularized by gong is “Hey, Jason was blissful prospecting. How have you been?” And going in with that line, I love this one. Our clients have a lot of success with this line, but then, how have you been is a little bit different than variations of that, then I’m going to talk about avoiding. So there’s a lot of data behind that working. The next one is, “Hey Jason was blissful prospecting. Thanks for taking my call. Do you have a couple of minutes?” popularized by John Barrows. He pushes that one a lot. Love that one as well. The next one, connect and sell really uses a lot in is popularized. It’s, “Hey, Jason was blissful prospecting. I know you weren’t expecting my call. Do you have 27 seconds to discuss how you guys prospect” or to discuss your prospecting or your outbound or your sales strategy, whatever it maybe? Insert that at the end. The next one is Richard Smith over at refract. “Hey, Jason Bay with blissful prospecting. If I told you this is a cold call, would you want to hang up or would you give me time to tell you why I’ve called today?” And this one you got to really go about this the right way in order for it to work, but if you can have a little bit of fun with it, it’d be very just upfront about the fact that it’s a cold call. A lot of people have success with that as well. Next one. “Hey Jason, with blissfull prospecting, let’s call it to introduce myself and see if what we do might be useful to you in the future. How’s my timing?” and that’s John Klymshyn. He’s someone that just responded to a LinkedIn post, so make sure to check that out. The next one is Tito Bohrt, which I really love Tito over at all T-cells. He said, “Hey Jason with pulsatile prospecting. I was really hoping to speak with you briefly. Do you have two minutes?” Love that one. The next one, Outreach IO talks about a lot and it’s a, ‘Hey Jason Bay was blissful prospecting. I’m the guy that’s been sending you the emails with the content in there with the cold call opening lines and then you can get into the rest of your call there. So you’re referencing an email you sent them or a direct mail piece. Ben Gilstrap, another person that responded on LinkedIn shares this one.” Hey, Jason Bay with a blissful prospect. I’m actually calling to sell you something” And again, it’s a pattern interrupt. Unexpected could work for you. I definitely recommend trying that one out as well. And then Christopher Voss/ Aaron Ross also at predictable revenue really popularize this one and it’s going for now. “Hey Jason was blissful prospecting, did it get you at a bad time?” And that has a lot of success. I feel like that’s getting really overused these days. But that’s definitely a go-to line that a lot of people use. And then the last one here, Jamie Carlson recommended a, by the way, there’s a LinkedIn post with all of this stuff on it along with like a couple of hundred comments on it. I recommend checking out and that’s in the show notes. But this one I really like, and again, it’s being very upfront. “Hey, Jason was blissful prospecting. You and I haven’t talked before, but the reason for my call is” and you go into the reason for your call is there’s five real quick that I want you to avoid based on the fact that a lot of salespeople use these. So there are three variations of the, how have you been? The reason why I recommend how have you been is that’s like what you would ask a friend, Hey, how you been versus how are you? How are you doing? How are you today? Those are all three lines that a lot of salespeople use in cold calls, and you’re going to come off as just another one of those salespeople. The other one that I would avoid is how’s your day been so far? And you’re really going in and asking them about their day and that sort of thing versus just in general, have you been like tried not to get them to do too much thinking. And lastly, the fifth thing you want to avoid is just going straight for your 15 to 32nd pitch. So try out some of those opening lines. Again, check out that LinkedIn post and let me know what works for you.

Scott Ingram: For the link to the LinkedIn post and for links to connect with Jason if you haven’t already, just click over to DailySales.Tips/318.

Then be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip from Todd Caponi. Thanks for listening!

“Remember that having a little bit of control over this part of the process is extremely important” – Dale Dupree in today’s Tip 317

How do you set up your week?

Join the conversation below and feel free to share your thoughts!

Dale Dupree on LinkedIn
Dale Dupree Website
The Sales Rebellion

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today, Dale Dupree, the leader of The Sales Rebellion is back with a perfect tip for a Monday as he talks about a better way to set up your week. Here he is.

Dale Dupree: This is a tip for account executives or individual contributors. It’s kind of a simple tip, but it’s extremely important and especially for anybody just getting started in this role that’s having a hard time setting a cadence for appointments. So a lot of times what I would see in my days of being a manager especially, but a rep as well too, when it came to my colleagues and the way that they were setting up their week, a lot of the time you would find that reps were having a hard time getting any prospecting done outside of their appointments that they were setting. And then when they didn’t have any appointments, they were doing so much prospect and that they couldn’t set an appointment up if they wanted to. So to kind of hack this entire process. Here’s some simple things to think about. Number one, try and set your appointments for specific days. I know a lot of times it’s easy for us as sales reps to say, well, my customer wanted me to meet them on this day at this time, and to just say yes, but remember that having a little bit of control over this part of the process is extremely important. The customer is absolutely important, just the same, but you can’t serve them to your fullest capacity if you’re maxed out or you’re not put together or you are having a hard time staying organized. So try and set specific days, specific time blocks and ask your prospects, “Hey, could we meet on this day at this time?” Throw the ball in their court requesting specifics. You’ll be surprised that most of the time your prospect will accommodate that request. Another thing to do once we’ve set these specific blocks of appointments is to try and create a solid 25 to 35 minutes in between appointments while not trying to distance yourself too much between them as well too. And so use that math. However, it’s relevant to you. If your appointment is 20 minutes away, try to give yourself an hour to an hour and a half in between appointments. The big piece of the puzzle here is that it’s not setting yourself up to do some busy work or to have some downtime, but it’s setting yourself up to be able to do some more door-knocking in between appointments. This is another hack to set your schedule up to where you have a cadence of prospecting inside of your cadence of appointments as well too. There will be other days, of course, where you will just want to have nothing but prospect and happening. Absolutely, but a really good way to get extremely intelligent prospecting done is to pick businesses around where your strategic appointments are set in the first place. Especially if you end up landing those businesses. Then all the neighbors get to go over and see your product and action. If you’ve built a really good relationship with the client and a good reputation around town, these things are super key to creating a successful appointment setting cadence.

Scott Ingram: For more about Dale Dupree and to get connected to him and The Sales Rebellion. Just click over to DailySales.Tips/317 where we’ll have links to everything.
Then be sure to stop by tomorrow for another great tip from Jason Bay. Thanks for listening.

“Because a lot of your clients are going to be opening your proposals on their phones first, and if they, that is not a good experience.” – Adam Hempenstall in today’s Tip 316

When did you last check your email? What device did you use?

Join the conversation below and share your thoughts!

Better Proposals Website
Proposal University
2019 Proposal Report
Proposal Templates
Better Proposals Facebook page

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Adam Hempenstall. Adam is the CEO & Founder of Better Proposals, where they offer proposal software and also offer Proposal Writing University. Here’s Adam with another proposal related tip:

Adam Hempenstall: When you last checked your email? What device did you use? Where you send a computer, was it your laptop, tablet or was it your phone? It was probably your phone and it is for about 70% of us. So 70% of email is opened on phones first and your proposals are no different. So when you send your proposals to your client, try to bear in mind the 70% of the time they are going to be opened on phones first. So knowing that and knowing that to be true, there’s a couple of things that maybe you would do differently. These days Google looks at mobile-first as an indicator of how progressive accompany is and it rewards it with good rankings in Google. The desktop version of everything is being downgraded and is now the secondary choice and your proposals are no different. Your proposals need to look good on phones first and on the desktop second. So when you’re creating your proposal, if you’re creating it in something like Microsoft Word or InDesign or you know pages, if you’re a Mac person, you are probably then going to be exporting it to PDF and then you’re going to be sending it. So there’s a whole bunch of problems with this. The first thing is that what you’re designing it on is a fixed screen size or a fixed size, which happens to be a piece of paper. Now if you shrink down a piece of paper and then you hold it over the top of a normal-sized phone, you can’t read a normal text, at least not very easily. And the second anybody’s got, over the age of 40 and starts losing their eyesight if things get even worse. So what you’re asking your client to do is to pinch and zoom their way through a seven, eight, nine, ten-page document. That is not an easy thing to do. It’s not a fun thing to do. And what is going to end up, meaning is that they’re not going to be paying attention to the proposal, so they’re going to skip straight through, look at the price, close it down and make a judgment on that alone. That is no good news. That’s not what you want and it’s not why you spent hours writing a proposal out in the first place.

So there’s a couple of things that you can do here. One is to design your proposals so that they, although you’re designing them on a paper sized screen when you’re using say Microsoft word or a document creator and does simply design it with mobile in mind. That’s definitely one way of doing it. The other way to do it is look into online proposal software. It’s probably the easiest way of making sure that your proposals are looking good when they are read on phones because what you can is actually then opening is essentially a mini-website. So that opening a mini website and they’re browsing that rather than reading through traditional documents. So do yourself a favor, look into proposal software. Some are better than others. Some have a web-first component, which is what I’m talking about. Others are more based on paper sizes, but at the very least, bear this in mind because a lot of your clients are going to be opening your proposals on their phones first, and if they, that is not a good experience, they’re not going to have a good impression of your business. And that can only mean that you’re less likely to get a sale.

Scott Ingram: You can learn more about Adam’s Better Proposals solutions and sign up for free at betterproposals.io

Then be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!

“The most important thing we need to do in our sales calls and our demos is get the prospect to take ownership of their situation.” – Brooks Van Norman in today’s Tip 315

How’s your sales call or demo? Do your prospect becomes your client?

Join the conversation below and connect to Brooks on LinkedIn!

Brooks Van Norman on LinkedIn

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Brooks Van Norman. Brooks is a consultant who specializes in helping SAAS companies scale revenue. Here he is:

Brooks Van Norman: Hey guys, I wanted to share one of the most powerful things you can do on a sales call or a sales demo to move the prospect closer to becoming your client. And it’s what I call Releasing Control and Self-Admission. And the idea here is that on sales calls or demos, buyers tend to have pretty high resistance. So what we do here is we flip the script and actually ask a question that leads the buyer to believe that, “Hey, we really don’t need you.” And so the way that we do this is, of course, you would have first done a solid diagnosis of the customer or client situation and their desired outcome. But then we ask this question, we say, “Well Jim, I understand you’re having situation X and you’d like to get to situation Y. What’s preventing you from achieving that on your own?” Or if you’re selling software, you could say, “What’s preventing you from doing that with your existing tools?”

Now we’re looking for one of three answers here. The first answer would be their inability to do it on their own. We want them to admit that we can’t get there with our existing strategy or our existing tools. The second is that they want to get there faster, and the third answer is that they want to work with a company or service that has the tools other people in the marketplace have used to achieve the desired outcome. This information is so powerful because we can now use this as a lever to secure the next steps calls to remind people in follow-up sequences why they want to make the change, but most importantly, it gives the buyer ownership of their problem, which is the most important thing we need to do in our sales calls and our demos is get the prospect to take ownership of their situation. So that is releasing control and self-admission. I hope you found that helpful.

Scott Ingram: If you click over to DailySales.Tips/315 you’ll find the video version of this tip as well as a link to Brooks’ LinkedIn profile where you can connect with him and if you work in SAAS sales, ask for his 12-part demo conversion script. This tip was just one of twelve parts of that script.

Then be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip from Adam Hempenstall. Thanks for listening!

“Today is Thanksgiving here in the United States and if you’re in the US I hope you had or are having a fantastic holiday” – Scott Ingram in today’s Tip 313

Happy Thanksgiving!

Join the conversation below and send me an email to get a free copy of the Sales Success Stories Book!

[email protected]
Sales Success Stories Podcast
Sales Success Stories Book – 60 Stories from 20 Top 1% Sales Professionals
Submit a Sales Tip

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today is Thanksgiving here in the United States and if you’re in the US I hope you had or are having a fantastic holiday. For my family and I, we’ll be starting the day with a 5-mile adventure that besides food and football is one of my favorite traditions and that is the Turkey Trot. My wife and I started this back when we were dating in California originally at the Dana Point Turkey Trot, and in the 15 years that we’ve now been in Austin we’ve only missed a handful, and that’s only been because we were traveling for the holiday. We did a couple of them when Emily was quite pregnant since my girls were born in December and January. We then pushed a stroller on the course for years. Then it was a combination of walking and carrying, and now that the girls do the full event under their own power we’ll even run segments or sometimes even every other mile depending on how everyone’s feeling. Then it’ll be off to my in-law’s house here in town for a traditional dinner and some football. After a tough weekend for both of my teams, I’ll be watching to see if the University of Texas Longhorns and the Dallas Cowboys can redeem themselves this week. I’m also just looking forward to the time off, to knocking out a couple of projects around the house and to just hanging out with the family. I really don’t have a tip for you today other than to say that it’s important to be grateful all year long, not just on this designated day of thanks. It’s why I try to make a point of thanking you for listening at the end of most episodes and I really really do appreciate you listening and being a part of this community. One thing I just realized that I haven’t done is to give away a copy of my own book. So let’s do that now. The first 5 people who send an email to me at [email protected] with a subject line along the lines of: Happy Thanksgiving – Please send me a book. I’ll send you a copy of Sales Success Stories – 60 Stories from 20 Top 1% Sales Professionals. Just be patient with my reply, because I might not get back to you right away. Thank you again and for the Americans. Happy Thanksgiving!

“The people who have been in the position of your customer, of your prospect, the people who have been in those positions before are the best people to help you remove that risk of your current prospects.” – Jeff Bajorek in today’s Tip 312

Do you have a trust problem?

Join the conversation below and go check the links to the previous tips in this series!

306: You Have a Discipline Problem
299: You Have a Messaging Problem
292: You Have a Preparation Problem
208: You Don’t Have a Closing Problem
Jeff Bajorek on LinkedIn

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Jeff Bajorek is back with part 15 of the 16 part series that he kicked off back in tip #208 called “You Don’t Have a Closing Problem.” I can’t believe we’re almost done with this series. After the series finale next week I’ve got something special I’m going to do to make it a little easier to listen to all of them in a row, but before we get there, here’s Jeff with today’s installment:

Jeff Bajorek: You don’t have a closing problem. You have a trust problem. Anytime you’re asking your prospect to make a change, which is what you’re trying to do when you sell them something, that change is going to be associated with a certain amount of risk. Big changes carry perceptions of big risks, but you need them to make this change because if they were doing what needed to be done, they’d be getting the results they’re looking for, right? So what are you doing to allay those fears? Because of risk and fear kind of go hand in hand. And there are a lot of ways that you can accomplish this. Maybe you can get your foot in the door with a smaller project. Maybe you can demonstrate that you’re capable of delivering on your promises, demonstrating that you’re someone worth working with because you’re easy to work with because you show up on time because you’re dependable and you do the things that you say that you’re going to do and you can complete projects with smaller successes along the way. All of that helps to build familiarity and reducing the perception of, “Oh my goodness, I’m going to die if I make this decision.” Right? Because on a primal level, that’s what almost everybody who makes a final decision is thinking when they signed that contract. But I think the most underutilized technique or approach to removing risk is the voice of your current customers. You’re stark raving lunatic mad fans who have been in this similar position before and there were willing to take the risk because they knew what was on the other side of that chasm was worth approaching, was worth going after and you were able to help them get to where they wanted to be because of the changes you were able to help them make it. When you say it about yourself, it’s bragging. When someone else says it about you, it’s proof. Jeffrey Gitomer taught me that and I want you to think about that because it is absolutely true. The people who have been in the position of your customer, of your prospect, the people who have been in those positions before are the best people to help you remove that risk of your current prospects. Think about that and now I want you to think about whether or not you have that. Have you captured those testimonials in written form? Have you gotten them on video? Do you have a YouTube playlist of the 10 top customers in your kind of stable or your book of business, your list of accounts who have been in a similar position to your current prospects and do they have 15 seconds worth of video to say to talk about everything that you did, whether it was something they expected or something you over-delivered on? How powerful would it be if you could just shoot that playlist to them in a text message or an email as follow up to that last meeting to say, “Hey, you know, this is a tough decision and there’s nothing that I can say that will help you make this decision any easier.” But I do have a handful of friends who have sat where you sit right now and are very glad that they made that decision. Why don’t you listen to them? That’s a really powerful statement to be able to make and ultimately it is the thing that gets a lot of deals done. Do you have those things? Can you get over that trust barrier? Is your level of trust or is the level of trust that your prospect has in you higher than their level of skepticism that you can get the job done? Think about that. Then go fix it.

Scott Ingram: For more about Jeff and for links to the previous tips in this series just click over to DailySales.Tips/312 that’s also where you’ll find the video version of Jeff’s tip and links to help you connect with Jeff directly.

Thanks for listening and be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip… or not, because it’ll be Thanksgiving.

“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

Have feedback? Want to share a sales tip? Call or text the Sales Success Hotline: 512-777-1442 or Email: [email protected]

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!

“The better you can show that you understand the problem, the better those potential clients think you have the solution. ” – John Livesay in today’s Tip 310

What is your best story?

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Better Selling Through Storytelling Book

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Transcript

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from John Livesay. John is a keynote speaker and the author of Better Selling Through Storytelling. Here he is with today’s tip:

John Livesay: The old way of selling is to just push out a bunch of information and hope some of it sticks. That no longer works, especially if you’re the kind of company that has to present in person against two other finalists. This is everything from Lawyers to PR Firms, to Ad Agencies, to Architects, Executive Search Firms, all kinds of industries. Get it down to the final three and they’re invited to come in and give a one-hour presentation, pitch, interview, whatever you want to call it, and the wrong way of doing it is just to talk about yourself, but information. Here’s how long we’ve been in business. The new way is to tell a story. Whoever tells the best story is going to win the sale. When I was working with an architecture firm, they would always hope that whoever had the best designs would win the business. One of their clients told them, we’re going to hire the people we like the most because we have to work with you for five years. That’s when they realized that they needed some help in their selling, that the soft skills really made them strong. Soft skills are storytelling, competence, empathy, and listening. So if you really want to up your likability factor, you want to show empathy for the people whose problem you’re solving. The better you can show that you understand the problem, the better those potential clients think you have the solution. So the mistakes people make besides pushing out a bunch of information, include a really soft opening like, “Hi, thanks for this opportunity. We’re excited to be here.” That’s a horrible opening. Nobody cares that you’re excited. A better opening describes a specific problem that you understand and how you’re going to solve it and talk about that in the next 60 minutes. A bad closing sounds like “Well, that’s all we got. Any questions?” A good closing is a summary of everything that you’ve covered that takes them on the journey of where they are now and where you want to take them and invite them to be with you on the next steps and invite them to take the next steps. You want to think about what do I want the audience to think, feel and do after my presentation. So reverse engineer your closing and your opening before you start on what the content is going to be in the middle. And then when you get to your team slide, a lot of people just tell boring information about how long they’ve worked at the company. This is where you need to tell a good story, where you pull people in on what motivated you to become an architect or a lawyer or whatever your specialty is, because that’s what makes you memorable. A lot of people say, “Oh well you hope to go last if it’s between us and two other firms”, but we can’t control that. Well, what you can control is the ability to tell a good story. So even if you’re first, you’ll be memorable. So once you tell a story of who you are and something that people can remember about you personally, then you want to turn your boring case studies into a story as well. And a good story takes people on a journey. You paint the picture of where the client was two or three years ago, what problems they had, how you solve them, and what is their life like now after solving them. So remember, whoever tells the best story is going to get the sale, and it’s going to make you magnetic and memorable.

Scott Ingram: To learn more about John and for a link to his book: Better Selling Through Storytelling, just click over to DailySales.Tips/310