“So gatekeepers are human work with them, and you’re going to see a lot more success when you have to call through them.” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 283
Do you work with a gatekeeper or do you try to get around a gatekeeper?
Join the conversation below and share your thoughts!
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 this tip on gatekeepers:
Jason Bay: Let’s talk about gatekeepers. So one of the things that I hear a lot in terms of how people talk about gatekeepers is almost as if they’re not like human beings with the job just like us. And that’s where it starts is this whole, do you work with a gatekeeper or do you try to get around a gatekeeper? And my school of thought and what we see working really well with our clients is to work with gatekeepers because obviously if you have a direct dial and you can get a hold up the person you want to get a hold up, that’s a good first thing to try because your success rate is going to be much higher. You don’t have to go through a persona to do that. But if you look at gatekeepers in another way, as a person that can help you and work together with you, they might be able to get you a warm intro that you couldn’t get yourself. And the chance of, and the likelihood of getting ahold of the person that you do need to contact could be much higher if you’re able to work with them. So I think that that’s where we need to start as framing gatekeepers and looking at them as more as people with a job to help you. That’s why they’re hired an assistant that answers phones is hired to help people that call in and direct them. And the second part of their job is to make sure that whoever they’re putting in contact with is not going to waste any of that person’s time. So let’s look at this first part in a good way of thinking of it is, you know, when you go into a store, we don’t try to work around the person that’s trying to help us. If we need help with something, right? We go to the people at the store and we ask them directly for help. We don’t try to go around them and waste, we’ll hopefully, you’re not trying to waste a bunch of your time looking for it yourself. So we work with these people. These people are there to help us. That’s exactly what an assistant’s job is to do. So we need to be conversational with them and actually talk to them like a human being. So when an assistant picks up the phone and they say, “Hey, thanks for calling ABC company.” The way that you can respond and start off is, you know,” Hey, Jason was blissful prospecting. I was hoping that you might be able to help me out real quick” let them answer. And then you can go into whatever it is that you need help with. But my suggestion is that even if you know who you should be contacting, you should still ask them for help because you can gather some really good Intel and your tonality is very, very important. And the way that I would describe it again as if you’re asking for someone for help at a grocery store or at a store if you’re doing research on beds or mattresses or electronics at BestBuy, whatever it is. That tonality of, you know, “Hey, I was looking for this and do you guys have this in stock?” That tonality is very important. So the type of Intel that you can gather is really interesting and this is going to help you when you actually do get through to the decision-maker. I want to give you three questions here that can really warm up that call. So once you ask like “I was wondering if you might be able to help me out.” And they’re like, “Yeah, you know what’s up?” Well you know,” Hey I, you know, what we do here at blissful prospecting is actually help a sales development teams increase the reply rates so they can get two to three times more meetings on a weekly basis.” And I was wanting to know if Scott is actually the right person to talk to about that and they might say,” Hey yes or whatever and give you some more information.” Or they might say, no, so-and-so is not in charge of that. Another really good question you can ask is know, “Hey, I know that you know, currently from our, looks like you might work with Scott closely on this have you heard anything around the office about, you know, any big sales goals you guys got coming up or anything to launch the new year? Anything related to prospecting, anything like that? Have you heard anything around the office.” And you’d be surprised what people will give you? So bottom line here is, you know, with gatekeepers we really need to work with them and look at them as human beings that we can have a conversation with and ask them for help and genuinely come from a place of curiosity of knowing, “Hey, am I reaching out to the right person Is this something that’s important to them? Have you heard anything, anything I can do to make sure that when I talked to this person and I don’t waste their time”. And you can use that Intel for when you get onto the next call and lead with, “Hey, I was talking to you know, Amy or Adam or whoever and they were mentioning that you guys have been talking about this and I was reaching out for this reason” so you can warm up for that next call. So gatekeepers are human work with them, and you’re going to see a lot more success when you have to call through them.
Scott Ingram: For more about Jason Bay and Blissful Prospecting, just click over to DailySales.Tips/283. We’ll also have a link to Jason’s LinkedIn profile so you can connect with him directly because he doesn’t just share great tips here.
Once you’ve done that, come on back tomorrow for another great sales tip from Warwick Brown. Thanks for listening!