A little more than a decade ago, when voicemail became common practice, many salespeople reached a new level of frustration. With voicemail, the person you really want to connect with cannot be reached directly. Worse, the arrival of voicemail often eliminated the nearby receptionist or personal assistant, a live voice and person who could at least direct your inquiry. (Of course these individuals, otherwise known as gatekeepers, might seem to be barriers to your sales effort but if you have any skill at all, you know they are actually your best friends if you are calling with genuine purpose and reason, and not just running through a long list of cold prospects with your canned script.)
Over the past several years, I’ve noticed that email has replaced the telephone for most business communications and the number of inbound calls (and for that matter outbound phone communications) has decreased dramatically. Now, I use the phone primarily for pre-arranged calls and interviews especially for editorial content and rarely connect with strangers by phone. Usually sales reps seeking my business initiate communication by email and if there is relevant interest, we set up a time for a conversation.
This makes sense on some levels in that email is relatively easy to handle, and if the email has some degree of personalization, it is a good way to reduce friction and barriers between the decision-maker and sales representative. It is also a great way to avoid unnecessary connections and contact, however.
Here we run into the challenge of barrier breaking and I wish I had a simple answer for you if you are a salesperson trying to break through. One of the biggest problems of course is that your offer may simply not be relevant or useful directly to the person you are calling/emailing. I can think of two recent communications, for example, which I fended off effectively.
One, a real estate leasing agent called my office, connected live with our administrator/receptionist (yes, we have a live person in the office who will answer the phone, quickly, when you hit “zero” — but of course sometimes she is on the phone and since she is the only person in the office, you may still end up in voice mail hell) and left a message proposing a communication. He also left me a voice mail and sent me a comprehensive email.
Good strategy, but on reading his materials, checking his website, and assessing the state of our business, I knew he would not find me to be a profitable client. I responded with a brief email giving him enough information to allow him to know that we couldn’t really provide value for him. He thanked me for responding and moved on. (Perhaps if he had been wiser, he could have seen some hidden opportunities in a non-cash relationship with a media publisher who might know people who could be his clients, but I suppose he wasn’t thinking that far ahead.)
The second communication is more interesting. A printer’s representative, finding a copy of one of my publications, communicated by email asking if I would like a quote. I told her directly that we have contractual obligations with our current printer and are not moving soon. (True.) She responded that she would be happy to prepare a quote regardless.
I accepted the proposal, again by email, succinctly explaining how we co-ordinate and measure our jobs for pricing. She had her estimators prepare a full quote. Perhaps to my relief, it turned out to be higher than I am paying presently. I deleted it. But here is the problem for her. If she had come in low, I would have simply “shopped” the quote to my current printer and perhaps received a better price. (To anyone out there screaming “ethical violation” note this is not a fixed bid tender offer, I did not solicit the quote and I told the potential supplier up front that I have contractual obligations to stay with my current printer. She prepared the quote anyways.)
So how do you handle the communications and selling process?
Jeffrey Gitomer has a wonderful weekly newsletter with interactive qualities I would really like to emulate on mine. He builds in a poll/survey question with four multiple choice answers. Today, he asked how you should leave a voice mail message. The correct answer is to leave your first name and phone number, and nothing more. You certainly don’t want to leave a selling message, and declining to leave a voice mail (if you have a valid reason for calling) of course will not connect you with whom you wish to communicate. Conversely, Gitomer advocates rethinking your outbound voice mail message to create an inviting sales presence, not a standard and cliche-driven script.
Your challenge is not to give away too much selling information about yourself initially, but to give enough value in the early relationship process that your prospective client will want to do business with you. This is easier said than done but is vital if you wish to take things forward. Then, and this is important, if you’ve reached the point where there is a potential relationship and some respect, you need to figure out what to do when you receive the “no” or “request more information” response.
The printer’s representative alas messed up on several fronts. She didn’t build a relationship and determine if I could be a truly suitable client up front before going to the trouble (and providing way too much competitive data) of preparing a quote. Probably her bosses measure her by the number of quotes she prepares and maybe a few of them stick. I tend to think, however, the printer has too much overhead in the sales department and thus its prices are uncompetitively high (or I have just been a good negotiator and have been able to keep printing costs reasonable — maybe my printers should not read this blog.)
A much more effective approach to the selling and marketing process is to realize that everyone you connect with has some value to your business, as you have some potential value to theirs, but this may not be in the form of a direct sale or sales lead. They may however know someone or be part of a network which could be useful to you. Here, you need to take your selling hat off and think about your relationship-building process. What can you give to the person you are connecting with which will provide some real value and utility, and not cost you much in time, effort, and resources?
Great, you say, but this doesn’t get me to my quota.
Here I wish I could wave my hand and say, voila, you don’t need to struggle any more. I would say this: If you are spending your day on the phone and email (or perhaps worse, cold canvassing), I would pull back an hour or maybe two each day and turn off the selling machine completely and focus entirely on what you can give/share/contribute to others. In a pragmatic sense, the others should be within your marketing community though general community service and charitable works certainly can qualify — and you may find you can enlist others in your community to help you with these greater good deeds.
Finally, when you have a valid “no” at least to direct business, consider whether you can provide something worthwhile for the person you are calling or (even better), if you are the person who is receiving the sales call, whether you can do something to help the sales rep. The latter thinking is quite counter-intuitive and even as I write this I realize I failed to follow up these principals with the two representatives described in this post. Wait . . . I’ll send them an email linking them to the post. Who knows where the relationship we build will take us?
One of your best postings in a long time. Helpful, informative and appropriately in depth.