I was talking about cold calling to a colleague of mine the other day who said he was having some trouble with connecting to his prospects when making calls. His issue being that he couldn’t connect with the decision maker and it ended with the decision maker finally blasting him on the phone exclaiming “which part of rejection don’t you understand?”… OUCH!!!

However, what he told me next was very interesting and I thought I would post about it today. He told me that after the manager yelled at him, he quietly said “I’m not calling to sell you anything, just have a chat… So I’m not sure why you would think you’re rejecting me?”…

This made the manager seemingly calmed down after that, replying “You’re not!… Ok, we’ll I guess we’d better meet then”…

I thought this was a very useful dynamic, because in typical sales prospecting approaches, when you’re trying to meet with a decision maker “cold” it can often be mistaken as a cold call.

When my friend actually told the manager that he was there “NOT” to sell anything to him, but to talk about a problem he had picked up from their advertising that he had some ideas on, the manager was all ears…

The ironic thing was, in the course of that natural conversation, the manager asked him about what he specialized in as the ideas he gave him were so unique. However, my friend being as skilled as he is, didn’t talk about what he did directly, he took out a snippet of what Michael Port teaches from the book “Book Yourself Solid”…

He said, “Well you’ve probably heard of how most companies have very big advertising bills that quite often don’t pay for themsleves, haven’t you?” to which the manager replied “Yes, of course!”… “Well I take those problems and teach companies how to turn them around, with a number of “non-traditional” approaches that have been proven to work wonders”…

So just by talking generally and not trying to “Push” the sale, but at the same time, relating the natural conversation around the obvious problem that the manager had, he most likely would have been thinking “Yes, that’s me you’re talking about!” but wasn’t going to admit it.

And that’s all you ever need to do, is plant the seed in peoples minds without being obvious, it’s far better that they ask you to help them then, rather than you asking for that.

You’ll find things come to a natural conclusion and sales will fall into place anyway, becuase, as you discuss ideas, examples and past experiences with other clients, you’re demonstrating your ability first hand but in a completely non-threatening way.

Once you get to this place of openness, you can then ask the prospect if he’s ever known anyone in such a position, he’ll say yes and you can then lean back, smile and gently say “Please tell” and it all comes off as a conversation, which is what it should only ever be.

I hope this has helped you a little more with how to open your prospects up, this example was one of the more tougher scenarios, because you’ll find in the real world, unless you really piss someone off or they’re having an extremely bad day, they won’t react violently like that, they’ll just politely say “no thank you!”…