August 27th, 2008 by Barry Caponi
One of the most common push backs we hear in our workshops on The Formula is that some believe that voicemails are a waste of time. I’ve written on this topic before, but let me take a moment and add another reason to leave them.
There are now six reasons for leaving voicemails as we’ve just come across another one that is worthy of mention. People who do not have physical gatekeepers are using their voicemail to screen their calls.
Unless they recognize the Caller ID, they won’t answer the phone. So if you’re not leaving voicemails, you’re in a Catch-22 situation. They’ll not answer your call because they don’t recognize your Caller ID (see August 13th Blog for why blocking the ID won’t work either) and they won’t call you back because they don’t know who called.
Reasons to leave a voicemail:
- Efficiency – Those that do call us back are pre-qualified (at least they are willing to have a conversation)
- Efficiency – The majority of the time you invest in making a call is up to the moment you would leave a voicemail. Without Klpz, that could be up to about three minutes of your time; with Klpz, about 90 seconds. A voicemail shouldn’t be longer than 15 seconds, so why not invest the additional time?
- Cold calling is partially a numbers game which means that there are some (less than five percent) of your universe of suspects that are in the market for what we’re selling when we call because they do need us. Therefore, some people will call you back.
- Marketing pays big money to advertise your brand (your message) and you’ve just reached out to a potential customer and you’re not going to leave a voicemail? You’ve already paid for (in your time to place the call) the majority of your effort, so why wouldn’t you leverage the effort?
- Advertisers say it takes an average of seven touches just to get someone to remember your name.
- People use their voicemail to screen calls so if they don’t recognize your caller ID (or if you’ve blocked it), they won’t answer the call anyway…ever.
In summary, start leaving voicemails using the concepts of The Formula. You’ll get more appointments and sales without much of a time or effort increase.
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August 13th, 2008 by Barry Caponi
So you think you’re doing yourself a favor by cold calling with the Caller ID on your phone blocked?
In one of our workshops the other day, one of our students proudly told us that they make their calls from a phone whose number shows up on the recipient’s phone as ‘Caller ID Blocked’.
Let me ask you a very simple question. When you receive a phone call and you look at your caller ID say’s ‘Blocked’, who do you think is calling?
Bottom line is that you’re not doing yourself any favors by hiding your identity from the person you’re calling. Unblock the block.
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August 6th, 2008 by Barry Caponi
Many times sales people fall back to the position of asking for ‘just 10 minutes’ when a suspect says no to an appointment request (or even starting with a request for that). That puts us in a very defensive position when we arrive for the appointment.
The objective of most Initial Meetings is for both parties to determine whether it makes sense to enter into a buying cycle or not. If less than 5% of our universe of suspects thinks they are in the market for what we’re selling when we call, we put ourselves at a distinctive disadvantage in telling someone we’ll only take 10 minutes of their time.
What happens is that we feel pressured when we show up because we’re not really sure whether they’ll limit us to the 10 minutes or not, so we just ‘product dump’ right from the beginning, hoping that the suspect will hear something that they want to hear more about and extend the visit.
There are two most likely outcomes for a call like this: 1) They’ll quickly come to a conclusion based on just hearing about features of what we sell that it’s not worth continuing and we’re cooked, or 2) our ability to get back into the normal sequence of determining buying motivations is so out of sequence that it is truly difficult to get back to it. The result is that we wind up presenting some kind of proposal based solely on price without understanding what the benefits to the prospect are. Our closing ratios suffer and since we only have a certain amount of selling time provided to us by the big guy upstairs, we’re doubly wasting our time.
If you really believe you’ve got something of value, then learn how to handle the ‘nos’ you hear and get an appropriate amount of time to conduct an Initial Meeting. Your goal is not the Initial Meeting, it is a sale.
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