October 30th, 2008 by Barry Caponi
“I can save you money over what you’re paying today!” “I can make you more productive and save you time!” Ever had someone call you with a message like these? If it’s not in the opening message, a lot of us cold callers resort to this approach as we try to talk the person we’re calling into meeting with us. When I hear that, I get even more upset at the interruption than I was when I realized this was a cold call.
In my opinion, we lose credibility when we make statements like that as it assumes we have intimate knowledge of their current situation and in most cases we don’t. (This does assume we haven’t done our homework and do know that we can help them. If we did though, the message would still be slightly different – a topic for another Blog.)
How do we know what they’re paying or how well they’re doing? For that matter, how do we even know they use what we’re selling? We do want to find out if we can help them, but let’s not use the assumptive position that we can. It’s insulting and makes us sound like the proverbial telemarketer.
One last thought. Go ahead and use this approach if you’ve been able to help 100% of the prospects you entered into a buying cycle with, because you’re selling the proverbial better mouse trap - and take advantage of it while you can. It won’t last long.
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October 22nd, 2008 by Barry Caponi
There are three steps to defining the message and then a very simple Formula to apply it.
1) We must write out the best success stories of someone using our solutions we can think. Include these five components:
a) What were the challenges facing our customer?
b) How did we address those challenges?
c) What were the results?
d) What did the customer tell us were the benefits of those results?
e) Can we use any of the names attached to these stories?
2) Using our success stories as a starting point, list:
a) All of challenges we believe our solution addressed for our current customers.
b) All of benefits (not features) that our solution provided for our current customers.
3) Determine the most powerful approach from either the challenge or the benefit approach specific to the audience we’ll be calling and apply it as follows:
“The reason I was specifically calling you today was that we’ve recently had a lot of success (insert most powerful approach from No. Two or Three above) and I’d like to stop by your office and share with you how we were able to accomplish that.”
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October 22nd, 2008 by Barry Caponi
Mistake #2 – Tell the Target all about what we can do for them
Remember, they don’t think they need what we’re selling, so why do we think this approach will work? Instead we should tell them about the results someone else got from using what we sell. (All of us – ok, maybe just most of us - think that others know some little secret we don’t that’s made them more successful than us.)
As this technique is too long to describe in this Blog, I’ve published a supplemental Blog which follows directly. If you’d like to read a more robust article about how to write Powerful Cold Call Value Propositions, click this link http://www.caponipg.com/Newsletters.htm and select the July, 2008 Newsletter. You’ll find a simple three step process to writing powerful reasons to get together.
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October 15th, 2008 by Barry Caponi
The most powerful technique of The Formula is called the Bridge Question. This concept is what differentiates us from any other appointment setting process. It accomplishes two objectives:
· Bridges us back into control of the conversation after the
suspect asks a question;
· Provides us the ability to Bridge from the suspect’s Conditioned Knee Jerk Response into a short conversation providing a platform to expand on our value proposition and qualify a bit before we ask for the appointment again. It will also reduce no shows and cancellations.
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October 15th, 2008 by Barry Caponi
Mistake #1 - There are only two ground rules our Targets play by when they receive a Cold Call. Ignore them at your peril.
When we place a Cold Call, we must understand that the person we’re calling really doesn’t think they need to talk to us. As a matter of fact, surveys show that less than 5% of Targets in any sales person’s universe of potential customers believes they are in the market for what we’re selling when we call them.
We must also understand that we are interrupting our Target from doing something when we call, so they don’t want to talk to us.
The result of those two rules is that they will do anything, including lie to us, to get us off the phone. Most Cold Calling methodologies teach us to counter their statement using a logical argument (or power benefit) to convince them that they should meet with us. But if they’re lying to us, why would we think logic would work against a statement that is not true?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have enough time to make calls until I find that 1 – 5% that is in the market. And heck, half of them seem to be too busy right then anyway. That means we must employ a different approach to get them past this ‘knee jerk’ reaction (we call them Conditioned Responses) designed to get us off the phone before we can apply any kind of logic to their response.
The Formula (our methodology) employs a technique we call the Bridge Question to get them to stop thinking about how to get us off the phone for a moment and gets them to open their minds to our logical argument (or power benefit).
As this technique is too long to describe in this Blog, I’ve published a supplemental Blog which follows directly.
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October 9th, 2008 by Barry Caponi
There are only four categories of ‘Conditioned Responses’ we’ll hear on an appointment making call and typically we’ll hear one more than all the others combined – if we are delivering the same message on each call. If we wing it, the responses we get will differ each time making it more difficult on us to get the appointment because we’re having to ‘Wing’ the Counter as well.
The participants who go through our workshops consistently tell us that they hear one type of what we call a Conditioned Response, more than any other. Our job is to figure out which it is and prepare and practice our Counter to that response. More than likely it will fall into the Pareto Rule (80 / 20 Rule).
Other than asking a direct question, our targets will only respond in the following manners:
1. Don’t need one (Not Interested)
2. Have one (Happy Now)
3. Send me something
4. Can’t talk right now
If we consistently deliver the same message in each call, those responses will fall into a very predictable pattern, simplifying our task of Countering. So start tracking the responses you’re getting and come up with a solid Counter to it and your ratio of conversations to appointments will go up!
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October 1st, 2008 by Barry Caponi
What we all want as the initial response to our request for an appointment is to be a yes, right? But since that just isn’t going to happen very often, what’s the next best thing? Getting a direct question as the initial response.
So the why is that? The answer is quite elementary, my dear Watson! It begins a conversation that provides us the ability to apply our skills to get the appointment.
There are two ways to accomplish that. One is to make a very bold statement about the results others have received from using our solution. That gets our target to ask us how we’re able to accomplish that. For instance, ours is, “Our clients report back that they’ve doubled or better the number of Initial Meetings they were previously setting.” The other is to be purposefully vague which almost demands a response asking us to explain what we mean.
In either approach, the result is that it gets us into a conversation where we can apply a logical reason for why they should meet with us. Prior to that, it’s just us talking and them thinking about how to get us off the phone; and logical arguments just don’t work in that environment.
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