Here’s an idea to make your appointment setting calls more difficult.
Cold callers make their jobs more difficult by forgetting to ask for the ‘sale’ again after answering a question or making a point.
In our appointment making methodology called, The Formula™, we constantly remind our students not to forget to ask for the appointment again after they answer a question or make a point. What happens when we don’t do that is we leave what we call ‘dead air’. The result of dead air is that the Target will fill it with another hurdle for us to clear or hoop to jump through. (You can choose your own metaphor.) Here’s an example.
When we cold call, we make a bold statement telling the Target that our clients consistently tell us that they experience a doubling or better of the number of Initial Appointments their sales teams set after going through one of our programs. We also tell them that we’d like to stop by their office and share with them how those clients were able to accomplish that. We then always finish with the question, “Would you be available this coming Tuesday at 2:00?”
The most common response we get from our Targets is, “How the heck do you do that?”
After responding to that question and to regain control of the direction of the conversation, we ask one of our Bridge Questions™ like, “I’m just curious, what kinds of things have you done to address this critical component of the selling process?”
After they respond, we always answer with, “You know what, that’s exactly why we need to get together, would you be available Tuesday at 2:00?” (Lot’s of emphasis on the bolded words, by the way as tonality is our strongest ally over the phone.)
Sounds logical, right? Well, when we role play these new techniques in our Prospectors Academy what we hear until these new methods become second nature is that the sales professional will stop after they answer the question. And even in the role plays, the Target not knowing that they are now supposed to immediately agree to the appointment, will respond with another question or will throw out a negative response that we now have to address. (Prolonging the call and making our job more difficult.)
Don’t make that mistake. The old adage of ‘he who speaks first loses’ does apply here, but only after we’ve asked for the sale (in this case the appointment). We can’t rely on our Targets to remember the closing question we asked in the beginning, “Would you be available this coming Tuesday at 2:00?” Their last thought was focused on the response or question they gave us. We need to ask it again!
Caponi Performance Group and Contact Science jointly market the telephone prospecting and cold calling solution called The Prospector’s Academy™ under the brand name Coldcalling101. It is the only comprehensive solution to solving the biggest barrier to success in most selling organizations – the inability to secure enough Initial Appointments to begin the selling process. We accomplish that through simultaneously addressing both the efficiency and effectiveness of the process. We can be reached at 214 483-5800 or at barry@coldcalling101.com.
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