This topic comes up a lot in our appointment making workshops – Once we get a suspect on the phone, should we be trying to sell them right then and there, or be asking for an appointment? Here’s our philosophy.

My answer to this and almost all questions I’m asked begins with this basic premise: Nothing works all of the time. However, I’m all about increasing my odds of success and reducing risk. So, when we cold call someone, remember that we are interrupting them from doing something, so in most cases, they don’t want to talk to us. Secondly, remember that less than 5% of our suspects are ‘in the market’ for what we’re selling when we call them, so they don’t think they need to talk to us at all.

What those two things mean on a cold call is that we’ve got a very short period of time to get what we want, so keep it’s best to keep it simple and basic. An appointment doesn’t commit them to anything beyond a few minutes of their time. Even if we are selling entirely over the phone, I recommend that we ask for an appointment to do that.

Here are some more quick reasons to do it that way:

• If we get into too many ‘selling’ conversations when making cold calls (elongating the average length of our calls), most of us sales people run out of time to make the number of calls we need to make in order to hit our goals – increasing the risk of not hitting those goals
• People will open up less to us on the phone than they will in person – meaning we’ll miss some percentage of opportunities because people won’t be forthright with us – reducing our closing ratio
• We will tend to feel rushed and therefore more apt to ‘product dump’ on the suspect hoping we can hit a ‘hot button’ before they decide this isn’t for them, when what we really want (and need) to do is to ask questions to understand how to properly present our solution in their terms – reducing our effectiveness (ratios) in the selling process
• When someone grants us an appointment (via the phone or face-to-face), they generally will stay committed to the time they committed for the meeting – increasing our odds of success