Telephone Prospecting is Hard..... or is it, How to Manage Objections in the call.

Telephone prospecting is hard, in fact so hard that most people spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy trying to avoid it.

What they are really trying to avoid is the rejection part of the call, “The Objection”.

That’s why alternate means of engagement have such a great appeal for the masses (washed or unwashed, you decide), whatever your view of social selling, there is no direct rejection. Somehow, some sellers can differentiate and compartmentalise rejection from being ignored; they may not blow you off in a direct way, they just pretend you’re not there.

The net effect is the same, no engagement, no prospect.

The problem for many would-be tele-prospectors is that they see the objection as being separate from the rest of the call.

They love to brag about their company and product early in the call, (mistake), and are surprised when the voice on the other end say, “no interest”.

What they fail to understand is that their intro, the start of the talk track (or script for you traditionalists), has a direct impact on the response.

Nothing to do with the school of sales one is from, and everything thing to do with human nature.

The good news is that both parties in this drama are human, giving us ways to deal with this in a way that yields results for both.

How we start a conversation directly dictates what kind of response we get.

For example, if a parent scolds a child for being late, the child will quietly take in the words, but not the message, offering a meek, if any response at all. Alternatively, if the parent took the opportunity to present a life lesson, taking a conversant tone and carefully selected words, the child is much more likely to take in the message, leading to entirely different (better) reaction and response, making them more open and engaged.

So while you will never be able to avoid objections in telephone prospecting, or being ignored in other forms of prospecting, you can do things to limit the number of potential objections, and keeping objections to predictable and manageable set.

You can then practice how to take away those most common objections that result from your well and purposefully crafted introduction.

Remember, the person you’re calling has literally heard all this before, thousands of times.

As soon as they hear a voice buzzing on about “leading provider”, “cutting edge solution”, or any set of words immediately followed by “awesome”, the prospect starts desperately search for their fly swatter, and start flinging objections at the buzzing sound emanating from their phone.

The logical conclusion is that to avoid fatal and unpredictable objections, we need to change what we talk about at the top of the call.

Namely, things the prospect was likely thinking about before you interrupted thier day.

If thatinterruption is in line with what they were focused on, you will still get an objection, after all, you are an interruption, but it is likely to be one of a handful, literally 5, objections.

Focus on thier objectives and the impacts you have delivered for others with similar objectives, and you will get the predictable response, allowing you to take away that objection in a predictable fashion that will lead to a conversation, which is the first step in engagement.

The GOAL of every high performance sales team should be to…… Proactively create the conditions where more deals, that are more profitable, with better customers, are the natural result. This is achieved by engineering the overall sales process such that it reliably generates the desired outcomes as a matter of course.

Predictable success can examine your sales processes and deliver an accurate road map after determining where you’re on track and where you need course correction.

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