Why cold calling a CEO is difficult...

I recently read a very interesting post, essentially admonishing company CEO's for their (our) collective attitude towards cold call sales. The gist of the post (which can be found here ) is as follows:

• Sales person sends 3 emails - on third email, CEO threatens to invoice for time wasted
• Sales person posts response suggesting that "no thanks" would have sufficed
• Sales person goes on to state "don't forget where you came from"

So, here's the view from the other side.

Firstly, as the Founder & CEO of a group of companies, yours is not the third email I received today. I get upwards of 170 emails daily, many of which are unsolicited sales or recruitment agencies vying for my business, none of which I asked for, and 99% of which are completely irrelevant.

Now, perhaps it would be nice of me to respond to them all, but in my experience, responding to hard-core sales people, whether it is a positive or negative response, is a sure-fire way of burying myself in a ten-fold increase in communications from the originator. Depending on whether or not the originator is a good sales person or a bad sales person will be immediately obvious based on the ongoing communication.

A good sales person

1. If I respond positively, a good sales person will be direct, ask what I need/want and deliver accordingly. A very good sales person will try and up-sell me, whilst remaining humble and empathetic, and without overdoing it, because they know that a repeat customer is worth a hundred times more than a one off sale.
2. If I respond negatively, a good sales person will move on. Time is money, and all that, and there's little point spending time when someone has provided an unambiguous "no thanks".

A bad sales person

1. If I respond positively, a bad sales person will bite like a Jack Russell and wring the life out of the transaction. They'll talk at me, keep me on the phone for far too long, bamboozle me with upsells and flagons of bullshit and, more often than not, try and convince me I need something other than what I've asked for. At this point, they lose the whole account, because I'm wrung out.
2. If I respond negatively, a bad sales person will almost always send me an email along the lines of "can I ask why?". If I then ignore that email, I get ten others explaining why I should change my mind. If I respond to that email politely, the cycle of increased communication is perpetuated. If I respond negatively, I often get stroppy responses back, some of which have turned quite nasty. The good sales person would already have recognised a dead lead, and moved on.

There are 7 billion people on this planet. I'm just a working class, West Londoner that's done OK for himself ( because I'm a tenacious little git ) that isn't going to be the purveyor of doom if you don't close me. Just move on.

The first rule of sales: Give them what they want.

A few years ago one of my customers decided he no longer wanted to carry my products in his store. I called him up to ask why, and this is basically what he said to me:

"A customer came in to my store today, and we spent an hour with her, and then she left and bought the product from your own website".

I'm sorry, what? If a customer just came in to your store, and then left and purchased it from our website, at the same price, but with additional shipping charges, you need to have a good look at yourself.

So, I found the customer and called her to find out exactly what happened. I couldn't believe what she told me. She had five minutes on her lunch break to drop in to the local store and pick up her tripod. She'd done a tonne of research and wanted one of our pro tripods. Upon entering the store, having already called them to ask if they had the item in stock, she asked for the tripod with cash in her hand. The sales person's response was "No, you don't want that - you want this..." and then proceeded to keep her there for a full hour to explain to her why he thought she should buy a different brand than the one she had chosen.

I can empathise with brand evangelism - we all have our favourites, but this cost the store a sales person's time for a whole hour, and a ￡400 sale. And that's not even the biggest consequence of his failure to meet the demands of the customer. She'll never, ever go back to that store again.

If he'd listened to her, and given her the product she specifically asked for, she'd have handed over ￡400 in cash, and walked within three minutes of arriving, freeing him up to serve other customers, but instead he let his ego get in the way. What a total moron. If that were my business, he'd be looking for another job.

Do's and don'ts

I confess, I'm not a sales person, so I'm not going to preach about how to do that job, but I am a successful entrepreneur that grew a company from ￡7k start up money, to a multi-national, multi-million pound global leader in camera support technology, inside 7 years, so I think my experiences from the other side of the table are relevant. This may well be unique to me, but somehow I don't think it is.

Let's start with the Don'ts:

1: When you get me on the phone, skip the small talk. I don’t mean to be rude, but when I get “Hi Danny, it’s Simon here from Blahblahblah Incorporated. How are you today?”

“How can I help you?” is my usual response. It’s not me being rude – I’m sending a message that I want you to get to the point, because I’m busy. I get 50 calls a day like this and 49 of them last less than 30 seconds. And not because I’m an arrogant prick. I’m just busy. Get on with it.

2: Don’t follow up with some generic chit chat-type rambling question – you know the sort of thing I mean – “I’m just calling to see how you approach using a Forex service for your international trades. Do you do a lot of this kind of transaction?” I’m already half way to putting down the phone. You shouldn’t have to ask this question if you’d spent five minutes researching my business before making the call. Qualified leads are a hundred times more powerful than speculative ones.

I don’t particularly like a hard sell, but if you’d said “I represent a Forex service that I believe is less expensive, more efficient and more user friendly than any other available service” or something like that you’ve achieved two things; a) I know what you want, and b) you’ve dangled a carrot that says I’ll save time and money. Boom.

3: Don’t bullshit to get me on the phone. The number of sales people that call my office and say “Hi, can I speak to Danny please? It’s Jeff from Superblag just returning his call from this morning.”

Then, my staff member puts the caller on hold and calls me, and tells me that Jeff from Superblag is on line 2, returning my call from this morning. Being that I’ve never heard of Jeff, or Superblag, I ask my staff to get rid of Jeff.

I sometimes even screen my own calls if we're busy and the phones are ringing off the hook. Whilst writing this I took a call from someone who asked for me, and when I asked “If Danny will know what the call is concerning” she told me that "Danny" called her this morning and that he'd asked her to call back. Being that I know she’s lying, I called her out on it. Then she tried to tell me I was wrong and I don’t know what I’m talking about. Lie after lie after lie. Number blocked on work phone system. Now you’ll never get a sale from my business, and more to the point, neither will anyone in your company, ever again.

4: Don’t bullshit me if you manage to get me on the phone. Saying things like “I’ve been watching your company for some time, and I’ve been really impressed by what you’ve done” is so easily undone, that credibility can be lost just by me replying “Oh really? What’s impressed you the most?”. The next 30 seconds is either filled with silence or you floundering around my company website looking for a glimmer of inspiration to help dig you out of a hole you shouldn’t even be in.

5: Don’t keep the conversation going at the point where I’ve either said I’m not interested, or you get the inkling that it’s going nowhere. Better to use that time to do the research into your next lead, rather than waste both my time and yours. I had a guy call me once from Anglian windows offering me a killer deal on double glazing. I told him in the first ten seconds that I live in a Grade II listed building that dates back to the 15th century. He should have just hung up at that point, being that I would never be given consent by English Heritage to put PVC windows in a 500 year old house. He didn’t, so I did.

6: Don’t tell me you’re not selling anything, when you are. “This isn’t a sales call – I just want to know if you have the correct medical insurance for your staff”. So if I don't, you can sell me some. I’m not an idiot. Click.

7: Don’t get shitty with someone because they said no. For all you know, I could be having a terrible day, and not want to take any sales calls at all. A month down the line, I won’t even remember that you already called, unless you’re a dick about it, and then I’ll make sure I remember you, so I can be a dick about it, and leave you on hold forever. There’s a famous expression, that I firmly believe in, that goes ‘Don’t shit on people on the way up, because you never know who you’re going to meet on the way down’.

8: Don't do generic. If you're sending me an email to try and sell me something, sending me a generic templated "insert company name here" email is the quickest way to my junk folder. If you're going to go for a scatter-gun approach by sending 1000 emails a day, in the hope that one person responds, you're a busy fool. Work smart, not hard. Just make a bit of an effort.

The Dos

1: As I’ve already said, get to the point quickly. The quicker the better. 50 calls a day, and if I took them all, I’d never get my own job done.

2: Do look into my company first. See what we do, even just a cursory glance so you at least know what we’re about.

3: Learn your script, and practice it. There’s nothing wrong with having a script unless it sounds like you’re reading from one. I hate that with a passion.

4: Keep it pleasant. Manners cost nothing, even in the face of hostility. It’s never personal to you (unless you’re pitching your own business), but it might be to the person you’re pitching to.

5: Be a straight shooter. Be direct, be firm, be truthful and have humility.

6: If you get the impression today isn’t the day you’re going to close the deal, get off the phone. “Danny, you sound busy, and I don’t want to hold you up any longer. I’ll call you back some other time”. That’s happened about three times ever, and guess what? I took the second call because they read the situation and made the right decision.

It’s really as simple as that. And if you do hit a brick wall after doing all the right things, then the prospect just isn’t in the market for what you’re selling.

The reality.

To the originator of the previous post, this is what I face daily. Your post may well seem relevant to you, but to me it’s a one sided whinge about what tyrants business owners and CEO’s are, when, in fact SME founders & CEOs are some of the hardest working people you'll ever meet.

I reserve the right to not want to take your call, to be direct, firm, and immovable. I reserve the right to hang up at the point of my choosing, so that I may put my business interests ahead of yours. I reserve the right to not take your call, because you tried a hundred different ways and you still haven’t got the message. And I deserve the right to put your email in my junk folder and block you, after the third email, when you still don’t get the message that I’m not interested.

So, "just a friendly reminder to everyone" when a business owner or CEO declines to take your call or answer your email it's because they are busy, doing their jobs, employing people, innovating, inventing, expanding, developing and probably putting in 100 hour weeks just to keep their heads above water, and if they/we/I lose our cool every once in a while it's because you did it wrong, not because we are condescending arseholes.

Also, I shoehorned the word "flagons" into this article, because I could. Just saying.