The art of warming cold sales prospects
Drayton Bird, one of the world’s most successful copywriters and a man to have on your side when you want to warm your business to business cold sales prospects and clinch the deal was recently blogging about the art of selling; why it’s important to be tenacious when endeavouring to turn cold sales prospects into warm leads. He revealed the following startling statistics about salespeople and their perseverance powers on the cold calling front.
48.2% of sales people made one call and quit
24.4% made two calls and quit
14.7% made three calls and quit
12.7% made four or more calls
60% of the sales were made on or after the fifth call.
Nearly 88% of the sales people automatically eliminated themselves from the potential business. They gave up before the person they were contacting had been brought to the point of being interested in buying.
It’s hardly rocket science is it?
How many times do you decide to buy a product or service for your business at the very first asking when an approach is made on the telephone? In all likelihood, it will take several conversations interspersed with information, a high-quality direct mailshot, a peek at their website, doing a little sleuthing on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook before you’re ready to do a Meg Ryan, shrieking ‘yes, yes, yes lead me to the dotted line!’
If you want to turn cold prospects into warm clients and you’re using a powerful low cost combination of direct mail and the telephone as your staple ingredients, then to reiterate one of the messages in last week’s blog, you have to be a tortoise – in it for the long haul. In that first call if you’re trying to coerce your cold sales prospect into a sale, you will only succeed in triggering alarm bells that you are not to be trusted because you’re just too damn pushy. However if you can treat the first call as a “getting to know your needs” call – an opportunity to gather information, emphasise key benefits and hot on the heels of this communication you send an exquisitely written letter sandwiched by… a follow-up phone call, you are establishing a continuum of communication that, if your cold prospect is really interested in what you are offering, should lead to sales.
Of course, in the real world you will have to do an awful lot more than just send one lovely direct mailshot and make a couple of calls. Because businesspeople are elusive aren’t they? You may have to make a dozen calls just to get through to the person again. You may have to send information to other people in the decision-making unit and at times it will feel as though you are taking one step forward, two steps back. But your persistence, charm and attention to detail will pay off as one by one your cold sales prospects begin to thaw.
Yes, it’s definitely about building rapport… about deriving a real understanding of need and how you can meet these needs and all of the other good touchy-feely stuff that you have to deploy.
But most importantly it’s about not giving up before the miracle happens.
