Smart Selling on the Phone and Online

Inside Sales That Gets Results

Josiane Feigon

• Verlag: AMACOM
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780814414668
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Business
• Thema: Marketing

In an age of telesales and digital selling, this award-winning business book pinpoints the ten skills essential to high-efficiency, high-success sales performance based on the author's TeleSmart 10 System for Power Selling.

Bestselling author and TeleSmart Communications president Josiane Feigon equips salespeople with the powerful tools they need to open stronger, build trust faster, handle objections better, and close more sales when dealing with customers they can't see face-to-face.

In Smart Selling on the Phone and Online, you'll learn how to:

• overcome ten different forms of "paralysis" and reestablish momentum;
• sell in sound bites, not long-winded speeches;
• ask the right questions to reveal customer needs;
• navigate around obstacles to get to the power buyer;
• and prioritize and manage your time so that more of it is spent actually selling.

The world of selling keeps changing, and sales professionals are on the front line of innovation to keep profits flowing. Combining an accessible text with clear graphics and step-by-step processes, Smart Selling on the Phone and Online will help any rep master the world of sales 2.0 and become a true sales warrior.

CHAPTER 1

TIME MANAGEMENT

Momentum Control

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

—Steve Jobs

In this chapter, you’ll get valuable insight into:

• The effects of having less time control
• Sales 2.0 overload for the sales rep
• When paralysis sets in
• Living in reactive mode

You’ll learn tools and tactics to help you:

• Regain your momentum and recapture time and take control
• Understand how to differentiate between reactive and proactive
• Say “no” and shut off distractions and learn to work smarter and faster
• Learn the importance of creating a daily activity plan to work with your territory plan
• Maintain self-discipline in blocking a few hours per day for your non-negotiable power calls
• Create a clear call objective prior to making each call

Susan isn’t ready for our scheduled coaching session—a web conference is running overtime. “I’ll just be a few more minutes,” she whispers, waving me into her cubicle and pointing at a chair.

While on her web conference, she receives an instant message from her manager. He requests that all deals be entered into Salesforce.com (SFA) before end of day if she expects to get credit for them. He also wants her forecast report. Meanwhile, her cell phone vibrates and she reads a text message sent by her UK partner: “The deal is ours for $80K this month & not $120K.” She groans. That means she’s going to have to revise the proposal to include the new terms and get it out to him before the end of his day—hours away from her time zone.

Suddenly, she slams her hand on her desk. “Don’t tell me this is happening again!” Susan’s system has locked up—a regular occurrence, apparently. Her company merged with a competitor a few months ago, and the systems haven’t been integrated or upgraded. Data is not efficiently shared or retrieved, which means too many windows and programs open all at once, which inevitably makes the systems crash. Susan looks at me with her last shred of optimism. “Just give me a few extra minutes to check my voice mail!”

She finds eight new voice mail messages—all marked urgent and requiring immediate attention—along with several dozen e-mails from her customers, external partners, internal departments, and several regional managers. Susan looks at her watch and glances at a series of clocks all neatly aligned on her desk. It’s noon now in California, 2:00 p.m. in Austin, 3:00 p.m. in Atlanta, and 9:00 p.m. in the UK and Latin America.

“There goes my morning again,” she says, shaking her head. “Ever since I walked in, I’ve been putting out fires!” Her field partner pops his head into her cubicle to ask if they can spend time strategizing on their target list before he leaves for the airport, and she agrees to meet with him after our coaching session. Just as he leaves, she receives an instant message from her regional manager, who wants her to attend the all-hands meeting in the afternoon because the worldwide VP will be making an announcement on new fiscal initiatives that address her new compensation. After attending this meeting, it looks like she’s expected to sit in on a meeting with the marketing organization to discuss lead quality and conversion. They’re planning a marketing blast campaign this week to over 300,000 prospects and they need input from the team on their target audience. Susan gives me a panicked look.

“I think we need to reschedule our coaching session for another time,” I suggest.

INSIDE SALES IS ABOUT TIME

Yes, inside sales is about money. But perhaps more important, it’s about time: how you plan it, and how you use it to your best advantage. There is a direct correlation between time control and quota attainment. The choices you make, the focus you keep, the plan you produce, the way you organize your e-mail, the order in which you ask questions, and the momentum you create and maintain set the foundation for your phone and online sales success.

Less Time to Sell

Precall research averages forty-five minutes for just one contact. It takes from five to seven attempts to reach your contact by phone or e-mail before they actually respond. You have to make enough initial calls and follow-up calls to generate genuine prospects you can confidently put in your pipeline. Meanwhile, the phone keeps ringing, texts and e-mails are flooding your inbox, your boss needs your forecast by this afternoon, and you’re already eating lunch in your cubicle. In the sometimes unpredictable Sales 2.0 world, it’s easy to lose time multitasking inefficiently, lose track of time, lose focus, and lose sales in the process. And if your momentum gets tripped up, that leads to procrastination and wrong choices.

Less Control Over How Your Time Is Spent

It’s no secret: inside salespeople are more frustrated with their time management and have less control than ever before. The good news is that they are finally receiving the recognition they deserve, as they are now a vital part of the entire sales process. But the bad news is that increased demands, requests, deadlines, and initiatives have been added to their daily responsibilities on a regular basis. That means having less control over how your time is spent.

The days of sitting in neatly lined sales cubicles cold-calling and prospecting sixty calls per day are over. An inside salesperson is not only part of an integrated and virtual team; he or she is the point person who leads, coordinates, facilitates, educates, and runs with the sale. The salesperson’s workday starts on a Sunday night to meet the demands of his or her globally disbursed geographical territories and their virtual partners. Salespeople are still driven by metrics that help them build a daily, weekly, and monthly funnel of prospects—which they must “touch” at least nine to twelve times and can forecast to a close. And on top of all this, they must maintain systems, manage complex sales processes, and work with more sales tools than they know what to do with.

Welcome to Sales 2.0 Overload

If you’ve been around long enough, you remember the good old days: selling with a Rolodex of accounts, prospecting for new ones using the Business Times, manually entering orders, tracking the number of calls you make each day on a tick sheet, and using an Excel spreadsheet to forecast your deals. Today, these tools are a thing of the past. The evolution of Web 2.0 has paved the way for the excesses of Sales 2.0. A glut of new web-based tools, technologies, and processes—all designed to help speed up the sales cycle, increase sales efficiencies, and close more opportunities faster—have inundated the market. All these tools and systems should be a big help. But in reality, inside salespeople are drowning in data, overwhelmed with learning new tools, searching for other tools, and paralyzed by these disparate systems.

The very nature of inside sales means managing the sales engine from the inside—no travel, no getting outside the box. Inside salespeople are active throughout the sales cycle, and they must also manage the technology, tools, and process before and after the sale even happens. Inevitably, they become the “data hounds” of their sales organization.

An average inside salesperson may manage data and metrics from at least two dozen different tools in order to progress their sale. They maintain, track, and enter customer data into at least a half-dozen systems. And—if they could just remember their log-in password!—there are many more licenses that are just waiting to be accessed and used. All these sophisticated tools are designed to track everything from routine contact and account management to, increasingly, opportunity management and prospect collaboration. Most plug in to the central repository that tracks contact information, sales metrics, and performance.

Before making a call, salespeople can choose from dozens of precall research and planning tools available to help them search their prospect company and gather names and contacts. During their sales cycle, they can use web conferencing tools to hold online meetings. After a call, their phone system tracks volume and talk time to identify performance and provide trends and analysis at a macro level for model refinement.

Inevitably, the tools designed to help reps sell efficiently lead to less productivity.

LESS TIME LEADS TO MORE PARALYSIS

The natural response to daily overload is frustration, the belief that time is beyond your control, and an increasingly desperate scramble to get a handle on your day. Some believe that working faster and multitasking will help get them caught up; some make poor choices because they can’t take the time to separate the urgent from the truly important. As they attempt to respond to the overload, paralysis sets in. They can only sit and watch as revenue dollars hemorrhage away.

The toll that interruptions and distractions take on productivity is significant. A study conducted by the University of California in 2008 found the average salesperson is distracted every eleven minutes, and with each distraction it takes them an average of twenty-five minutes to return to their task. These distractions range from the simple desktop “noise” of e-mail, voice mail, and text messaging to trouble with tools and systems. CSO Insights’ 2008 Performance Optimization Survey also confirms the time salespeople spent on non-sales activities is increasing. When you add the inevitable external interruptions, there’s a constant stream of obstacles coming at them to interrupt their momentum and keep them from rebounding or multitasking efficiently to get back on track with sales calls.

Call Activity Paralysis

Call activity, otherwise known as phone activity, is at an all-time low. Inside salespeople are slowing down on their phone calls primarily because they find they are wasting so much time leaving voice mail messages rather than getting a live person on the phone. Some standard metrics indicate the typical inside salesperson is making an average of just eight to twelve outbound calls per day and their total talk time averages thirty-three minutes a day.

E-Mail Paralysis

E-mail is replacing phone efforts, but even this is a problem because most inside salespeople do not have an efficient marketing and sales strategy in mind before pressing the “send” key. They are spending too much time crafting individualized e...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: But I’ve Only Got Four Minutes!
• Chapter 1: Time Management: Momentum Control
• Chapter 2: Introducing: Selling In Sound Bites
• Chapter 3: Navigating: Avoiding the No-Po’s
• Chapter 4: Questioning: Building Trust, One Question At a Time
• Chapter 5: Listening: Letting Go of Assumptions
• Chapter 6: Linking: Selling to Power Buyers
• Chapter 7: Presenting: It’s Showtime!
• Chapter 8: Handling Objections: Bring Them On!
• Chapter 9: Closing: The Complex Road to Gaining Commitment
• Chapter 10: Partnering: Conscious Collaboration
• Epilogue
• Index