Good Preparation for a Sales Call part 2

By Kamau Austin

In our last blog post I outlined the anatomy of preparing for a sales call. This is the first thing you should concern yourself with before making your sales call.

It is quite simply: Try to THINK like your prospects. Look at your sales call from the perspective of what’s in it for them. How will your product or service help them?

It is the driving force behind developing a sales script. As we mentioned before in an earlier post you should always work from a sales script.

However your sales pitch shouldn’t sound scripted to a call prospect. It should sound natural. Your sales script will only sound natural with your practicing it enough until you know it by memory without having to look at it to deliver it. You should only look at it for reference -- or to consider changing it if you are getting too many rejections and hang ups.

Now back to the driving force of your sales script: the needs and most importantly the wants/desires of your customer. If you are making business to business sales calls in most instances your prospects is concerned with two things:

1. How can you make them money or…
2. How can you save them money?
   

If you are involved with telemarketing to consumers they may be interested in the above issues also but they have a bunch of other concerns. Their other desires may be things like how can:

• you help them lose weight;
• feel better;
• be more sexy or attractive;
• reach out better to friends and family;
• or... be successful.

Their desires may not always be obvious when it relates to why they may or may not buy your product or services. You may be selling phone service with a pitch about cheaper rates but they may consider switching to your phone service because they can use the cheaper phone service to call parents or family in another country more often.

It is good to try to conceptualize different desires that your customer may have in using a service or product like the one you will be pitching. Since this concept is so important we will cover it in more detail in our next post.