1st March 2014 - LAR Consultancy Ltd

How to Make Effective Sales Calls

Mar 31, 2014

So you want to learn how to make effective sales calls and I’m guessing that you battle with yourself every time you need to make one. This is especially true if you are new to the company, or you are calling out on behalf of a client company. So the trick is to realize that you potentially have an issue and if you don’t deal with it head on, it is unlikely you will be successful at achieving your goal.

Getting past the gate-keeper is tricky, and if by some miracle (or ineptitude on the gate-keeper’s part) you do get past the gate-keeper, or you got lucky and the decision-maker answers the phone directly, you may start to stutter and stammer and will the call to end before you got to deliver the punch line. Frustration and loss of confidence will soon ensue.

The quickest and best way to tackle this is to ensure that you completely understand the unique selling points (USPs) of what you are selling AND, here’s the clincher, fully believe in them. You cannot believably sell a product or a service if you do not believe in it yourself. Do you not believe in the value? Think the service or product is over-priced?

Sounds obvious doesn’t it? You may be surprised perhaps, at how new recruits can be trained on the theory of sales and cold-calling and then be let loose on ‘hot’ leads, without fully comprehending and internalizing the company core values and USPs. Their confidence soon ebbs and they become grateful when the call drops and they can move on to the next lead. If their target is 100 calls per day, they’ll easily hit it. Actually, they’ll not only hit the call volume, but will ‘burn’ the list if you’re not careful.

If the target is conversion, on the other hand, which makes more sense, they’ll probably fail miserably. So be clear on the target, do not let the sales team loose on a ‘hot’ list before they are well trained, indeed, train them first and let them try calls on a ‘not-so-hot’ list. Listen to their conversation and help them to understand how they can improve the content and lose their bad habits.

It’s worth investing in cold-call sales training to get the return on your Profit & Loss sheet – conversion rates increase whilst costs stay the same, i.e., bottom line – more profits. The return on the cost of training your team will be rapid, as the conversion rates will improve immediately. Our business training workshop delivers this training on your premises, building confidence and better telephone personalities in your sales team.

Train your sales team. Don’t let them ‘burn’ hot leads.
By investing in your team, your profit will increase.

Bespoke Workshop: The Art of B2B Cold Calling

Getting past the gatekeeper

Mar 29, 2014

Getting past the gatekeeper isn’t always easy as you probably know by now, or you wouldn’t be reading this article! New recruits making sales via ‘cold’ sales calls often struggle to take their generic sales training and put it into practice. If they are not trained professionally on how to make the pitch, they will lose calls and burn leads. Worse, they often make their company look bad if they managed to say where they are calling from before the callee hung up and won’t get a second chance for a while. Sometimes the caller may receive abuse, further reducing their will to make more calls, with their confidence dropping at an exponential rate.

Note! It isn’t always appropriate to cold-call before you have established some sort of contact first, say, via social media. People do not like to receive phone calls out of the blue. I’m going to assume you know what you’re doing and need to make the call and therefore getting past the gatekeeper is essential for you!

So here are 5 simple tips to help your staff overcome the obstacles to getting past the gatekeeper so they will have a chance to convert to sales:

1) Monitor the team, especially new recruits. Within days they may acquire bad habits that are hard to break, if left unchecked. You need to determine if they have an issue about making cold-calls, by listening and monitoring their behaviour whilst on the call: Train – Script – Monitor – Fine Tune – Interview – Retrain – Monitor…

2) Have a periodic group sales team meeting where there is no such thing as a silly question. At these meetings team members can share where they get stuck on certain questions from the caller.

3) Encourage sharing when they have a ‘good’ conversation that leads to them sending out further information or a price quote. Emphasize what they said that caused an increase in their conversion rate.

4) Ensure that a team member having a ‘bad sales day’ has access to an onsite sales trainer (who could be a team member having a ‘good sales day’) whom they can shadow and monitor for a couple of calls, to listen and learn how to improve their pitch.

5) Share with them the following to get past the ‘gatekeeper’:

Don’t tip off the gatekeeper to the fact that you are cold-calling. In the UK, I often hear callers typically open the conversation with:

‘Is Mike there, at all?’ – what are you implying by ‘at all’? Dead giveaway!

‘Is David available please?’ – implying that you don’t know him and would he make himself available?

‘Can I speak with Mrs Robinson’? – implying you don’t know her well enough to use a first name.

A simple: ‘Can I speak with Harry please?’ or ‘Is Harry there please’? will suffice.

The gatekeeper may ask ‘will he know in what regard?’ or ‘have you spoken with Harry before?’ – don’t be tempted to lie, never a good policy in the long term – you may get caught and the gatekeeper may then get into trouble when the truth is found out, making sure that you won’t be getting past the gatekeeper the next time you try.

My advice would be to sell to the gatekeeper at this point because you’re in danger of losing the call. If Harry isn’t available at that point, find out best time to call back and find out the gatekeeper’s name, add it to the CRM*, thank them for their help and next time, address them by name! Cold-calling, and indeed sales, is, after all, all about creating relationships!

If you would like to train your sales team or any other staff member on the art of cold calling, visit our ‘shop‘ to book a workshop for your business.

* Customer Relationship Management system, e.g. Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, BaseCRM,PipeDrive

Be kind to the gateKeeper – they’re only doing their job!
Be sharp about your pitch – believe in what you are selling!

10 Tips on How to Commercialise Technology

Mar 28, 2014

Ideas for new products occur often when we least expect them, when we’re walking the dog, weeding the garden, taking a shower or during a boring lecture. You may not even notice that your mind has wandered, but suddenly, there it is – a ‘light’ goes on and you have a flash of inspiration. You want to stop whatever it is that you’re doing to find a notebook to jot down your thoughts before you lose them. But what are the next steps you need to take to get your product to market? Hopefully I’ll get those creative juices running by your reading my ’10 Tips on How to Commercialise Technology’:

1. Check the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) to determine if your idea has been commercialised and is ‘out there’. Not finding a similar product does not necessarily mean that it doesn’t exist out there – it could just mean that you haven’t come up with the right keywords.

2. Do a literature and patent search – you could make an appointment with the Business & IP Centre at the British Library for help with this.

3. If your idea does appear to be unique, determine if there are claims that could form the basis for a patent. Look at patents in similar fields of research and in the industry to see the sorts of claims made and to get a feel for the format a patent application would take. Which patent agents or attorneys drafted the patents you consider strong? You may want to hire the same agent or attorney that have knowledge in this scientific or industrial sector. As they are in the field, they may come up with ideas on how to commercialise technology in your particular field.

Note – by protecting your intellectual property (IP) you may be able to stop others from copying your idea and have the right to defend your idea, but it will not mean that you have the freedom to operate (your patent may infringe existing patents and if so, you will need to come to an arrangement with the original patent owner).

4. If the search engines do not produce results, it could be because it is not such a good idea afterall and there isn’t a demand for it or alternatively, it’s a great idea, but with current technology the costs to implement it would prohibit sales at a price the end-user would be willing to pay. The last thing you want to do is to invest time and funds into developing a product and then find out that there isn’t any demand for it. Or simply, no one thought of it earlier!

5. Who is the end-user? Is the end-user the same person that decides to purchase the product? If not, what is the decision-making process in the industry that you are addressing? How will you reach the end-user? How will you reach the decision-maker? Who do you need to lobby? Is the timing right? Are you ahead of the market? Is current legislation in favour of your idea or would laws need to be in place before your product becomes a viable proposition? How sensitive is your idea to legislation?

6. OK – you’ve asked an answered the questions above and come up with some of your own, and now you have decided to apply for a patent. One minute! Do you realize that as soon as you apply for a patent, the clock starts ticking? Filing a patent is not that expensive until you need to file the patent in various countries 18-24 months down the line. Translation costs alone can be prohibitively expensive. Make sure you have a strategic plan for where the patent needs to be filed (in which countries) and that you have the funds to do so, well before the date you actually need to. Raising funds when you are desperate, in order to protect patents, could prove very costly to your equity holding. Investors will often ‘smell’ desperation and force a better deal for themselves.

7. Building prototypes and testing the idea is imperative. If it’s an idea in the food, biotechnology or chemical industry, for example, going from table-top to scaling up by factors of 10- or 100-fold can produce surprising and sometimes unwanted phenomena. If in the field of software, for example, debugging before release can save embarrassment and your company’s reputation from being damaged.

8. However tempting, do not over engineer the product – time to market is precious. Less is more so do not engineer the product to death with features that most end-users won’t use. Those ‘nice-to-have’ features could be implemented in later versions. You need sales! Get moving! Talk to end-users – get their feedback and produce a product that the market is interested in.

9. Routes to market – is this a one-off product or a platform from which you could develop a series of products for one or more industries? Answering this simple question could mean the difference between licensing your product to an existing player in the market versus setting up a company and commercializing the idea yourself.

10. Lastly, it’s always a good idea to sell in your local market before exporting. If things go wrong, it’s better contained nationally than internationally – especially if you are exporting huge machines and need to fly out engineers to fix them – hotels, food and flights can soon add up.

So those are my 10 top tips on how to commercialise technology – what are yours?