Appointment Setting Cold Calls – 3 Sales Tips To Get Your Call Off To A Great Start
By Stephen Craine
Appointment setting cold calls are how field and direct sales people gain the opportunity to make a sale and earn their commission or grow their business. Follow these 3 tips and you will start your call with confidence, and make more money earning sales appointments.
1. The reason for the call must be a potential benefit for the prospect, not just the caller or the sales company.
You have probably heard appointment setting calls where the caller says something like: We are in your area and would like to meet with you to…
This does absolutely nothing for the prospect. There is no obvious benefit to the listener, and this very poor cold calling technique has been used for so long most prospects ignore it anyway. Get out your marketing material, look at your product's features and benefits, and choose a potential benefit that will grab your prospect's attention and keep them listening to your appointment call.
2. It must be brief, clear, and quickly get to what the caller can do for the listener.
Write down your reason for calling and include the benefit you chose in tip 1 above. Write your reason for calling and then delete any redundant words or phrases. Every word should work for you and nothing extra should be added. You want a brief statement that tells the listener why you are calling and what that could mean for them. Anything additional just fogs the message and reduces the impact. So remember: Don't waffle. Present your message with a clear benefit and move on.
3. The reason for the call must be followed by a link to the next stage of the call.
Many appointment setting calls that I hear while coaching sales people have no direction, no process. I have listened to Field and Direct sales people who give a good reason for calling, but then either keep on talking and lose the impact of the message, or take a big leap to the next stage of their sales appointment call.
When you have given your reason for calling your next line should be a link to the next stage of your appointment call, and it must motivate the prospect to move along the sales appointment process with you.
For example: If your benefit used in your reason for calling was to save the prospect some money, your next line might be: To see if I can make those savings for you let me ask you a couple of questions. Then you ask your first question. Adding this motivational link, to connect the cold call stages, means you get fewer objections and smoke screens that stop your calls and prevent you from making sales appointments.
Invest some time in perfecting your reason for calling and you will increase the number of sales appointments that you make. You will convert more prospects to qualified appointments, and you will spend less time on the phone and more time selling. And that's how you will earn more money or grow your business.
You will get more training on how to make sales appointments by opening http://www.sales-training-sales-tips.com/cold-calling-techniques.html The training and techniques on the website have all been developed by working sales professionals and proven on real appointment setting cold calls.
