Do you want to get your customer to be a little more chatty on the phone with you? 

Well, maybe you should stop playing tennis with them. 

We tend to feel the compulsion to fill every moment of silence on the phone with noise, including our own voice as a sales rep. And that’s a big mistake, particularly when the customer’s thinking before they say their next topic. 

You should get good with that mute button. And when your customer is talking, stay on mute. 

That way if you find yourself interrupting with a, “Sounds good” or “Makes sense,” they won’t actually hear it. They’ll just hear the silence that they should be hearing if you were listening in the first place.

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Is that big audience for your next sales call making you nervous? 

Well, your first step is figuring out is this big picture or little picture? 

I found in my career, once they get beyond three people attending my meeting, I always have at least two competing agendas on what people want to learn about. So the larger the meeting, the more different topics that people are going to want to cover. 

So why not do what I do when I start seeing I have a larger meeting than I’m comfortable in having?

I contact my host and determine if is this a big picture or a little picture meeting. Meaning, are the people who are attending the meeting looking for value and benefits and understanding, or are they looking for specific benefits and features? And if the answer is both, why don’t we split ’em up and have two half meetings? 

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Having a hard time describing what you do? 

Well, sometimes the meek shall not inherit the earth. 

The use of hyperbole, which is the use of an exaggeration where all parties know it’s an exaggeration, is a very effective technique to have people anchor and remember the things that you’ve said.

So when describing what you do to people, make sure you’re using words like “best” or “only” or “greatest.” 

Not to brag, but to anchor because it’s that use of hyperbole that tells your listener that you actually do believe that this stuff that you do matters. 

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Not entirely sure when you should bring up competitive differences? 

It’s after they do.

It can always be a struggle in knowing what the right time is to bring up how we’re different and better than our competition. But I always want to make sure I do it after I’ve spoken about their competition. 

By asking the prospect questions about how they compete in their marketplace, it generally reveals elements of pain that can be very helpful when I’m talking about my competitors and why they should choose us over them. 

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Want to drive better engagement on your next demo? Let them drive. 

There’s nothing more boring than a Zoom, unless of course you’re watching someone give you a demo on a Zoom. Just sitting back passively while watching someone show you how their product works is the quickest way to lose interest. 

So want to do what I do? 

Let your customer drive a bit on your next demo. Incorporate elements where they have to control the keyboard, the mouse, or even the camera. 

By having them actually participate in the demo, they’ll actually play with the product and keep their engagement and hopefully interest high.

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Do you want to breathe a little extra life into your next Zoom call? 

Why not try a venue change? 

You know, there’s a lot of reasons why these Zoom calls can get very tiring and fatiguing, and one of them is our backgrounds never change. By having the same background every single time we meet with someone, the brain gets lulled into the false idea that this is one long meaning. 

So why not spice it up a little bit like I do? Move around, shoot the video from another part of your home office, or maybe even outside or another venue entirely. 

Sometimes even moving the camera a few degrees can make yesterday’s call seem like a completely different call from today. 

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Want a better sense of what your customer’s looking for? 

Well check out their dating profile and it’ll tell you. 

One of my favorite topics to have with customers is on who their favorite partners and vendors are, even before I’ve discussed my own company’s products, services, and value. By having them focus on their favorite relationships post sale, I start to learn the things that they find important in their partners, and I can start to showcase those things when I position my product later in the call. 

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Ever wonder how many emails you should send before you just completely give up? 

The answer is five. 

And don’t take it from me. Take it from sales and marketing management, when they published a report a number of years ago that show that 80% of all significant deals for Fortune 500 companies start with a minimum of five cold call attempts. 

Instead of writing an email, waiting for a response, writing the second, waiting for a response, why not write all five at once? That’s what I do. That way I can build up ahead of steam knowing full well that the fourth email is a lot faster to write than the first one. I can stay on that website. I can find the triggers I want. I can build it the way I want. I can make the little changes and nuances, the change my closes, whatever it is. 

Write five emails, send one, and then if I don’t get a response in a few days, the second one’s already written, so just send. Third one’s already written, just send. I find that all that investment on a Monday pays off magnificently by Friday. 

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Are you looking for a surefire way to improve your demo conversion rates? 

What’s simple? One guest at a time. 

It’s so easy for us to get swept into the idea of getting larger and larger attendance to our demos, but that’s often a mistake because in large audiences, it’s very hard to identify the champion or even the anti-champion. 

So want to do what I do? Resist a temptation for a large audience and go the opposite direction. Make sure all of your demos are done to only one person at a time so that you can really have the intimate setting required to learn what their role and responsibility is. 

It will only be after I’ve found a champion that I could have a large demo in front of me. 

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Ever wonder what the best day is to cold call? 

The answer is Friday, not Monday, and I know Friday is when you’re calling. 

Most of us tend to front load our week to the stuff we don’t like. Let’s get our cold calls over with. Unfortunately, it’s true for our buyer as well. The last thing a buyer wants on a dismal Monday morning is an unsolicited cold call. 

Why don’t you reserve your calls to the end of the day and the end of the week? That’s what I do, and I find that by using my Mondays and Tuesdays to prep, research, and write the call scripts I’m going to use, then I can spend all day Wednesday, Thursday, Friday making those calls, and I’m going to be greeted by someone who’s not as busy, who’s a little bit tired and maybe a little more friendly. I know I am on Fridays. Why don’t you give it a try? 

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