The Psychology of Selling: Increase Your Sales Faster and Easier Than You Ever Thought Possible pdfdrive com

Cold-Calling for Appointments
I learned about the importance of this from my own experience. When I was
selling sales training, I would call people on the telephone and say something
like, “I would like to talk to you about training your salespeople.”
This automatically triggered responses such as
“We can’t afford it.”
“We don’t have the time to train our salespeople.”
“We have our own sales training program.”
“Our people don’t need training.”
“Sales are down right now, and we can’t pay for it.”
“Business is bad.”
“We don’t have any training money in our budget.”
With some variation, these are the same things that prospects tell us all the
time.
Rewrite and Reword Your Opening Words
When I found that I wasn’t getting anywhere with my approach, I sat down
and studied it. I spent several hours working and reworking my opening

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and studied it. I spent several hours working and reworking my opening
comments, trying to determine how I could cold-call on prospects in sales
organizations more effectively.
I finally realized where I was going wrong and developed a strategy to
compensate for it. The first thing I decided was that I had to be sure that I was
speaking to the right person before I made any attempt to set up an appointment.
Who is the prospect for sales training in a business organization? It was
obviously the person who was responsible for making decisions about sales
training for the salespeople: the owner or sales manager.
My second question was, what is the basic need or concern of my ideal
prospect?
This, too, was obvious. My ideal customer was not interested in sales training.
He was interested in higher sales volume, in increasing sales results. I realized
that I had to ask a question that focused on that specific need, the result or
benefit that my ideal prospect was seeking.

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