Being Real on a Sales Call Doesn’t Require “Foot-in-Mouth”
Take a look at this list of anecdotes of people making egregious blunders on sales phone calls (thanks to Trish Bertuzzi at The Bridge Group for the link).
Aside from the sheer hilarity of some of these ingenious ways to screw up a sales call, I noticed a surprising trend:
Even in this incredibly small sample, the caller often still closed the sale, in many cases because of the “screw up,” rather than in spite of it.
Why? Because the blunder showed the prospect that the caller was human.
Now obviously I’m not suggesting that sales reps make a social faux pas on every call to increase sales. But it does demonstrate that all of us, in every profession and vocation, respond to something real, something relatable.
We don’t like talking to automatons. We don’t like getting “pitched.” Insincerity is about as valuable as a useless management meeting. We’ve been to too many bogus sales conferences, heard to much schlock, that when we hear or see something truly genuine, we gravitate to it.
It’s four years old now, but one of the best articles I’ve ever read on this idea is the Trusted Advisor’s “Stop Trying to Close the Sale.”
As author Charles Green states, when we close a sale, it’s not because we’ve “rationally met” every objection our client can throw at us. It’s because we’ve made them feel comfortable with their decision to choose us as a vendor.
At XANT, we relentlessly champion the need for immediate, powerful, process-driven lead response management. Our products and services are designed to give sales reps the technological (and in some cases psychological) advantages they need to successfully maximize every opportunity they have.
But the technology is useless without reps who understand how to successfully approach the clients in the first place.
Making impactful sales calls is still a daily task of every sales rep on the planet, but the trick isn’t to create “false sincerity,” the trick is to be real in the first place.
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