How to Avoid Dumb Mistakes in Sales

How to Avoid Dumb Mistakes in Sales G. Gschwandtner: Hi, my name is Gerhard Gschwandtner and welcome to Selling Power TV. Today, we continue our conversation with Art Sobczak. He’s the author of a wonderful notebook called “Smart Calling.” Art, how is the book doing? Art Sobczak: Gerhard, the book is just doing phenomenal. We hit number one in the sales in selling category as well as marketing category the very first day it came out. We hit 40 in overall books and still several months afterward we’re still in the top sellers in the sales category. So I think that’s a testament to the fact that the people are using it and they’re getting results. G. Gschwandtner: Right, what I particularly like about the book it has a lot of dialog in it so there are a lot of scripts and almost tempted to read from them and lift them out and apply into myself. Art Sobczak: Well, people can do that but of course what I suggest they do is they used these idea starters and make their own because we need to make them national. We do need to make them conversational. Now in fact, one area that has been very popular is where I talked about the damn mistakes that people make when they’re called calling and these are actually all real mistakes that I hear or I see taught with other sales trainers. For example, let me just give you the opening of a call or this could be a voice mail message and we’ll see how many mistakes we can pick out here. G. Gschwandtner: Okay. Art Sobczak: So let’s say you receive this call and I said, “Hi, Gerhard. My name is Art Sobczak with business spy phone. We have not spoken before and I know you're busy so I won’t take up too much of your time. We are sales training company. We just come out with a new prospect in bulk and system. What I’d like to do is come up there, maybe take about half hour of your time and show you what this system is all about and see what it takes to have a seminar at your company. Would that be okay for you say on Friday?” Now, based on that six that’s just close. Is that right? I think there is about seven in there if I go through it in my head so let’s go through each of these and these are just six, seven or the 20 that I have in the book. So I started out and I said, “I know you're busy. I won’t take up too much of your time.” Talk about stating the obvious. Every person is busier, busier than ever. G. Gschwandtner: You don’t want to start negative. Art Sobczak: No. The other one is, “I know you're busy. I won’t take up too much of your time. We have not spoken before. ” G. Gschwandtner: Right, we have not spoken before. Art Sobczak: Okay and gee, was that a revelation too. G. Gschwandtner: Right. Art Sobczak: so now, what I’ve done, so I’ve said, “You're busy”, though I’ve already taken up some of your time. It is something that has no value. Then I went on to say, “We’re a sales training company. We’ve just come out with this new system.” G. Gschwandtner: It’s about you and not about me. Art Sobczak: Exactly. So as a decision maker, I probably lost you. G. Gschwandtner: Alright, after the fifth mistake so it’s three strikes in the out. Art Sobczak: Or even before it. Something will give you how much time, they may have hit the literally the voice mail or there are too many others. They’re starting to go into what I call get rid of the sales person mode. Then I go on to say, “This is what I have. This I what I do and again that was all about me and not about you.” Then what I say was, “I want to take some of your time.” G. Gschwandtner: I want to bring something to you. Art Sobczak: Yeah, so instead of bringing value to you I want to take something for you, which we can’t do so that’s a real turnoff. Also, I said that I wanted to come out there and do that. I haven’t given you enough reason to even go any further in the call right along meet with you. G. Gschwandtner: So how do you teach a group of sales people on how to adapt smart calling strategies? Can you give me a scenario like say I lead to the room of 20 sales people next door and what would be the agenda and how would you get them to adapt those new techniques? Art Sobczak: What we do is, well first, we have to go to the mindset. The mindset being we’re never in place any call to call. G. Gschwandtner: Okay. Art Sobczak: We’re going to replace the word call with smart where they know something about the people that were calling. Then we go through a process where we identify what information should we be looking for that’s going to make our calls more intelligent. What are some of the trigger events list situational things that we’re looking for or the personal things, the company things that we’re looking for. What’s going on in the industry and we show them how to do that, how to use the web, how to use the sales tools that are out there. Then what we do is we plug that into a proven sales process. I’ve been teaching for quite and that being it’s all about them. It’s all about the prospect. It’s all about the customer. It’s not about you, which really isn’t new, but I do it in a very, very conversational language to work on. We’re coming up with a possible value propositions. You can talk about before, how we use a lot of dialogue. I have hundreds of examples for the word per word, ideas that they can put into during scripts, their own voice mail messages and then we work on the rest of the call whatever their objective is. So it’s all about questioning. Some people are completely doing in tight sets so other people who want to take it to the point where they have a good qualified lead so those are the things that we’re working on. G. Gschwandtner: Well, I want to thank you Art. This was very illuminating. You have been the pioneer in the art of reaching out to customers by phone and forming profitable relationships with your customers and I want to congratulate you and also congratulations to this book. How can people get in touch with you and what can they expect? Art Sobczak: Well, we’ve got several websites and we have three years. The one that goes along with the book is SmartCalling.com and there they can do several things. We have a special report. The additions mistakes that are on the book I have a special report called “The Top Ten Dumb ‘Calling Mistakes’ Made by Sales People” that ensure rejection. So they can download that for free if they want to buy the book, they can certainly go to our link there and go to Amazon and get it. If they want more information on a workshop or a training program in-house on smart calling, they can see that information as well and also, if they just want to listen to some dumb calls, we’ve got some recordings there. G. Gschwandtner: Wonderful, go to SmartCalling.com and enjoy and download the ten worst mistakes that you don’t want to repeat. Thank you so much. Art Sobczak: Thanks Gerhard.