Colours of Sales

BY TISH TIMES FOUNDER, TISH TIMES NETWORKING & SALES TRAINING

4 tips to help you get over the FEAR OF SALES

I want to talk with you about something that many people struggle with and I hear about it frequently from clients. Sales can be scary, right? We say things like, “I will do anything except pick up that phone.” You then find yourself shuffling papers, cleaning your office, doing research, any non-profitproducing activity to avoid picking up the phone and making sales. Well, guess what? If you don’t have sales in your business, your business will cease to exist. Either you must do the necessary sales activities in your business, or you must hire someone to manage the sales activities.

The way to get better at making sales calls...

is to MAKE MORE SALES CALLS!

Tip 1 - Research

to doing sales I am an advocate of doing research in preparation for your sales calls. Sales calls do not have to be cold calls. As a matter of fact, I highly recommend you find some ways to warm them up so that they do not feel so cold. Some of the questions you may ask yourself to aid in preparation are: What is going on in the industry? What might the competition be for the people that I am calling? What might they be doing that I might want to talk about with the person that I am calling for? Do the research, but do it in preparation for, not in lieu of your sales call.

Tip 2 - Call Parties

There is nothing wrong with asking some of your colleagues to do calls in tandem. Personally, I enjoy doing sales call parties. Some days I approach my team saying, “Okay, I am going to make calls today and you are going to make calls today. Why don’t we make them together? Let us jump on a Zoom call (with muted lines) and let me hear how you are making your calls.” We might be able to give each other feedback such as, “Hey, I would have said this,” or “You know, that was fantastic. I am taking those notes and I am going to do that on my next call.” A good idea is to partner with others who share the same or higher skill level, have call parties, and not only learn from one another but also encourage each other.

Tip 3 - Build a plan

Build a plan. In the sales profession, we can find ourselves stuck and feel as though we do not know what we are doing.

What is your sales plan? What are you trying to accomplish? How many calls are you going to make? How many calls does it take for you to get 10 connections and then how many of those connections will turn into a sale? Having a plan in place and being prepared helps reduce the level of stress that such questions can induce.

Tip 4 - Warm leads

Have a full pipeline full of warm leads. These are people that you have already warmed up through your networking. Maybe through speaking or social media conversations so that by the time you have that conversation it does not feel like a cold call. You need a viable pipeline to make it easier to have fruitful sales activities.

At the end of the day, the way we get better at making sales calls is to make sales calls. You have to keep doing it even when it is uncomfortable. Do not allow your profit-producing activity time to boss you around! Do not believe that you are going to fail… that people are going to reject you… that no one wants to talk to you because when you do that you have lost the sale before you ever pick up the phone.

Summary

Do your homework, schedule 90 minutes of business development time, create some workgroups so that you can have accountability around sales calls to get it done.

If you still have questions about how to warm up your calls and make them more effective during that 90 minutes a day shoot me an email at tish@tishtimes.com.

And once again, if you just do not have the team or the time to get this done on your own, let me know because that is what we do. We can help you with that. I will talk to you next time!