What I Learned My First Week of Sales Calls
My Weekly Sunday Recap
What I’m Learning:
One cool thing I learned at work last week was how to make better calls.
Coming into week 1
Coming into my first week of making calls, I was a little apprehensive. Will I be good at it? Will I get anxiety? If I get anxiety, how will I manage it? What is the best intro for a call like this? When should I call to get the most pickups? These, and many more questions, were running through my head that first Monday morning. And while I was slightly apprehensive, I was also very excited. I was excited because if there was one consistent message I heard about sales, it’s this: selling is a learnable skill, improved by iteration.
This prospect of improvement, of growth, is what got me fired up about sales, to begin with. It’s the reason that I wanted this role so badly, and its the reason I wake up every morning excited about making calls — excited about selling. And that excitement and enthusiasm are what caused me to notes from which I will be sharing the 4 key takeaways from this week’s calls.
4 key takeaways
- Nail the intro — Nail the intro. First impressions are paramount in sales calls because it is in those first couple seconds that your prospect will decide to either give you some time — or hang up. We want option one — so nail the intro.
- Calm, Cool, Collected — The days of the excited, overly enthusiastic phone salesmen are gone. People don’t want to hear that anymore. Instead, we want to hear a calm, confident, reassuring voice that isn’t trying to ramp up our energy and add more chaos to our day, but whose goal is to help us manage our problems and relieve our pain points. So stay calm, stay cool, stay collected, and be that person.
- Know your product — Product knowledge is vital. I used to think it wasn’t; I assumed that if you could be convincing and enthusiastic, you might be able to sell without it. Here’s why I was wrong. When prospects, customers, clients, and guests come to you with a problem, they are looking for one thing: a solution. If you don’t know the ins and outs of your products, you can’t relate your solution to them. Meaning they won’t have any buy-in. Prospects need to know why and how your product will help them, and you need to know the details or your product to answer those questions. Know your product.
- It’s not selling; it’s helping. — This single shift will take you from being anxious over calls to being excited about them. Once you reframe your mind to understand that what you are doing is solving people’s problems, you can’t help but be excited to call them. Shift that mentality, and your call anxiety will decrease. Shift that mentality, and you will get more fulfillment from your calls. Shift that mentality, and you will have more success with your selling.
Other Growth Areas:
“All the days that you wake up, you have one job, and that’s to get better every single day.” — Derrick Rose
Daily reading: Currently, as part of my morning routine, I am reading Aristotle for Everybody by Mortimer Adler, and To Sell Is Human by Daniel Pink.
Insight of the week:
From Aristotle for Everybody: Even though Aristotle lived 2300 years ago, he still was able to reason out questions that so many of today’s individuals would have trouble answer, even with the help of the internet, advancements in science, all of the other modern improvements.
From To Sell is Human: According to the stats, 1 out of every 9 individuals in today’s workforce is a salesperson. But, if you breakdown selling, you come to realize that we are all in sales now. Every single last one of us. From the Starbucks barista to the Kroger clerk, the marketing magician to the I.T. intellectual, we are all in sales. We are all in the business of persuasion, convincing others to part with something they have — their time, energy, interest, money — for something we have — our product, our skills, our interest.
