Waste your time making sales calls

There are some 'gig's in business that are more appealing than others. Small business owners 'love' networking, love sending emails and are becoming more in love with Social Media applications as the modern entrepreneur evolves to meet the demands of the modern marketing mix. Other activities, like making sales calls, go straight to the bottom of the pile for a variety of reasons.

A fruit cake is not a fruit cake without fruit as we know. For centuries, people have been following proven recipes that have yielded 'results' and enabled people at the dinner table to enjoy what was cooked up for them. More recently, some have chosen to ignore or change the formula of the recipe and something close gets produced.

I'd bet a fair amount of money that a lot of businesses out there would jump at the chance of doing business with a large company, one with turnover in the millions, one with 'large contracts' on offer, one that has sales in its culture and uses the telephone to generate relationships with its clients. So how do you 'get into these businesses?' Answer - use the telephone.

The trick to making good sales calls requires the following:

1 - Do your research. Find out a bout the clients business and get 5 core pieces of information about the business so if asked 'what do you know about us?' you can answer positively.

2 - Have an objective. Your objective is solely to get an appointment at this stage, not to make a sale.

3 - Create a solid business purpose statement. People buy emotions - concentrate on building a powerful opening statement that demonstrates the clear business benefits of your product or service.

4 - What questions might get asked and how will you handle them? If you were the person on the other end of the line, what might you ask about you and how would you handle that question?

5 - Appreciate that not all people will be free to talk when you call. Not everyone will want to speak with you and some will want to rearrange. Don't take lack of availability personally.

6 -Be resilient.


One of the common fears of making calls is fear of rejection. To put this in perspective, have you ever called a travel agent to hook a holiday and they didn't have what you ere looking for? What did you do? Just stop looking for a holiday? No! You called another, and another - until you got what you wanted.

Sales calls is no different

It's called the marketing mix for a reason and that reason is because it contains ALL the ingredients you need to market your business. Play with the above recipe and bake a decent cake. But don't expect it to contain any fruit if you didn't put any in the bowl in the first place!