Telephone Marketing is an art…plain and simple. The better you become at it, the faster you will grow your factoring consultancy. Too many new brokers, however, relate cold calling to sales which puts way to much pressure on both you and your prospective client. A better way to view telephone marketing is to use the time spent on the phone to build relationships. Let the sale take care of itself. Build the relationship and when the time comes, the business will come to you.
One of the major stereotypes about prospecting is that a cold call is about instantly closing a sale on the telephone in just one call. When talking about prospecting many sales professionals throw everything they know about relationship building with prospects out the window. They think they have to somehow manipulate a prospect into buying from them in one phone call. This is one of the reasons why so many struggle with prospecting. Very few people want to be manipulative and manipulation actually doesn’t work very well.
With that said, cold calling is an acquired art and there are hundreds, if not thousands of publications on the subject. Every once in a while, you will run on to some prospecting gold and that is the subject of this short article. Simply put…if you want to learn, and we really learn, the art of cold calling and relationship building, pick up a copy of Prospecting Your Way to Sales Success by Bill Good.
Who It’s For and What This Book Teaches You
The age of this book and who it is directed at will shock you. First off, Bill Good is an internationally recognized sales trainer of STOCKBROKERS. While that be a bit of a foreign concept to factoring consultants at first, it actually shouldn’t be. The prospecting process in the consumer finance investment securities industry and prospecting process in the business finance industry are almost identical. Second, the book introduces readers to the need of a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) and for certain, things have come along way since this book was first written but you will easily be able to conceptualize the knowledge imparted by Good and apply it to a modern CRM such as Pipedrive.
With typical prospecting training books, once you begin reading you typically expected to find the same old advice and tired drivel on cold calling concepts. With Prospecting Your Way to Sales Success, are in for a BIG surprise. Instead you will be treated to a solid “system” of prospecting of excellent advice, techniques, and tools. Good’s book covers all the bases from list building concepts to cold call script writing but most important, this book changes prospecting from a grueling job to a pleasurable daily event. Good defines “Old School Prospecting” as “hard” because it is based on overcoming rejection and the dial by dial endless process of numbers over quality. Old School Prospecting was all about…
- verbally beating up on a prospect until they capitulate
- dealing with buyers that are liars
- that each “no” you receive leads to a “yes” ultimately…and
- that you need at least 10 “no’s” to get a “yes”
Bill Good shows the reader that “Prospecting and Selling are two entirely different subjects”. Prospecting gets “rid of” and selling “keeps”. Prospecting takes an easy “no”. On the other hand, once a salesperson is convinced someone is a good prospect and should own the product or service, selling no longer takes an easy “no”. This sales system is a “better systems” that recognize that most buyers tell the truth. If they’re not interested at this time…then they are not interested and you should then say simply “Thankyouverymuch” and move to your next call and opportunity. In this exceptional book, Bill Good shares his in depth experience in prospect and sales along with his savvy, wisdom, experience.
Get this book. It is difficult to find due to its age but you can periodically find it at Amazon.com
