How I Increase My Sales Appointments

It's grateful if you can successfully make a sales appointment with your prospect, though it doesn't guarantee that you'll get the deal. However, it can increase the opportunity to win the deal as you have the chance to talk face-to-face with your prospect.

But making sales appointments is not easy. Many salespeople depend on cold calls, but we know that it usually ends with rejections. Prospects have all the information they need, thanks to the advance of internet and search engines. If interested, all they ask for is price list, not the sales meetings.

I also experience the same until I recently found a simple technique that increases the frequency of my sales appointments. All that I need to do is to ask twice for the appointments.

About few months ago, I cold called a woman who was going to open a new restaurant. As you may expect, she told me to send the brochures first. I simply agreed her request (I knew if I tried to handle that objection, she would give me more objections). But before I ended the phone conversation, I asked her once more for appointment: "Well, if you are unavailable on Tuesday, what if we meet on Wednesday?"

To my surprise, she agreed. More good news is she finally bought from me.

Was it just my lucky day? I tried the same technique the other days and most of the prospects agreed to meet. This is very simple yet effective. I don't say that this technique always works, but most of the times it works (according to my own experiences).

The same rule also applies when a prospect calls in or sends an email asking for price list. It amazes me that many salespeople merely send the price list and do nothing more about it. Whenever a prospect asks my price list, I always suggest him to set an appointment so the both sides can meet face-to-face to discuss the solution deeper.

In short, just try a little bit harder. Ask twice if necessary.

Try it yourself and I'm eagerly waiting for your responses.

No. 1 Sales Skill to Learn

What skill is that? It' s skill of prospecting.

What is prospecting? Simply translated, it's a method or a process of finding your potential buyers. These potential buyers are usually called as "prospects" or "leads".

Many times, I've seen so many salespeople who are weak or poor in prospecting skill. They often underestimate prospecting. They think it is less important than other sales skills like handling objections, making appointments, closing sales, etc.

I know this because that is the way I used to be when I was new in sales. I much more preferred learning skills like how to make appointments, close the sales, conduct powerful presentations, to prospecting effectively. Although I learnt a lot of those skills, I unsuccessfully made impressive sales results. I eventually realized my mistake and started to pay more attention to my prospecting technique. That was how I increased my sales since then.

I'm not saying that the other sales skills are not important. I'm saying that among all sales skills, prospecting is the one that you should put at the first priority. You must learn this first before you learn the rest of other sales techniques.

It's like building a house. It's important to learn how to build the roof, how to put the doors and windows, how to install the piping system, etc. But first of all, you must learn how to make a strong foundation to support the house. Without it, there's no use how great you've mastered the knowledge of roofing or piping system if you do not have the knowledge of building foundations.

To end this post, I'd like to leave some comments for your contemplation:

"When you've mastered skills of prospecting, the rest of your sales process would be much easier.
If you haven't, the rest of your sales process would be much more difficult."

Two Great Mistakes in Selling

These mistakes are very common and committed by many salespeople. If you want to be successful in your sales career, pay attention carefully to whether you do these mistakes or not. What are these most two sinful mistakes?

1. Trying to sell to everyone or every company.

This is the most terrible way to sell. In the past time, we had mostly been taught that everyone or every company was a prospect and had a possibility to buy. If you try to sell to everyone or every company, you'll surely have a bad experience in sales. This way of selling is just very ineffective and it makes you frustrated.

You'll face a lot of objections, rejections, unfriendly responses from your prospects, and the worst is that it wastes a lot of your time, energy, and even sometimes your money. It's like trying to catch the fish in any given pond or river you can find.

Instead of selling to everyone, focus your sales effort only on your qualified prospects. Profile your prospects and focus on them. Choose the right pond in which a lot of fish gather. Selling this way saves a lot of your time and energy, yet at the same time increases your efficiency and sales results.

Ok, now you'd probably say like this: "I sell office equipments. Doesn't it mean that every company needs my products?". Yes, it's correct that every company needs office equipments. But still, you should not try to sell to every company.

Perhaps the office equipments you sell are the premium ones, then you should not try to sell to small companies. Or you can profile your qualified prospects from their territory. You can even profile them based on competition existence by targeting only those companies who have not been very familiar with your top competitors.

2. Selling before collecting information.

How many times do you receive phone calls from someone trying to sell something to you, and you feel that this person just utterly wastes your busy time?

Recently, a marketing staff from a certain English course company called me. She tried to persuade me to enroll the course. I told her that the course is too far from my home and I had no time to go to the course. After all, I don't have any urgent need to sign in to any English course.

This is a very classic example of how a salesperson often forgets (or ignores?) to get the information as much as he needs to help him sell. Had the woman from that English course gathered some information about me, she would have saved a lot of her time and avoided a frustration due to my rejection.

The reason why you should acquire as much information as possible is to quickly determine whether your prospects suit the criteria of your qualified prospects. If they don't, then you can leave them immediately and move on to the next prospects. It saves a lot of your precious time, doesn't it?

Are You Sure You Want to Build Rapport with Your Prospect?

I once heard a story of a newbie salesperson trying to establish rapport to his busy prospect. It was the first time this sales rep met his prospect. Since he had already been taught before that building rapport was important in sales, he intended to apply it to that new prospect.

When this rep entered the room of his prospect, he noticed that there was a frame of fishing award or championship certificate, or sort of that, hanging on the wall. After taking a seat, the sales rep then opened the sales meeting with comment like this:

"Oh, what a great award you have! Can you tell me how you finally won that award?"

I know, this sales rep was actually attempting to create what we all call as ice-breaker. He expected to get a warm response by talking about his prospect's interest. Instead, this was the response he got:

"Forget about that damn award! Let's get down to the business."

Many salespeople have been taught that they should do a little light conversation about their prospects' interest to build rapport or ice-breaker. It's believed that it will make your prospects more relaxed and warmer. I also did this method in my sales, but I found it didn't really help my sales.

Put your feet on your prospects' shoes. They all are busy people. They have no time to waste to talk about their hobbies and personal interests. After all, they frequently meet insincere salespeople talking about their interests and hobbies. Now you come in to their office to talk about the same thing of which they know it's just your strategy to get a deal from them.

Again, sell like a professional. Come to them with your solutions, not your insincere care about their interests. Start your sales meeting with problem-oriented questions, not with stupid chat about fishing, baseball, or irrelevant question like "how did you start this awesome enterprise?". Make your sales meetings straightforward, relevant, and professional.

Instead of establishing that shallow rapport, there are more valuable things you can develop to create a deeper relationship to your prospects. These things are what I frequently try to show to my prospects. What are they?

They are trust, relevant solutions, and good service. I never use rapport to make my sales easier. In fact, it just makes my sales more difficult. Instead, I always build trust, relevant solutions, and good service. When you show these three qualities in your sales process, your prospects will respect you more than they do to those sales reps with shallow rapport. They will think that you are not just another salesperson trying to waste their time. In fact, they will start building rapport with you, not the other way around.

In fact, in B2B sales, that's what a rapport means: trust, relevant solutions, and good service.