Tweet

Most Frequently Requested Help

Written by: Dave Kurlan

Article Overview: What do you think is the most frequently requested plea for help? Overcoming Objections? Handling Stalls and Put-Offs? Closing? Getting Appointments? It's getting calls returned.

Most Frequently Requested Help

What do you think is the most frequently requested plea for help?

Overcoming Objections?
Handling Stalls and Put-Offs?
Closing?
Getting Appointments?

It's getting calls returned.

Getting calls returned can be fixed in about two minutes but why are you leaving messages? Is that just easier than making repeated attempts until you get through?

The real problem is that most salespeople either don't get through or when they do, one of two things happen:

1. They get an appointment for the wrong reason;
2. They don't get an appointment for the right reason.

What are the wrong reasons? In the area, free samples, introduce yourself, demos and presentations, etc.

What are the right reasons? They told you about an issue that your product or service can help with. Most salespeople are simply awful at this. Several past Baseline Selling tips dealt with how to get through, get attention and get an appointment.

I'd like to help you better understand how to make Getting to 1st Base work in these challenging times by giving you 5 tips.

1. Get Introduced - use your network, clients, customers, and online networks to make this happen. Ask!

2. Spend Time Developing Your Positioning Statement and Examples - It's Exercise 5 in the Baseline Selling Field Guide. It's a major part of Getting to 1st Base in Baseline Selling. Those are the most important words in your call.

3. Work on your tonality - how you sound in the first five seconds of the call. You should sound just like your prospect's best friend, not some professional salesperson.

4. Have Fun. It's a game. The person that wins is the person who is most convincing. Do they convince you that they don't need the help or do you convince them that you can help?

5. Practice until you can't stand it anymore. Practice especially often on the stalls, put-offs and objections that are most difficult for you.

Related Articles
  YOUR EMAILS – THE IMPRESSION YOU MAKE
  Using Influence to Gain Commitment: Are Men and Women Really That Different?
  Warm Market Research
  Timing Your Stay-In-Touch Messages
  Why Press Kits can Backfire

Article Tags: appointment, appointments, attempts, baseline, best friend, challenging times, exercise, free samples, important words, network clients, overcoming objections, plea, positioning statement, professional salesperson, reason 2, right reason, salespeople, tonality, two minutes, voicemail



Related Forum Posts
Re: Contact Information - Another idea would be to have an email form in place to accept "ticketed" inquires (if people are afraid of spammers seeing their email address). However, I hate how some sites try to persuade you out of sending an email by bombarding you with lists of "Frequently Asked Questions & Answers" as I find they're rarely helpful.
Re: A Tip to Increase Traffic - I do believe that Link Referral is also a powerful way to increase your traffic, however, here are some tips that I have came across with the other day from Webblogs: Write Well and Write Often Frequently updating your blog with useful content is the first step to building your blog's audience. The content you write is what will keep readers coming back for more. Make sure you have something meaningful to say to them and say it often to maintain their interest and keep them loyal. Furthermore, post frequently to increase the number of chances you have for your blog's content to be noticed by search engines such as Google or Technorati. 2. Submit Your Blog to Search Engines Get on the radar screen for the popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo! by submitting your blog's URL to them. Most search engines provide a 'Submit' link (or something similar) to notify the search engine of your new blog, so those search engines will crawl it and include your pages in their results. It's important to understand that simply submitting your blog to search engines doesn't mean your pages will appear at the top of a Google search results screen, but at least your blog will be included and will have the chance of being picked up by a search engine. 3. Use and Update Your Blogroll By adding links to sites you like in your blogroll, the owners of those blogs will find your blog and will be likely to add a reciprocal link in their blogrolls. It's an easy way to get the link to your blog in front of many readers on other blogs. The hope is that some of those readers will click on the link to your blog on the other blogs' blogrolls and find your content interesting and enjoyable turning them into loyal readers. 4. Harness the Power of Comments Commenting is a simple and essential tool to increase your blog's traffic. First, respond to comments left on your blog to show your readers that you value their opinions and draw them into a two-way conversation. This will increase reader loyalty. Second, leave comments on other blogs to drive new traffic. Make sure you leave your blog's URL in your comment, so you create a link back to your own blog. Many people will read the comments left on a blog post. If they read a particularly interesting comment, they are highly likely to click on the link to visit the commentor's website. It's important to make sure you leave meaningful comments that are likely to invite people to click on your link to read more. 5. Syndicate Your Blog's Content with an RSS Feed Setting up an RSS feed button on your blog makes it easy for your loyal readers to not just read your blog but also know when you publish new content. 6. Use Links and Trackbacks Links are one of the most powerful parts of your blog. Not only are links noticed by search engines, but they also act as a tap on the shoulder to other bloggers who can easily identify who is linking to their sites. Linking helps to get you noticed by other bloggers who are likely to investigate the sites that are linking to them. This may lead them to become new readers of your blog or to add links to your blog from theirs. You can take links to other blogs a step further by leaving a trackback on the other blog to let them know you've linked to them. Blogs that allow trackbacks will include a link back to your blog in the comments section of the post that you originally linked to. People do click on trackback links! 7. Tag Your Posts It takes a few extra seconds to add tags to each of your blog posts, but it's worth the time in terms of the additional traffic tags can drive to your blog. Tags (like links) are easily noticed by search engines. They're also key to helping readers find your blog when they perform searches on popular blog search engines such as Technorati. 8. Submit Your Posts to Social Bookmarking Sites Taking the time to submit your best posts to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and more can be a simple way to quickly boost traffic to your blog. 9. Remember Search Engine Optimization When you write your blog posts and pages, remember to optimize your pages for search engines to find them. Include relevant keywords and links but don't overload your posts with too many relevant keywords or completely irrelevant keywords. Doing so can be considered spamming and could have negative results such as your blog being removed from Google's search entirely. 10. Don't Forget Images Images don't just make your blog look pretty, they also help people find you in search engine listings. People often use the image search options offered by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines, and naming your images with search engine optimization in mind can easily boost your traffic.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

The Value of Small Businesses

Halloween Howl Seven by Author Paige Agnew

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.