Have you ever felt like a lead wasn’t paying attention during your call?
If your lead is not engaged on a call, if they’re bored and tuned-out, you won’t get to next steps, which ultimately means no sale. You might think you need to say the perfect phrases or use the best hooks to create an “impressive” display. Sales reps commonly try to drive through all their slides in order to show how vitally important it is to make a purchase. It’s normal to have this first strategy come to mind, but it doesn’t work; at least not as well as having a conversation.
Conversations require listening. They’re two-way streets; not one-sided stages. Listen with earnest interest to your leads, and they will reciprocate. By establishing the trust and credibility that you’re not there to sell, but rather to problem solve, your lead will feel apart of the process instead of apart of a mass audience. (We’re not watching TV after all.)
Here are five tools that will keep your leads engaged with you during calls:
Active Listening
Active Listening and Open-Ended questions are the best way to facilitate a real conversation. Active Listening involves a set of techniques but primarily focus on repeating statements back to your lead but in your own words. This serves to clarify understanding and makes it easy to ask clarifying questions. (Plus it shows you’re interested and listening.) In other words, make your lead’s statements the center of your conversation.
A good rule of thumb is to try and speak only 20% of the time. This might be hard, but in a good conversation, it happens easily. Cold calling requires a bit more spryness then a discovery/demo call, but making room for your lead to speak during these “interrupting calls” is actually even more important.
Open-Ended Questions
These are questions that require a bit more than a yes or no answer. If you tend to ask yes/no questions, practice rephrasing them until it becomes natural to leave room for your lead to elaborate. “Does this seem interesting to you?” should become, “How can this fit into your current efforts,” or “What are your thoughts about this?”
Call Them by Their Name
This is both a way to acknowledge someone and personalize a conversation. Our brains instinctively become more alert when we hear our name. We’re more likely to pay attention to the next statement.
It’s a good idea to use someone’s name when you’re about to make a key statement, something really important you want them to take away from the meeting. For demos, I also always use names to thank my leads for making time to join the call. On a cold call, I always begin with their name followed by mine and the company I’m calling from.
Transition Statements
Presentations and slides can easily blur together. It’s hard for someone who is just learning about your service to conceptualize it in the same way as you. Transition statements help recap sections of your presentation and make it easy to segway into the next section.
Think of these phrases as your chapter titles or bullet point headers. “This means that…” or “So those are the end goals we enable, and we have a few different tools available to employ depending on the strategy we want to take. Let me show you those different tools, just so you have a sense of everything that’s available.”
“At a high level…,” is one of my favorite transition phrases. This statement sets expectations that you aren’t going to try and explain everything (too many details are overwhelming). Therefore, it opens the door for your lead to ask for more detail (which tells you they’re interested).
Pause and Open the Floor
“I feel like I’ve been speaking a lot, so I want to pause and hear your thoughts or back up to clarify anything.” Now the ball is in their court.
This is a great time to qualify interest. Focus on learning about your lead’s efforts so you can serve as an informed consultant. Are there any pain points your lead is facing, which you two haven’t talked about yet? Are there any obstacles that could impede your sales efforts? Give them dedicated space to speak, and see what happens.
Outbound Sales Demystified: Generate Leads & Close Deals
You can learn more about qualifying leads and creating meaningful conversations that boost your closed-won rates by reading “Outbound Sales Demystified: Generate Leads and Close Deals.” This book is a tips & tricks go-to guide for sales tactics, as well as a comprehensive overview of successful B2B selling strategy.
Available on Amazon in paperback & ebook
