What should you get for the advertising salesperson in your life?
My recommendation: get them a digital copy of Breakthrough Prospecting: Jumpstart Your Media Sales Career and Make the Income You Deserve.It’s regularly $14.95, and on sale for just $9.95 between now and Midnight on Cyber Monday.
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In Breakthrough Prospecting: Jumpstart Your Media Sales Career and Make the Income You Deserve,you’ll learn:
5 places to find great leads right now…including at least one you’ve forgotten, and two you’ve never used before.
A battle-tested call opening that will turn “Not interested” into “Tell me more!”
A comprehensive list of questions you MUST ask at the first meeting if you want to bring back a plan that’ll make ’em buy.
A proven 3-step method to get the client to give you their advertising budget — and tell you where they’re spending it!
Any media salesperson – radio, television, outdoor, transit, print, or digital advertising – at any level will find real value. The book is chock full of actionable tips that will generate new direct money fast.
AE’s who’ve been in the business for three years or less will benefit the most. So will the managers who work with them.
And between now and close of Cyber Monday, you can download Breakthrough Prospecting for just $9.95 — 33% off its regular price.
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How do you motivate yourself to make sales calls when you just don’t feel like getting on the phone?
Photo by Sevendeman
When someone signs up for my mailing list, I send them an email asking what they’re struggling with. These two responses echo many:
From a radio AE in the Midwest:
Call reluctance. Not because I lack the tools (I read your emails to improve my skills and learn, learn, learn!) but because it’s one of the least favorite things to do.
An East Coast Director of Sales had this to say:
My sales team struggles with call reluctance. It’s an every day battle.
They’re not alone. We all have days when we know it’s time to make new business calls, but we just…don’t…want…to. So the delay tactics start:
We check our email.
We reorganize our desk.
We go through our paperwork to make sure everything’s been filled out and turned in.
We go online to do some “research.”
We post something on social media.
We check our email again.
It’s not hard to kill an hour or two this way. We feel busy. We’ve accomplished nothing.
The problem hasn’t gone away. We still need that new business.
How do top salespeople beat call reluctance?
Some of the most useful advice I’ve seen on the subject comes from a blog post by Rory Vaden, author of Procrastinate on Purpose.
Vaden recommends starting each day armed with a list of people to call on.
…before you stop working on any given day make sure to choose the first person you will call on the next day. Going door-to-door 80 hours a week for five summers I always had significantly fewer butterflies on days where I knew exactly what my first house would be.”
Sometimes we don’t want to to contact complete strangers. On other occasions the problem is someone we know but can’t bring ourselves to call.
The late radio sales trainer and consultant Jim Taszarek used to call these “Chicken Accounts.”
Taz published a great newsletter called Quota Busters. The newsletter’s gone, but some of his wisdom is still available in his book The Best of Quota Busters:
We don’t like to talk about them, but we’ve all got them. They are the accounts that we’re just afraid to call on – for any one of one million reasons.
It’s a normal sales phenomenon called “Call Reluctance”. Everybody’s got it to some extent. We say that the accounts are “too big,”, they are “newspaper only,” they “said no” repeatedly, or we’re just afraid of them. What to do? Sit on them? No way. Try this – it’s easy and you’ll love the results:
Confront them by writing them down. Write ’em down – make a list of our Chicken Accounts in one column, then look at them (Sales Managers, if you ask your staff to do this exercise make sure you emphasize that the list is for the AE’s personal use only. The list will be shared with no one. Not turned into management. No role-playing, no open review of the accounts. That will have the opposite effect of what were looking for. Got it?)
In the 2nd column, write a comment next to each account, answering the big question, like, what’s the barrier? Why are we reluctant to call on them? What’s the big reason we hesitate when we think about calling on them?
In the 3rd column, write a dollar amount of what they be worth to us if we could pop a hefty little schedule out of them.
Then call on one of them a day or a week. And not a halfhearted call either, go for it – the real thing. But just one a week. Or one a day. Depends on you. Then what happens? You’ll connect with one of them. It’ll turn out that there’s a person who listens to you and they’re interested. And they’re not such jerks after all. It turns out we can cut those suckers down to size – if we do them one at a time. And, this is important – remember to reward yourself.
…They’re bigger in our head than they are in reality. Your Chicken List will disappear. Congratulations.
During my radio sales days, I tackled call reluctance by establishing a ritual.
My goal was to start the process with a list of 10-20 people to call. I’d set a cup of coffee on the left side of my desk, the list in the center, and the phone on the right. I’d pick up the receiver and recite the following incantation:
“Time to make the donuts.”
The line came from an old commercial (direct link here):
In my mind, “making the donuts” meant getting down to business; once I said those words I had to make my first call. I can’t tell you why it worked for me, but it worked.
The real secret to beating call reluctance is this: once you make that first call, it’s a whole lot easier to make the second, and the third, and the fourth. You’ve just got to make the first one.
If you can get yourself to start making the donuts, you’ll be on the road to making some dough.
[reminder]How do you get past call reluctance?[/reminder]
Do you need to bring your new direct sales numbers up? Breakthrough Prospecting is for you.
Any media salesperson — radio, television, digital, print, outdoor — at any level will find real value. The book is chock full of actionable tips that will generate new direct money fast.
AE’s who’ve been in the business for three years or less will benefit the most. So will the managers who work with them.
In Breakthrough Prospecting: Jumpstart Your Media Sales Career and Make the Income You Deserve,you’ll learn:
5 places to find great leads right now…including at least one you’ve forgotten, and two you’ve never used before.
A battle-tested call opening that will turn “Not interested” into “Tell me more!”
A comprehensive list of questions you MUST ask at the first meeting if you want to bring back a plan that’ll make ’em buy.
A proven 3-step method to get the client to give you their advertising budget — and tell you where they’re spending it!
Invest just $14.95 to download your copy of Breakthrough Prospecting, and you’ll be in profitable territory fast with the very first sale you make.
Want to read the first two chapters free? Sign up for my mailing list, and you can have Chapters 1 and 2 for no charge.
[button href=”https://philbernstein.com/read-chapters-1-and-2-fuhnuthin” primary=”true” centered=”true” newwindow=”true”]Click Here to Read Chapters 1 and 2 For Free[/button]
For those who missed the announcement, I’ve got a sales book coming out in a few weeks. The folks on my email list had a chance to vote for three possible covers. And the winner is…
I got lots of votes by email, and on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. All three finalists had their fans. In a three-way race, Cover #1 (above) got well over 50% of the votes.
Breakthrough Prospecting: Jumpstart Your Media Sales Career and Make the Income You Deserve will be a digital-only release for $14.95. I’ll make it available to my mailing list first, and at an insider’s discount price of $9.95, for one week only.
If you’re reading this as a blog post online and aren’t yet on my email list, you can sign up on this page — look down below for the signup form. I’ll let you know when it goes on sale and what the deadline is for the discount.
Salespeople and sales managers spend a lot of time on the phone. And we spend a lot of time driving.
The invention of the cell phone meant we could talk on the phone while we drove – in fact, the first cellular phones were promoted as “car phones.”
As crash data came in to highway safety experts and insurance companies, it became clear that hand-held cell phones were creating a real danger on the roads. Now, some states ban driving while using a hand-held phone, and other state legislatures are considering doing the same.
Hand-free systems were expected to take care of this problem. If both hands are on the wheel, you should be able to talk on the phone and drive safely, right?
Photo by Ivanko80
Wrong.
A series of studies have demonstrated talking on the phone with a hands-free device is just as dangerous as using a hand-held device.
Scientists at the University of Sussex, in a driving-simulation study with 60 volunteers, found that drivers who were engaged in conversation with an out-of-car voice took longer to respond to events such as a pedestrian stepping off the curb or the appearance of an unexpected vehicle.
The study indicated that such “conversations can cause the driver to visually imagine what they are talking about. This uses a part of the brain normally used to watch the road.”
Dr. Graham Hole of the University of Sussex put it this way: “The only safe phone in a car is one that’s switched off.”
The statistical difference, the MythBusters said, is negligible. It is no safer to use a hands-free device while driving than it is to use a handset…
…The National Safety Council says the issue is more mental than physical. Drivers talking on a cellphone, the organization says, can overlook up to 50 percent of what’s around them while looking out the windshield. And activity in the area of the brain that processes moving images is reduced by up to a third when talking or listening to the phone while driving.”
Other studies indicate that voice-operated text messaging is just as dangerous as typing out the text as you drive. And as more new cars have rolled off the assembly lines with these devices, crashes nationwide have risen. So have auto insurance rates.
What does this mean for us as salespeople?
We may believe that we’re the exceptions – that we can safely drive while talking hands-free on the phone.
We’re not, and we can’t.
The only safe phone in your car is one that’s switched off.
