HARDISON’S TIPS – MAY 10, 2021 – PHONE SALES SKILLS (PART ONE)
Phone sales is about mastering two things:
- Your mindset, or your approach, to the day-to-day drudgery of phone sales
- The specific, tactical things you do every day to have better conversations and close more sales
Both of them are essential, and both require active, intentional effort to improve upon.
Today, I’m going to share my approach to staying upbeat and productive in the face of rejection, as well as 5 tips to ensure phone sales success.
Let’s get started.
How to Sell Over the Phone
The process for selling over the phone is easy: pick up the phone, dial a number, and go through your script. When the call is done, do it again.
Easy, right?
You and I both know, there’s more to it than that. When learning how to sell over the phone, you’ve got to master some basic sales skills:
- The sales process that your org relies on
- Your script (and sounding natural when you deliver it)
- Getting past gatekeepers
- Building rapport quickly
- Leaving a voicemail that gives you callbacks
- Time management, so you can hit your daily targets
But before you get into the tactical, there is a more important skill that you’re less likely to get training on, and that’s mindset mastery.
Which brings me to my CAT Framework. This is, in my opinion, the difference between success and failure as an SDR.
In phone sales, you’re going to get a lot of hang-ups. People will be rude and angry. And you’ve got to be able to shake it off and call the next person on your list. All day. Every day.
If you can stay positive, you’ll find huge success as an SDR. But if you let it get you down, you’ll wash out. Sad but true.
The CAT Framework will help you avoid getting discouraged and keep your head in the right place. Let’s get into it.
The CAT Framework for Mindset Mastery
Step 1: Confidence
As you learn how to sell over the phone — and throughout your sales career — confidence is key. Like me, you may not have much confidence when you begin, but you’ll develop it through two channels:
- Belief
- Action
Since NLP gives us visual, auditory and kinetics – the phone is a mastery of auditory and how you pace, tone, listening skills and closing skills are part of this Belief and action.
