Learn to Thrive on Meeting Future Customers!
“You will lose 25-30% of your customers every year!”
“New customers are the Life Blood of the organization”.
These words rang out as I listened to the speaker. This speaker knew what he was talking about as the leader of a growing and thriving agribusiness. His point was very focused. Customers will leave you for various reasons: they switch vendors, they go out of business, they stop carrying your product line, they sell the business or merge and the new owner decides not to carry your products, etc. Whatever the reason, it happens. What the speaker was telling us is that we needed to keep prospecting for new customers continuously throughout our sales career. You can’t rest on your customer base. Now, you might want to argue with the 25-30% and make the claim that you have a lower turnover than that. Fine, that’s great. The point is that you will have customer turnover. You will need to add customers to your territory to maintain & grow your business.
Obviously, the initial step in signing new customers is cold calling. Unfortunately, this can be one of the most difficult things for a sales person to go through.
Here are some thoughts on cold calling to alleviate those fears and learn how to thrive on meeting Future Customers.
- Warm it up – In today’s information society, there is really no reason any of your calls should be cold. Warm it up by getting to know your prospect before the first call. From social media, there’s Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. In real life, there’s a multitude of ways to get to know your prospect: referrals, other sales people, industry & trade information, government reporting information. So, don’t go in completely cold. Warm it up by preparing yourself ahead of time. Doing your homework and preparing will make you more confident to make that initial call.
- Re-frame the Prospect – Instead of calling them prospects or suspects (which I really don’t like), call them “Future Customers”. I know we need to call them prospects when talking among ourselves, but in your head, think of them as Future Customers. Thinking this way, can change the relationship you have with the person. Instead of looking upon them as an adversary (Suspect), look upon them as your future customer. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually you will work with them as a viable part of their business.
- Re-frame the Call – If you are getting really nervous about the cold call, try re-framing the terminology or thought of what you are trying to accomplish. Call it a “Fact Finding Mission” or a “Fishing Expedition” or “Info Gathering Session” or a “Get to know you meeting”. Any of these sounds less frightening than “Cold Calling on a Suspect”. Next, realize that few sales wills take place on the first call. Unless you are extremely lucky in your timing, you need to make multiple calls. So, quit worrying about the first call. Re-frame it as a fact-finding meeting. You want to simply understand this Future Customer, learn about their business to determine if you can help them or not and then get a follow up appointment when you bring solutions to their problems.
Over the many years of coaching sales people, I saw the fear of cold calling be a huge limiter to sales people. And if they were losing customers, it became their downfall. The strategies mentioned above are three of the most powerful methods to overcome those fears. As always, the fear is in our head. If we can short circuit that fear and reroute our thoughts, we are on our way to thriving when we meet Future Customers. Learning to enjoy this part of the sales process may not happen overnight, but eventually you will get good at it and conquer those fears enough to enjoy it. Even if you are the most fearful among us, it will happen as you get better over time.
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