#60 - Sales Tip: Pick Up the Phone

Hey, Bob. Guess what it is. Yes. 

You' re gonna guess I know it's another episode of Let's Chat Sales 

Let's Chat Sales

And so this time let's talk about phone calls because 

Let's chat phone calls

Yes. Let's talk about phone calls. Exactly. So here's the thing with phone calls. People don't do them anymore.

And I think that's a real shame. And the phone calls are secret weapon.

So... what were you gonna say?

Let me step back. I wanna set some contexts cause you're jumping right into this. Okay. So within the sales cycle, 

Yeah. 

We need to get to know our client that we're serving, our customer. 

And there are several tools that we can use. We can use texting. 

We can use email. We can use faxes. We can use letters.

I don't recommend all those. 

And we can also use the phone. 

There's telex

what's that 

Telex? Don't forget 

telex. 

That's good. Yes. 

That's right, there is cams, western. So yeah, you beat the hell at it. So, so keep going all, let's go 

Over time. It's evolved. And what you and I have both observed, cuz we've been in the business world a couple of decades. 

Yeah.

Is that the use of the phone has moved out of popularity.

And people tend to text and email more. What's funny to me, Brendan is, and this, I never thought about this until right. 

Now at a time when the phone was stuck on your desk or on the wall of your kitchen.

Yeah. 

We used the phone more to contact people than now when every single person I know is carrying their phone with them 24/7. 

Right. Well, that's a function of the fact that there are other, there are other channels that didn't exist back then, too. 

Right. So, and those channels... 

What's the benefit of using the phone? Go back 20 years, 30 years.

And maybe we can educate people on what we experienced that was so valuable about phone calls. 

Well, the value of phone calls then... As now, is that it's synchronous.

It's in real time. 

It's dynamic. And the problem with text and email... they have their roles.

They're very useful. 

But the problem is they remove you from your customer by some amount of margin.

There's some delay. There's filters. There's space that makes the conversation less informative and less nuanced. 

And, I think there are a lot of things.

There are a lot of reasons why you wanna be able to pick up the phone and call someone... that you rather than send them an email. 

There are great opportunities. There are certainly circumstances where email is the right way to go, or text is the right way to go. 

But, for a lot of sales situations, do not use email and text as the way you sell who you are in your product and your solution.

So, I've kind of touched on that a little bit. A lot of it's the speed of the interaction. 

It's a conversation that can happen in real time. So you can adjust how you respond based on what the customer says. 

You can interpret the nuance in what they say.

Is there a hesitation? If they say something you ask, 'em a question and there's a hesitation. What does the hesitation mean? 

Is it them trying to figure out the problem or is it them not having a resistance to telling you the answer for example, and you can't tell that in an email or a text message. Right.

But you can pick that up immediately in a phone call, or a zoom call. Hey, yes. I want a question about how... hey, so how's this budget thing work.

And if they go, Hmm, I don't know. You know, or versus if they say, I don't know, you know, it's very different. 

That, just that pause, like, what does that pause mean? You'll never pick that up in an email message or a text message. 

Well, can I give you some of the common objections to picking up the phone that I've heard from people?

Yeah 

One, I don't know what to say. What if they ask me a question? I don't know the answer to I'll look stupid. What do you say to that, Brendan?

First of all, it's okay to look stupid. If, if that's

Why you're a friend of mine, Brendan, that is . That is the number one reason. 

It's no, it is. It's like if first of all... learning almost always happens from mistakes... so.

You don't learn typically from doing things well. 

You learn mostly from doing, at least my experience is you learn things from doing things and making mistakes. And you get on a phone call and you don't know the answer, right? 

Then that you've learned something. And now you have to go and learn the answer to that question, right?

And the next time you come back, you'll have that answer and you'll be further on. 

You'll be better on what you do. If you have a few sales calls with customers, and there are three or four things you find out you don't know the answer to, and then you get the answers to those questions.

The next time you're more prepared. It's you're gonna be better. You're gonna be better at your craft. 

And there are gonna be questions you don't know the answer to, or you have to get back to someone on because you don't have enough information and there's nothing wrong with saying, I don't know the answer to that.

Most of the time.

Let me find out and I'll get back to you later today. I think the thing to me is when they, they do the open ended, let me find out. 

Yeah.

I always like when someone says, let me find out and they'll get back to. In a reasonable amount of time. 

And, it may indicate, like I said, it may indicate that you're not prepared... in which case, next time you'll be prepared.

You better be prepared if you keep getting the same question and you don't, you keep not having the right answer for it. That's a problem. 

So that's one, that's one issue 

Second one I hear all the time is what if I bother them when they're busy?

Well, then you ask them at the front of the call, say, Hey, you got a minute?

You know, just, and like be honest about it, you know, that's one of the things I, I like to be really honest with people. Like if I say 10 minutes, I want to end it in eight. 

Yeah. 

I don't do the, if do you have a minute and then make it go 45 minutes. 

Okay. Yeah. It's do you have a minute?

You have time now. Am I, am I catching a good time? If you're not, oh, 

Hey, is there better time? You know, you wanna text me back? 

You wanna let me know what's good. 

Like, alright. I'll check with you this afternoon, or I'll check with your admin or whatever.

So forth. If they pick up the phone and answer it, that's usually a good sign.

And cuz people don't pick up the phone that often anymore.

That is I'm sure that's when you're rejected objections is... people don't pick up the phone

Right

That is a problem. 

So in some cases, you might want to schedule time. 

You might wanna schedule a phone call. Hey. I say this a lot.

Can I get 10 minutes with you? 

You send 'em an email and rather than tell 'em on the email, say, Hey, can we get 10 minutes today? 

Let me know. 

I want to talk to you about A, B, C, and it's oftentimes more efficient to have a conversation with someone than it is to type something out.

You're gonna miss something. 

They're gonna miscommunicate something. 

These are all areas where having a phone call is. 

All right

Go ahead. 

I was gonna say you took my next objection already covered it, but I have one more.

Yeah. 

I wanna have a record of everything we discuss in case we run into problems later.

Yeah. You don't, you don't want that. And here's why, because a sales process is, is a back and forth. It's a give and take. 

If you write something down, then it's memorialized. It's in concrete. 

It's been solidified and that may not be what the customer wants. It's better to have a conversation and take advantage of that.

The nuance and the, the, and 

the fluidity 

fluidity of the conversation, and then say, oh, you need it that way. 

Oh, I'm sorry. I misunderstood. 

You can't do that in email, back and forth. 

They think, oh, you've done their own thing. 

And now they're stuck. 

Oh, this guy doesn't get it, but you're not supposed to get it because it's a back and forth.

So it's much better to have the phone call. 

And then say, this is great.

And then send an email afterwards... here's what I understand. 

I got that right? And you send him a quick email 

Based on our phone call earlier today. Blah, blah. 

And with some of these with zoom and with Google meets, there are transcript services that can record all this stuff and you can go back and if you wanna drop it into your CRM... the conversation afterwards, you wanna go to that trouble, at least that way you're not typing everything.

Right. 

So yeah, I think it's important to have records. 

It's, it's surprising how much salespeople end up putting into the CRM that really doesn't matter. 

And it's much better to have a conversation, take the keynote, write 'em down and then transcribe them if you have to, into your CRM.

But, going the trouble of writing everything ahead of time when you don't know your customer, something could have changed.

So then, how do you do this? So as I mentioned, having a phone call, and the younger generation is really hesitant to have phone calls.

And because they're just used to doing everything via text and Snapchat and whatever else there is out there. 

The problem is, it means that everything is asynchronous. I state something to you, 30 minutes goes by, you respond back and then 

if you're walking 

they're right. And then I respond right away and then you don't respond again for 30 minutes.

And now I'm thinking in my head, oh, what's going on here?

Is he, is he delaying? Is he whatever. 

And you might have like gotten a phone call or you might have gone out to lunch or whatever. 

You've just left your phone in a different room, whatever the reason is. And now I'm in my head,

I'm going through all this stuff in my head.

Oh, blah, blah, blah. You know, I'm placing all sorts of meaning on things that may not have any meaning at all. 

I wish I could understand Brendan. 

Yeah. So then, it's like the best way is to get a phone call going is to send an email or a text and

say, Hey, you mind, can we chat about this?

Can we get 10 minutes? Can we get five minutes? What's your day like?

And you can do it on zoom. Hey, here's a link to zoom, or you can do it as a FaceTime or whatever you wanna do. 

But the idea is to have that much more interactive conversation.. I just think this is a secret weapon for salespeople.

And I think a lot of salespeople don't do it. And what I'd say is... if someone has other questions about this ping us, you know, send us an email at hello@letschatsales.com. 

And we'll answer the question for you. Well, you know about this, cuz I think this is really important. 

Now now Brendan, we have to, we're gonna introduce a new feature starting today.

Oh, we are. Okay. I'm not hearing this. Okay. 

Ready for this?

I'm not sure. 

It's the best thing you've consumed in online streaming over the last week. 

Oh, wow. That's a good one. 

You' ve consumed so much great content. You've given me so many great recommendations. It's

only fair that we share this with the world.

Ah, okay. Oh, well. Let me think about this. 

Give me something good. 

One second. I got one. I got one. You ready? 

Yes.

I got an email from Steven Prattley. Who's a guy I follow on Twitter and he had this one, this short

E-book on how to create hooks. 

And it was a really clever little writeup on how to write compelling copy. 

And so I'll include that in the doobly-doo cause he's a great guy and answers, emails. And how about you? 

You know, I watched a video oddly enough of, just a sales video where someone was explaining

Facebook Ads.

And I really got a lot of value out of that. And yeah. Yeah, but it was a, it was total sales pitch. 

Oh, okay. All right. 

But I was able to reverse engineer and dissect the nuances. Because, I'm a trained sidekick. 

The other thing is and I'm not gonna share this one cuz I'm gonna steal it and use a variation of it

for my course, for my course landing page 

Appropriate the resources in a new way.

So I believe how we describe when I was a student at Johns Hopkins and fiction writing. 

Yeah. So it's a particular video that was like, 

Oh, he showed me that. 

Yes. Yeah. And it's just a very clever video. And so I'm gonna do a variation on that. We've got a

film guy here that does this stuff now.

I'm gonna do that for my landing page for the course that's launching on September 26th, sales

course, right. 

I'm hoping I can get admission to that. 

It's a very, the admissions process is quite selective, so it's really not 

Just don't scare them 

details in the doobly-doo, so we're good

I think we've covered plenty of ground 

all right, good talking. 

I'm gonna go make some phone calls.

All right. Sounds good. See ya.

That was another episode of Let's Chat Sales a quick one, of course. And I hope it was helpful. And if it was please like, and subscribe and more importantly, share it with your friends. There should be something right here you could point to and click on and try that out. It should be good.
It's probably good. Certainly short. It's probably helpful. And thanks for listening or watching.