Bill Truax is a sales training consultant living outside Cleveland, OH. He has 3 books, 2 CD’s, seminars, and workshops on Prospecting and Making Cold Calls. Visit www.BlitzCall.com for product and contact information.
Those of us in commercial/industrial sales must use a variety of skills.
I have been a sales training consultant since 1978. One thing that virtually every sales person asks me at some time during our work together is, “which sales skill is most important?”
Now there is a common list of sales skills we all need:
Prospecting
Questioning
Features
Benefits
Objection Handling
Closing
Product information and several others.
My response is always the same. Every one of these skills is equally important in selling. The Most Important is the one skill which is your weakest!
That’s right, the one you do poorly or the least. The one skill that you should do more often and/or better becomes the most important.
And guess which one that is for most sales professionals? Prospecting. Yes, the skill that allows us to use all those other skills. Without Prospecting we don’t have enough people on which we can use our sales technique skills.
That is why we developed our Blitz Call® prospecting system (www.BlitzCall.com). When we are in the field and come to a good Prospect or potential Prospect, why not stop. Yes, Fact to Face Prospecting can be very rewarding.
Remember, it takes a minimum of 4 calls to make a sale. Therefore, your first call should be a Blitz Call – a pure Prospecting call, not a sales call. Your objective with a Blitz Call is simply to get an appointment for the 2nd call. I suggest that a typical Blitz Call should take less than 4 minutes, including parking the car.
Just think, if you made 3 Blitz Calls on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday that would be 9 a week. If you are in the field 40 weeks this year that would be 360 Prospecting calls. How would that change your life?
The Blitz Call system has tracking and follow up methods to get you to those next 3 calls.
So now you can make Sales Prospecting, NOT the most important skill.
Sell Well and Often
Bill Truax
© Copyright 2007 WJ Truax
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