A Fateful Breakfast Meeting and the Reinvention of Sales Conversations

Curiosity Is Your Key To Effective Cold Calling On this episode of the Sales Gravy podcast, Ulysses Price, filling in for Jeb Blount, interviews Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. ConnectAndSell is a software service that helps salespeople initiate conversations with prospects. Beall explains how market dominance and the humble cold call are connected. His prospecting philosophy requires the salesperson to build trust and demonstrate curiosity, master the first few seconds of the conversation to create emotional buy-in, and avoid triggering psychological reactance. By breaking down the conversation and practicing each part in training, sales reps can improve their skills and conduct more successful sales conversations. Chris Beall connected the dots between market dominance and the potential impact of a humble cold call. Calibrated callers are comfortable using a psychological framework, playful curiosity, and confidence to create a clean read from potential customers and insist on a meeting. The seven-second rule is a technique for building trust in a cold call by demonstrating tactical empathy and competence to solve the problem of the caller being an interruption. The risk of B2B sales is a career risk, not a financial risk. B2B salespeople are necessary because buyers risk their careers when making buying decisions. Salespeople must gain the trust of potential customers to become the expert and be on their side. Sales reps must be able to make a clean read of a potential customer, understand their needs and interests, and provide value. Handle objections in a delicate and curious manner, stick to your guns, and position yourself as an expert to establish trust quickly. Gain Your Prospect's Trust In Seven Seconds Cold calling is still one of the most effective ways of reaching potential customers, but it can be a daunting task for many salespeople, especially when you don't know where to start. To start a conversation, we need to gain someone's trust. Without trust, they won't listen to us, and we won't get far. When we make a cold call, the person we're speaking with only wants to end the conversation while keeping their self-image intact. If they didn't care about their self-image, they would just hang up. So we have a small window of opportunity to gain their trust— just seven seconds. In those seven seconds is to help the other party see that we see the world through their eyes. We call it tactical empathy. Secondly, we need to demonstrate to them that we're competent in solving a problem they have right now. Their problem could be me, but I can always offer to go away in exchange for something. You want them to listen to you, so you make that offer. For example, you might open the call with a statement like: "I know I'm an interruption. Can I take 27 seconds to tell you why I called?" By saying this, you're self-indicting right at the beginning. That's what the other party is already thinking about you. You beat them to the punch. As a seller, it's essential to establish trust with your audience, especially in B2B sales. Eventually, they have to trust you more than they trust themselves and view you as the expert. This is why the first seven seconds are crucial in establishing trust with your audience. Do it wisely, and they will trust you forever, but try selling to them, and you'll lose their trust in an instant. Then comes the pitch: "We've made a breakthrough that eliminates the waste and frustration that hinder your best sales reps from being effective on the phone. My call today is to request 15 minutes of your time to share this with you. Do you have your calendar handy?" Sounds easy, right? But it's not. The waste is economic, and the frustration is emotional. That's because frustration triggers the part of our brain that causes us to lash out. Be careful not to trigger anger and instead, use a tone of voice that shows you understand what frustration mean...