It’s end of month and every minute your manager either requests a 1:1 or emails you a status update on your numbers. That’s usually what happens- you either closed the deal or you didn’t. Sounds pretty black and white to me. When the pressure is on, our focus narrows, our options become smaller and we lose sight of our creativity.

I recently went out and bought a box of Crayola Crayons- you know the kind that has the sharpener.

I realized that I tend to go after the brighter shades in my choices - I choose the brilliants that have passion, excitement, risk, and speed. I need to spend time with the muted tones, which are more calming, down the earth, centered and solid.

I’ve seen a lot of sales forecasts in my day but never saw it in the color of a rainbow. You know the 25-50-75-95-100% of close, these numbers we know. But what if we were to color code our opportunities? Or better yet, analyse and strategize on an account based on color. It may have started off in some muted tones but after a demo, you may have added red because the interest was getting stronger. But then your coach in the account went on maternity leave so you had to throw some grey or brown into the deal. Get the picture? Get some crayons and good luck end of month!

One of my favorite topics of discussion is about prospecting into large Fortune 500 companies. Not only is this a question that I’m frequently asked but it’s something that fascinates me because it changes all the time. Think about it- 10 years ago we prospected by leaving voice mail messages and waiting for a call back. How simple was that? Today, voice mail is one of many tools and it must be used in combination with email to even wish for a response.

Another one of my favorite topics is Blogging. As a matter of fact, I’ve registered to attend the Blogher conference this summer.   

Blogging and Prospecting come up in my discussions with a friend who is a big sales guy and a mentor for me. He’s now managing one large enterprise account for his company- it’s his only account and he’s tasked with growing that business for this year. Although he’s a field guy and flies out there each week to make presentations, he also explained how he gains traction in his prospecting efforts. He has managed to find blogs his prospects not only read but also write. He follows their blogs, keeps up with their hidden internal culture and also learns about how they think and what they’re up against. Once he introduces himself, he may reference a blog entry. Or, for example, he recently read about a prospect of his that received a “spontaeous applaud” at a recent developers conference. As he prepared to email his prospect, in the first opening line of his email, he wrote, “Heard about your spontaneous applaud at the xyz developers conference last week, way to go!” and then introduced himself.

Being a blogger myself, I am so thrilled to hear when others out there read my blog. Take some time to research your audience and learn about the blogs they are reading. How do they stay current? What are they interesting in? This is a great prospecting vehicle.

Today I was meeting a friend for breakfast who doesn’t live in the city. I suggested a cool place near Potrero Hill and the Mission called The Universal Cafe. It’s a great place on a Sunday morning and the weather has been so wonderful. As I started driving out there, I got completely caught in Carnival traffic. Oops! After living here so many years, the events in the city sometimes become cumbersome as traffic clogs up and all the tourists are in town.

Carnival is California’s largest multi-cultural celebration of the year.  It is one of San Francisco’s most spectacular traditions as it showcases the Latin America and Caribbean cultures and traditions. it happens in the Mission District every Memorial weekend.

I wasn’t planning on going to Carnival. I was planning on meeting my buddy for breakfast so I found myself starting to stress out about traffic, parking, breakfast, making the wrong decision about where to meet and what Plan B should be.  Every corner I turned the street was closed off to traffic because the carnival dancers were practicing and lining up for the event.

Change your perspective- that’s my self-talk these days. There is always a better way to look at something that can just throw us off. I started looking around and thinking about how lucky I was to live in such a culturally rich city that attracts people from all over the world. The beauty, color, spirit of this city is so alive.

In sales, we can wind ourselves down about having a bad territory, annoying field partners we have to support, a toxic sales manager who makes our lives miserable and a company that doesn’t have great messaging. Take a minute to change your perspective about negative things you may sound off on- it helps open up new opportunities.

Some of you change your outgoing greeting every day while others change it each week. Usually when you are going to be out of the office is also a good time to change it. Aren’t we tired of hearing the same things in our outgoing greeting?

Here’s a sample: “Hi, this is Bob and I’m not in the office, please leave me a message or if this is urgent, please call my cell at 555-789-0086. Thanks for calling.”  or “I’m out of the office and will get back to you upon my return, please leave your name and number.”

So champions, how about using this outbound greeting as a sales opportunity? Add a stimulator to your greeting such as “Ask me about the new release of …..” or “visit our web site at www…. and download a white paper” or “our users conference is scheduled for May 23rd in Austin.”

Use this outbound greeting as a way to educate, inform, sell and motivate your prospects. What does yours say?

When you are making new introductions, don’t just count on your phone and voice mail efforts. If you are keeping track of outbound call metrics, you must also keep an eye on outbound emails. The phone can no longer stand alone. Email is necessary to back up your prospecting efforts.  So how does it work? Theses two should be synchonized to work within seconds of each other. That means, it doesn’t make sense to leave a voice mail in the morning introducing yourself and send a follow-up email at the end of the day. The response rate increases when the two work together at the same time.

The good news is they both have similar attributes and challenges, such as:

Tone: We can write and speak with so many different tones- whether it’s confident, authoritative, direct, tentative, conversational, formal, enthusiastic, trustworthy, intelligent, professional, inviting, or interesting.

Word Choice: Are the words organized, weak, overused, abused, techno babble, visual, strong? Is the manner of writing and speaking concise, succinct and articule?

Pacing: Usually we measure this when we speak as talking too fast, too slow, or steady.

Organization: What is the clear call or writing objective? How are you setting expectations with your speech or your email?

Since these two complement each other so well, invest time in making them look like they match and putting your vocal and visual stamp on your messaging.

Mother’s Day is one of my favorite holidays and has been at least for the past 17 years, since I have an awesome daughter who has made this holiday worth celebrating. I also am lucky to have a wonderful mom.

My family gathered together today to celebrate this holiday and as I was drivng home, I wondered what influence my mom has had on my sales abilities. My first thought is absolutely nothing. My mother is so far removed from any business, sales, or public speaking aspect as her background is completely different. She never worked outside the home and is still very traditional in her European ways. 

So how does this translate to who I am and what I do? My mother has given me the gift of intuition and the ability to listen and learn someone’s character. Intuition is key in sales and something we need to listen and trust more often. How many times are we dealing with a call where we know something isn’t right or suspect a hidden agenda? Or we’ve got a sale and it’s not lining up the way it could be? Or we’re talking with someone who acts as though they’ve got power but we sense otherwise? We need to listen to our “gut”, or intuition, which knows so much more than any books, training, or manager can ever teach us.

That’s where listening comes in. The ability to listen to yourself and listen to others. The ability to really listen to more than what is said and to understand one’s character. If we are good at this skill, we can create more urgency in the sales cycle and also map out the political influences in an org chart. For example, although someone tells us they are one of the main decision-makers, we still sense they don’t have high influence.

Take the time to listen this week to more than what is said and trust your intuition about potential opportunities. Take notes on your calls and ask the tough questions that invite a bigger response. Move deeper with your conversations with prospects. Try to develop the type of relationship with your prospects where they might say to you, “I’ve never shared this with anyone before but……” or “you’re the first I’ve ever said this to.” That’s an endorsement of your listening and your ability to establish trust.

I have an unusual name-most people who first meet me have a difficult time pronouncing my name. I feel bad as I listen to them struggle with it, avoid it, ask me how to say it or simply take the liberty of shortening it like calling me Josie.   I don’t meet Mike and decide to call him Mikey or meet Frances and call her Francy so why call me Josie?   It’s uncomfortable and tiresome correcting people when sometimes I just don’t feel like it. I was taking a class from an instructor who kept callng me Joella for a long time. When one of the students finally corrected her and said, “why do you keep calling her Joella, her name is Josiane” , she turned to me and asked me why I never corrected her. I said that I liked the sound of that name better than mine.  Don’t get me wrong, if someone calls me “Hozeannie” I definitely stand my guard.

When I was 17 years old and got my first telemarketing job, it was literally a boiler room phone jock with yellow pages dialing for dollars job. The sales manager told me I couldn’t use my name and had to come up with something else on my cold calls. So I used Diane. It definitely made a difference except for when people would call the front desk and ask for someone by the name of Diane and found there was nobody that worked there by that name.

In our phone introductions we only have a few seconds, word choice and tone make a huge impact. A difficult name can create noise in the channel. Although I usually recommend first and last names, it can get tough it they are hard to pronouce or remember. We want our introduction to arouse curiousity, deliver value and command attention. If we have a tough name, the listener may stop listening to our message and only focus on our name. On the other hand, my name gets attention and it’s not easily forgotten.  And when someone says my name right, it is such a great accomplishment for us both. They feel proud, I feel relieved and we quickly bond. 

Does your name bring you shame? Does it help or hurt your intro? I want to hear from reps with unusual names this week. Send me your comments.

It’s amazing how many times I meet clients who have established outbound telebusiness teams that don’t do any call recordings. Somehow, somewhere, someone had a bad experience with it so they decided to shelf the idea. Their legal department may have caught wind of this and demanded disclaimers on outbound calls, which kills any opportunity to develop rapport and establish trust in those precious few seconds.

I would compare call recording to looking at yourself in the mirror before you leave for work in the morning or video taping yourself for a stand-up presentation. If you are spending up to 40 hours per week on the phone,  it is so important to hear what you sound like- your voice tone, word choice, organization and pacing.  It’s one of the most insightful things you can do to develop yourself. I still always record my calls and find myself picking up new “non-words” that I never realized I had, such as “wow” or “awesome” or “got it.” When you hear 30 of these words in one conversation, you become aware of a new habit.

The execution and implementation is where most people run into snags, so here are some tips:

1. Make a decision- detemine how and why you want to integrate call recordings into your department.

2. Decide on the messaging- this is where you can get into trouble as it’s very delicate and can easily be misunderstood. Your goals should be to create a safe and trusting call recording culture and not use this as a way to punish team members.  

3. Decide on the type hardware you’ll be using- it can be as easy as an old recorder with casette or a digital recorder where you upload your MP3 sound files.

4. Purchase the hardware and set it up- find a technical guru in the group who can be the “go-to” person for everyone.

5. Record all types of calls- mostly first introductory calls or 2nd-4th calls. Record the call from beginning to end.

6. Sit with your manager or your peer and review. Listen to the entire call- beginning, middle and end. Evaluate the call.

7. Learn from this, request feedback and try it again. You can always erase and start over again.

What’s your worst call recording experience? What happened? Please respond with comments. 

Field sales people have it easy because they get to see their prospects and customers. Recently I met with someone I’ve been chasing for several years and the need finally arrived where he wanted to check into sales training for his growing organization. This guy is a pretty high-level director from a very prestigious company. In the past, he never responded to my emails and his secretary always screened his calls. All I ever could go by was his outgoing voice mail greeting saying he was out of the office and to leave a message. I almost felt initimidated with this level of unapproachability as he was powerful and heavily guarded.  I finally landed a phone appointment with him. During that call, he spoke to me from his speaker phone and confirmed that he was this powerful demi-god decision maker. At the end of the call, he took me off the speaker phone and requested that I come in to meet his managers and continue our discussion.  Sounds great- yippee! My appointment day finally arrived; I checked email anxiously waiting for him to cancel but he didn’t. I got there, registered at the lobby, waited for the receptionist to call his secretary, who came and escorted me into the conference room where he and his managers were waiting. Within seconds and in one quick glance, I knew it was going to be a great sales call and threw out any fears I had in the past of this high-powered individual.

When we meet someone face-to-face, it takes up to 3 minutes to form a first impression because we are sizing up so many visual cues. For example, you can size up how they look, what they’re wearing, their accessories, their body type,  their eye contact, their handshake, their smile, their teeth, their shoulders, the way they hold their pen, how they listen and focus, how fast they read and nod their head with understanding, their hair style, or any hair at all for that matter, etc. etc. etc.

Now imagine you arrived blind-folded on a face-to-face call and missed all these great clues. That’s what it’s like on the phone- that non-visual medium we communicate in. There are so many clues we miss when we are on the phone, such as someone nodding, shaking their head, rolling their eyes, looking up at the clock, drumming their fingers, and more.

You’ve probably heard of the Mehrabian study which reveals that 55% of communication is focused on the visuals, 38% on the vocals and 7% on the verbals. When we are on the phone and the visuals don’t exist, we can only rely on the vocal and verbal cues. How long does it take to form a first impression over the phone? 15 seconds. That’s based on the vocal tone, which is 86%, and word choice, which is 14%- so it’s not what you say but how you say it when you are on the phone.

I start this month anxiously waiting to be surprised. It will preferably be a good surprise and so my expectations are up and I’m ready. It’s a good place to be as I treat everything coming to me with a new freshness to it because I’m looking for that aha moment that I know is coming soon. Life would be so boring if we weren’t surprised. Some people say they don’t like surprises. With certain things, I’m certainly one of them - don’t ever give me a surprise party - please don’t, I’m serious. There’s something about seeing all the people I know in one room looking at me and wondering if I was really surprised - and continuing to ask me that question throughout the night - that doesn’t jive for me.

However, I love surprises from good friends, family members, clients, and prospects that come when you are least expecting it and remind you of why you care so much for them or for the work you do. Get out there and be part of a surprise this month!