Introduction: Selling “Double Green”

Years ago, our entrepreneurial ancestors pushed a cart through the city square to peddle their wares. And the profession of “sales” was born.

The interactions were in person. Face to face. And although many a peddler burned untold calories pushing his cart around, he left no effect on the environment in his wake. Since then, many sales evolutions have taken place. John Deere and his wagon loaded with plows led to the more modern day with hundreds of thousands of salespeople on the road driving millions of miles each year to visit customers. These numbers have steadily risen over time.

With the advent of better train and air travel, we’ve added driving to stations and airports, hopping on trains as well as planes—just so we could meet with our customers in person, hoping to close the sale. And we have been very successful with this method in the past. But consider this: It costs a company between $100 and $600 dollars for a salesperson to visit a single customer in person (depending, of course, on how close together customers are clustered).

A new day has dawned in sales, and with it has come rising travel costs, increased wait times, and a lower return on investment for individual sales staff because of the time/money trade-off. Time spent on planes is not generating revenue. Time spent waiting to see customers can also eat into return on sales investment because it’s not direct customer contact time. Not only does selling on the phone virtually eliminate these concerns, it adds the bonus of being a more green method of selling.

Or, looking at this another way, the ROI of using the telephone to sell is far more profitable for companies. More salespeople can be employed, less waste takes place, and business gets back on track for profitability.

One of our clients began an inside sales organization employing six telephone salespeople in 1994. Her group’s sales grew to around $500,000 the first year they were in operation. Today, she employs over eighty inside salespeople and their sales have grown to over $100 million! Her departmental costs are a fraction of the outside sales organization’s. Every salesperson has a desk and a telephone. Her sales-people can make dozens of sales calls per day, as compared to outside reps, who can make a maximum of only ten sales calls daily.

Senior management at this company is thrilled with their results. Our client’s employees consistently win the sales awards at national meetings, outselling and outproducing the salespeople who are also using more of our earth’s resources to accomplish sales. In short, the company achieves a dramatically better ROI for their inside sales team than for their outside sales force.

Hence the “double” in “double green”—greener to the planet, and more green in your pocket.

While you’re taking a more responsible stance toward the future of the planet by utilizing the telephone more effectively and minimizing travel costs, you may be wondering why customers prefer to conduct business over the telephone as well. The answer is simple. Time. All customers have a limited amount of time to work with salespeople. If you’ve ever heard “I’m just too busy” from a customer, and you believe there is sincerity behind those words, then you understand.

Meeting with a sales rep in person means that the customer has to carve out valuable time away from daily job demands. A phone call is less time-consuming for him or her, and just as effective for you (if not more so), than that one-hour face-to-face appointment. With a focused call, most trained salespeople can accomplish their call goal in a quarter of the time it would normally take to meet with the customer in person.

In this Second Edition of Selling to Anyone Over the Phone we explore how you can maximize your sales, save operating expenses, and operate “in the green” by using the telephone. Instead of just telling you to “call, call, and call,” we explain how you can effectively use the phone to generate business.

In this book you will learn the tips and finer points of phone selling as you become more skillful at using the phone to:

Focus the customer’s attention on your call.

Engage customers in conversation and keep them there.

Generate interest in your products/services.

Not only get past gatekeepers but also gain their help to reach your customer.

Ensure callbacks from customers.

Set appointments and prevent customers from canceling them.

Conduct webinars and conference calls with multiple decision makers.

Utilize communication technology to go “global.”

Plus, new to this edition you’ll find:

A new chapter on presenting to groups over the phone via webinars and teleconferences.

New information on outside salespeople transitioning to inside phone sales.

New material on establishing trust relationships over the phone.

Guidelines for the use of text messaging.

Expanded coverage on global and cross-cultural communication.

New phone selling challenges to open each chapter.

New models of effective and ineffective telephone exchanges between salesperson and customer.

A new “Greener Way to Do Business” sidebar in each chapter discussing ways in which doing business over the phone is environmentally friendly.

New “Talk Tip” sidebars throughout the book.

A new appendix on handling customer complaints.

And by the end of the book, you will definitely know how to make more sales, increase your bank account, and contribute to a cleaner world, all by selling to anyone over the phone!