Skip to main content

A Phone Call A Day To Get That Sale



I been listening to several sales podcasts recently and one of the common tips that they give is that you should make the phone call daily to touch base with your sales prospects.

I have the additional task of building the company's partner base and calling partners on a regular basis is also part of parcel of getting them to help bring me more customers.

Today, a phone call help closed a deal.

Sounds easy yet behind the phone call was some hard work and creative thinking to get the deal.

This deal was considered as one that is handed to me on a plate as it was a maintenance deal to be renewed. For maintenance deals, the customer have already been using the company's solution for at least a year so there isn't the challenge of having to do the whole introduction spill again.

Getting the appointment to close the deal was, on the other hand, the toughest part. This was because the customer was quite busy and had a tight schedule for a meeting. There were times when I called and the customer was too busy to pick up.

So the traditional method of closing the deal was
Step 1 - Get the appointment
Step 2 - During the appointment, discuss the details of the deal
Step 3 - Return to office and submit the quote
Step 4 - Wait for customer's approval.

Here's where the creativity kicked in.

Step 1 and Step 2 were currently the blockers that prevented me from moving forward with the maintenance deal. As such, I decided to try skipping Step 1 and 2 and go direct to Step 3.

The customer did mention he wanted some add-ons but didn't give any details. So I made an estimation on the add-ons, created the quote and emailed the customer before the weekend. I sweetened the deal to include an upgrade to a hardware as the current hardware would be phased out due to some government requirement in April 2017.

Maybe it helped that the quote was send on a Friday and probably the customer had the time to read it over the weekend.

This morning, though, I listened to a podcast from advancedsellingpodcast.com and one of the motivators was to "Go to work and make that phone call". Motivated I was, and I did the phone call to the customer.

I was rather surprise that the customer answered, but i had to keep my cool and treat the call as per normal.

As it turned out, the customer did read the quote and was ready to extend the maintenance. There was a question on the need for the change of the hardware but I was fully prepared for that.

The lesson of the day - Do something different and make that phone call.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How UOB's Paper Trail Amplifies IT Greatest Security Threat

UOB required you to do everything on paper. If you want to change your mobile number for your banking account with them or for your credit card, you need to fill up a form. Yet, this paper trail represented a potential security fail for the bank - Human Error. So a bitcoin expert walked into UOB to open a bank account. The bank employee had to print a form from a online pdf document to fill in this bitcoin expert's particulars. When it came to entering the bitcoin expert's email, that's when the forgotten art of handwriting was the most obvious of the digital generation. Wrote Robert Capodieci, My name is Roberto Capodieci, as most of you know. and my email address is very obvious to decode. It is not a p4l_l337_s0u1@gmail.com, but it is a more obvious roberto@capodieci.com, thing that, right after reading my name in the same form, should come out easy. Still, a data entry personnel of the UOB bank (or of a service provider the UOB bank uses) entered it as roberto
1 comment
Read more

NEL Train Fault Shouts Lack Of Crisis Communication

The North-East Line train fault of 11 April 2018 was my virgin experience of a rush hour train fault since I moved to Punggol. One would have thought that with the number of train faults experienced by the North-East Line operator, SBS Transit, they would have improved the communications and handling of train faults. However, my personal experience told another story. First, there were no announcements at the Punggol LRT stations of the train fault even though SBS Transit manages them. The train fault was reported as early as 7.10am as I had a friend who was also stuck in the train. I boarded the LRT at Coral Edge around 7.30am and I didn't hear of any announcement nor was there any signage to inform me o the train fault at Punggol Station. Second, the announcement kept saying that there would be a 15 minutes delay, but 15 minutes passed and the trains, on both side, wasn't moving. If the announcement would be more frank to say it will be a longer delay, commuters would
Post a Comment
Read more

Singapore radio personality in "hot soup" for reporting train delays based on Tweets?

Update - Hossan Leong has commented on this post to say " I'm not in trouble pls don't blow this out of proportion. Let it rest. It's getting silly. Thank you for your love and concern and I apologize for any misunderstanding." ~  Hossan Leong. Hossan Leong, a Singapore radio personality for The Gold Breakfast Show on Gold 90.5, was censured today for reporting on train delays on the Circle Line because he based the information on Tweets, rather than waiting for the official reports from the Circle Line operator, SMRT.  It is, however, unknown if the "warning" came from Mediacorp producers or SMRT. Tweeted Hossan Leong ,  OK...I reported it on air and now I'm getting into trouble for it?? The CC line is DOWN rite? I did nothing wrong rite? The SMRT Circle Line was reported to be down this morning during peak hours and started as early as 7am. However, local news only received official statement was received by the mainstream media at about 9
14 comments
Read more