The Expert Podcast

Are you a true closer sales person? Are you a business that has or wants to have actual closers as salespeople on their sales department? Are you a manager, sales manager, that wants closers to be talking to your customers and not just clerks or product information specialists?

So let's talk about cold calling. Cold calling is a very common activity given to salespeople to contact prospective customers to try to get them to buy something. As a business, we recommend to never do cold calling ever in the long run.

The probability that that's going to have a net positive effect on sales is probably negative. Here's why: if you have good closer sales people that know how to close a deal and you have them talking to people that have not expressed any interest in the product, you're wasting valuable talent on non-buyers. These are not people that express interest in buyers. The best sales person in the world is not going to get most of them to buy something. There's an old saying, “You can sell ice to an Eskimo.” Not true.

It's a cliché. You're not going to get a good sales person to close the majority. Every once in a while you'll get a sales person that will magically get a non-buyer turned into a buyer. What you want a sales person to do is to get a buyer to actually buy. Because even though somebody's a buyer, there's a lot of hesitancy in sales—there's resistance, there's objections, there's complaints, there's a natural aversion to buying something. People have buyer's remorse even before they buy. That's what a good sales person does.

They identify the need, they identify the hot buttons of the client, and they put together a deal for you as a company in a positive way. We're not talking about high pressure. We're not talking about manipulation. We're not talking about something where people are being defrauded. We're talking about true sales people selling a valuable product or service and connecting a buyer with a need with a product that they may not know all the details about—and they may have some hesitancy, objections. That's what a sales person does—a good salesperson, a closer—and gets them across the finish line.

That's why they're called a closer. Most customers get almost to the point of sale by themselves. There's an old saying that, you know, a dog with a note in his mouth could close that deal. Well, not really—but a dog with a note in his mouth can get you to the three-yard line. The closer gets them across the three-yard line. But that's the hardest part.

If you throw closers against cold call customers, not only are you wasting their time when they could be talking to actual buyers, but you're eroding their sales skills. It's like taking a scalpel—very sharp knife—and trying to cut a brick. You're just going to dull the knife, and that sales person is going to become demoralized. They're not going to believe in themselves. Those repeated objections and rejections are going to just make them not have the confidence that it takes to be in sales because it's difficult. You hear “no” a lot.

Even in a high closing sales environment where you're closing 20%, 25%, maybe 30%—that's a high closing ratio—you still are rejected 7 out of 10 times, 8 out of 10 times. And that could be demoralizing. If you make it to where you're rejected 99 out of 100 times, you're just going to be demoralized.

So what about the strategy of saying, “Well, we're going to take our new sales people, our rookies, our newbies, our greenpeaces, and we're going to put them on the cold calls”? Well, you know, there is some argument to be made of having a new salesperson get familiar with rejection and conversation and that kind of thing. But don't make it permanent because they will never learn the thrill of actually making sales. They will never learn what it takes to make a sale. They're going to think that everything they do is a failure.

That's a lazy way of sales training. You don't want to just have rookie sales people talk to non-buyers and think they're going to learn how to sell. If you don't have a trainer or somebody that knows or wants to train sales people, then don't bother hiring them and just talking to non-buyers.

Develop a true sales training system or hire an outside training company—an outside training consultant—to train your sales people. You're better off doing that than having them spend all day talking to non-buyers and getting hung up on and yelled at and swore at. It's not going to make them a better sales person—just going to make them miserable and hate their job and hate you.

Cold calls are worthless. Now, by cold call I mean just calling somebody out of the blue cold, that never inquired, never has an interest in your product. That's a cold call. There's no reason to do that.

However, if you have somebody who has inquired but maybe isn't a hot buyer, that's a different story. Now you can have a sales process that entertains that. But don't confuse marketing with selling.

Marketing is having somebody become familiar with your product and learn about your product and be exposed to the availability of your product. That's marketing—sometimes called advertising. There's a progression from advertising to marketing to sales.

Advertising is just getting your name out there. A billboard could be advertising. A newspaper ad could be advertising. A Facebook ad could be advertising. Marketing is when you start to describe your product, and it doesn't have to be done one-on-one with a person. Usually it's better off to be done maybe with a website, maybe with videos, maybe with brochures—a little bit more detailed.

Once a person is beyond advertising and marketing, now you can put them in a sales process. What you don't want to do is have somebody who's a good salesperson—a closer—have them do your marketing for you. Marketing should be almost automated. It should be done with YouTube videos. It should be done with webinars. If you want to do it in person, do webinars. Do Zoom calls with marketing.

If your sales person is doing too much marketing, again, it's going to erode their sales ability. Now granted, some of the sales process is a little bit of remarketing. But if your salesperson talks to a customer—let's say for 15 minutes—maybe three or four minutes should be marketing. That's different than product presentation. Product presentation is important.

But if the customer isn't even aware of the product, doesn't know what you're buying, don't force a good sales person to become your marketing or advertising person. That just means you don't have a good marketing message yet, good marketing system. You don't have a content machine that's making product information available to your potential buyers.

Because you want the person educated first about your product before the sales person goes for the conversion to a sale—goes for the transaction. You don't want them being a walking, talking brochure. Because that's an expensive brochure.

How much are you paying your sales people? If they're any good, they should be making six figures plus. If they're good—and if they're that good, you know, six figures—that's a lot of money, right? That's $50–$60 an hour. If you're paying somebody $50–$60 an hour to talk to prospects, you're spending—if they talk to a prospect for half an hour—that's not valuable. You just threw out $25 out the window. $30 for a walking brochure.

You want your sales people talking to people who are buyers or potential buyers or high probability buyers. You don't want them reciting product information for a half an hour that cost you thirty dollars. You could send that customer a cheap Android tablet with all the information on it as a gift for thirty dollars. That would give the same info and probably have better effect because now the prospect can listen to it at their own convenience. They're not roped into a corner with trying to get off the phone with that sales person.

So first of all, get your good sales people off cold calls—really get everybody off cold calls. If somebody calls in, that's not a cold call—that's somebody who's inquiring. That's an inquiry. Now it may be a marketing inquiry or a sales inquiry. That's up to you to decide which one it is.

You want to assume it's a sales inquiry. If it needs a little bit of marketing, maybe you have a marketing person first talk to the customer to give them some information. As soon as there's any buying signals—"What's the price?", "How long does it take?", "What's in it for me?"—now it goes to a salesperson.

And maybe those first-line marketing people can become salespeople. Maybe they're being trained. But again, don't confuse marketing to non-buyers or inquiries with sales training. Because they're not going to learn by themselves—they're going to learn from an expert. Maybe it's a good salesperson in your company that trains them.

And again, training is different than management. Managing sales people is an important process: keeping them organized, focused, motivated. That's different than training them. Maybe the same person trains and manages, but they're two different skills.

There are some great managers who know how to manage processes, manage people, but are terrible at training. And vice versa—there are people that are really good at training sales people but don't know how to manage a group of people, keeping them organized.

Neither skill is better or worse. It doesn't make you a bad person if you're not good at management and you are good at training. But just make sure you're defining the two.

And newsflash—your top sales person isn't necessarily your best trainer. Your top sales person is probably not your best manager. They have a skill—creative skill with customers. They may not be able to manage things like schedules and motivation, that kind of thing, with sales people. They can maybe train them—but manage that process to manage the training.

And don't confuse those three things: marketing, cold calling, management, training. They're all different things. A lot of times they're grouped together.

Talked to a colleague a few weeks ago who is a good salesperson in a company. He's a younger guy, up and coming, and he was working for a company that he really liked. And he was a good salesperson in that company. And every day in the afternoon, early afternoon, the boss, so to speak—his boss—would tell him, “Look, you're in charge. The other two sales people—they answer to you. You're in charge of the sales department. We're doing this to kind of groom you to be a manager someday. We want you to come up through the ranks, get a promotion, and be a manager. So here's the keys to the place, you're in charge, everybody reports to you, we're out of here.” And the manager and the general manager would leave.

And he was thinking that's a good thing. But after some period of time—a few weeks, few months—he realized this hasn't helped me any. It's not training me to be a manager. It's just forcing me into that position without any instruction. It's like telling somebody they're going to be a pilot, just giving them the keys to the plane and saying “Go fly. Learn how to fly.” You're going to crash and probably kill yourself.

So that forced management thing wasn't really—once the person realized—it was appreciated at first: “I'm getting authority, I'm getting privileged, they like me, you know, I'm boosting up my ego.” But in reality they realized: “I'm not learning anything. I'm not any better as a manager today as I was two months ago.”

And it got even worse. Because once they realized what was really behind it—why would they do this? It's because they were too lazy to train. And they really just wanted to leave, to go to lunch for an hour too. And nobody was ever putting time and effort into them to train.

At first it seemed like an ego thing, like “I get to be the boss,” but then it's like nobody even really cares about me. Nobody really cares about my personal development.

So as a manager of a company that has sales—which is every company has sales—make sure that you're caring about the development of people who are selling for you. Because that's a valuable thing. Nothing happens in your company until the sale is made. You don't have any revenue until a sale is made. And that you're truly looking at those different elements: marketing, training, management—and don't...