Many business owners and entrepreneurs find sales calls daunting. The thought of picking up the phone and selling their services is enough for some to not do it. In this episode, Samantha and Tim share their thoughts on how to handle nervousness before sales calls.
If you don’t feel comfortable being in a sales conversation, you are not alone. However, you can overcome this by being confident in every call that you make. And the way for you to develop confidence is through practice.
Getting on numerous sales calls allows you to review and recognize the areas you need to work on, which means your sales skills will improve over time.
Samantha and Tim discuss the framework behind successful sales calls so you can conquer your fears, and begin to love the sales process.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- The need to separate your personal fear of rejection from business transactions (03:52)
- Three reasons people get nervous on sales calls (04:25)
- The importance of dialling in who you’ve helped and what you achieved (04:33)
- The negative effects of having too many offers (05:55)
- Why pre-qualification prior to the call is so important (06:40)
- The dangers of acting from a place of desperation (08:10)
- Symptoms of not having a sales call framework (10:45)
- Sam and Tim’s advice for people who get nervous on sales calls (17:50)
QUOTES:
- “When we come from that place of service, sales calls become an opportunity to help people.” -Tim Hyde
- “Not every single person is going to say yes to your products or programs but if you don’t sell, you’re going to have zero clients.” -Samantha Riley
RESOURCES MENTIONED
SHOW SPONSOR
This episode is sponsored by Your Podcast Concierge. Affordable podcast production for coaches and speakers who want to increase their authority and generate leads from their show. You press record, and let them do the rest.
SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW THE INFLUENCE BY DESIGN PODCAST
Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Influence By Design podcast. If the information in any of our conversations and interviews have helped you in your business journey, please head over to Apple Podcasts, click the 3 dots in the top right corner of your smartphone screen, follow the show, and leave us an honest review. Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver valuable content, but it will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you!
BOOK A BUSINESS ACCELERATOR CALL
If you’re a coach who wants to create consistent monthly recurring revenue and scale your business, book a quick 15-minute Accelerator Call.
We’ll work together to identify:
- Your current situation and immediate opportunities for growth
- Uncover the #1 thing holding you and your business back from scaling
- Develop a 3-step implementation plan
Click Here to book your no-charge Accelerator Call.
WHERE TO FIND TIM HYDE
- Website: https://winmoreclients.com.au/
- Facebook: Win More Clients
- LinkedIn: Tim Hyde
CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY
- Facebook: Samantha Riley
- Instagram: @thesamriley
- LinkedIn: Samantha Riley
- Twitter: @thesamriley
TRANSCRIPTION
Tim Hyde Snippet (00:00):
There’s no substitute for a live sales call with someone you don’t know. But how do you overcome nervousness you overcome nervousness by being confident, and confidence comes from practice.
Samantha Riley Snippet (00:13):
The more you can practice, the more people you can get on sales calls, and the more that of that excitement you’ll have in your business.
Intro (00:22):
My name is Samantha Riley, and this is the podcast for coaches, course creators, and experts who want to grow their influence, income, and impact to take their coaching business to a million dollars and beyond. We’re going to share the latest business growth, marketing, and leadership strategies, as well as discuss how you can use your human design to create success in business and life. Inside and out. Create the influence, income and impact you need to build your business so you can create your ideal lifestyle. It’s time to make a difference and scale-up. This is the Influence By Design podcast.
Samantha (00:59):
Welcome to today’s episode of influence by design. I’m your Thursday co-host Samantha Riley joined as always by my friend in crime. That actually sounds wrong, because we’re talking about sales today. With my good friend, Tim Hyde, how are you today Tim?
Tim (01:15):
I was like, wow, it’s kind of
Samantha (01:20):
Wrong metaphor. Well, I said it because my sister always used to say, oh, you know, we’re going out Friday night, you want to be my partner in crime. And that generally meant we were going to have a good time. So that’s where I was going with this.
Tim (01:35):
Not super appropriate for today’s lesson on how to overcome nerves or any sales. We are not going to teach you how to rip off your customers. That’s a lesson for another day.
Samantha (01:50):
No, but we are going to have fun. We are going to have fun. I think this is a fun topic. I like sales. And I even pose that people that say they don’t like sales. We were just chatting before Tim, that I don’t I’ve never met anyone that’s got off a sales call where they’ve made a sale and gone. I hate sales calls.
Tim (02:10):
Like that’s what you love it.
Samantha (02:11):
That’s the best time we’re like, yes, I made a sale. That’s so good. So hopefully.
Tim (02:18):
I have some way where it doesn’t fall over there at the moment, because I’m redoing my office, but I haven’t gone right, whenever we get a sales to call in a week or sell across one, bang, the gong going, I’m gonna do it right now.
Just for the pleasure, just because this is a nice auditory thing. Here we go. Here’s the sales Gong. Nice deep resonance. Nice bit of celebration. There we go. And we do like sound effects on our podcast at least. And we should put more in applause button wherever the applause button is.
Samantha (02:50):
It’s actually in the cards. But today, we’re going to talk about how to handle nervousness before sales calls.
Tim (02:55):
Yeah, look, it’s I think that lots of people have an issue with and particularly if you’ve never been in a sales role before, and you’re sort of transitioning into business. You’re the guy, right? Or the girl, as the case may be right? You’re the person who wears the sales hat.
And this is the oxygen now everything else can go absolutely, I think everything else can go largely pear-shaped. And you’ve got to at least you’ve got a business, albeit not a very effective one. If you cannot make sales, however, you don’t have a business at all.
You’ve got the most effective non-starter, and we absolutely need to overcome sales, you know, this sale this fear of sales in this fear of asking clients for money. Yeah, I mean, I quicker we can do that, the better.
Samantha (03:45):
100%, most of us, you know, a lot of us have got a fear of rejection, all of these kinds of things. However, we really need to separate our personal fear of rejection, and bringing in people into our programs or into our business because they’re two different things.
Not every single person is going to say yes to our product or program. But if we don’t have sales calls, we’re going to get zero people. Yeah, we’re going to get zero customer zero clients.
Tim (04:18):
And look 100% you know people are going to miss out on the genius you bring to the world.
Samantha (04:22):
So let’s talk about the three things that we have sort of pulled out of why people get nervous on sales calls. And number one is people getting nervous on calls because they really haven’t dialled in who they’re talking to or who their ideal client is, and the promise that they help them or the know, the promise of the outcome that they help them achieve.
Tim (04:48):
Yeah, I think this is really interesting one, and it comes back to that real sort of sense of confidence that you’re the person you’re talking to. You can get them the outcome I think anytime you’re talking to someone new, yet I can, I can do this for you, I hope.
And that can really convey, right, because it comes back to that self-confidence about what it is that you can do. And if you haven’t really dialled in, yet, the who and what you achieve for you know, for them, absolutely, it’s going to project through your tone of voice, it’s going to project through your, your ability and confidence and whether you can actually get this person the outcome that you’re telling them that you can create for them.
And I think it’s really important to make sure that we, you know, we constantly come back and dial in, you know, who and then do who we work with, and then what it is that we do for them.
Samantha (05:45):
The other thing I see, that’s just a slight play on this is having too many offers, and having someone on the call and not knowing where to point them towards. And I know we’ve talked about simplifying our offers on a previous episode, and we’ll link that up in the show notes. But when we’ve got too many offerings, it can be very difficult to decide where to put someone say having a very simple, we only offer this one thing, or these two things that are very different, makes it a lot easier to understand how to make that sale.
Tim (06:20):
Yeah. And again, it comes back to what am I presenting to you, because I don’t really know where you fit. So here’s the thing, right. And if you get that, if you can really narrow that down to the one thing and you can make a very successful business out of like just one thing, as we’ve spoken about before, it becomes very easy to understand whether this is the right person and what you can do for them.
I think some of the other areas here that we can get some quick wins and really dial in is around a pre qualification for the call. Right? So, you know, before someone comes to call, have them fill out a form that says what are you hoping to get from the call? And where are you at right now?
It’s a very simple instructional thing. I actually think doing this has other benefits as well. Because if you’re going into a situation where you’re providing instruction to a client, for them to do something, it’s a really good, I think litmus test. Yeah, to see whether someone can follow instructions. And if they can’t fill out a simple form, you know, upfront, then maybe they’re not going to do other things that you need them to do later on.
Samantha (07:25):
Yeah. Is this someone that I actually want to work with? Is this person easy to work with? So I really like filling out a form. So I think that being very clear on who it is that you’re speaking to, what is the promise that you are promising? What is the promise of the outcome that you’re talking about? And making sure that it’s nice and clear? Or with? You know, where you’re sending them? And are they actually the right person to be on the call in the first place? Yeah. So I really liked that the filling out a form making sure that you get the right, who on the call in the first place?
Tim (07:59):
Yeah, it’s all part of that pre complication, whether it’s a formal writer, you know, someone else who calls him out five minutes and says, Hey, looking forward to chatting with you later in the week, what do you want to cover sort of stuff. I think that’s the second place to people should really look at to overcome nervousness before sales calls, is coming from probably coming from a place of desperation, thinking I need the client, as opposed to I want the client.
And when you do that, when you come from, oh, my God, I need to get a sale. Otherwise, things are going to go really badly. You tend to act from this place of desperation, and start to make it sort of all of that you get into this convincing mode of selling, which starts to bludgeon the person into going like you must buy from me, that’s why for me, it’s very uncomfortable for them. And you potentially start taking people on that aren’t really the right fit for you.
And I know, Sam, we’ve often spoken about marketing and having your marketing on full bore all the time, so that you’re constantly having opportunities. But it really comes back to like reframing this idea of a sales call to not be about sales, but to be about are we a good fit together.
Samantha (09:13):
I love this idea of you know, even renaming it so that we’re coming from a different place. So instead of saying, we’re getting on a sales call, which in our mind, as the person that’s, you know, that’s facilitating that call thinking, oh, I need to make the money, turning it into a right fit call because this comes from a place of service just to see, are we right fit together to work together?
You know, are we aligned our values aligned? Can I actually help you or are you actually better off working with someone else should I be referring you to someone else? And I think that this takes away that desperation, the changes the energy, you were talking about the desperation that blocks energy, and even though we can’t necessarily put our finger on what’s going wrong, we just have this feeling that something’s a little off. And that never ends well.
Tim (10:05):
Yeah, absolutely. Again, this right fit call. It works both ways, right? You know, not every client is the right client for you. And it’s okay to say no to a client to say, hey, I don’t think we’re the right fit, I don’t think that we can get you the outcome that you’re looking for.
And someone else might be better positioned to achieve that goal for you. And that’s, again, that’s coming back to that confidence about being really, really clear and confident in yourself that this is the person that you help achieve that outcome.
Samantha (10:42):
100%. So that’s the second one. And the third one is something that I see as well from people are that they don’t have a sales call process. Now, let us be clear that what we’re not talking about here is following a script, following a very strict script. Because that doesn’t work. It’s not authentic and genuine.
And I know Tim, you had a really funny story that you were sharing with me before we went to air about a sales call that you were on where someone was just reading from a piece of paper wasn’t even listening to the answers.
Tim (11:15):
Well, it was a terrible thing at the time. I’d literally just gone and downloaded Sam ovens, sales script, seven figure sales bitcoin. We got to embellish it nine. So what’s better than a seven-figure sales script? The eight-figure sales script, that I’m going to do that one next time. Okay, that’s, I’m just trademarking that one, by the way, guys. So you can’t take eight-figures. Unless you rename, and oh, my god, maybe the nine-figure sales script. There we go. I’m going to have to come up with that one next.
But it was so it was so regimented. How this lady went for it. And, you know, obviously, she was coming from a really genuine place. But she was going question, question, question, question without really, I guess, having the flexibility to drill into things that clearly needed more discovery.
And there was this obvious pivot point where she’d done with her questions, the transition, the transition, and the transition was so clumsy that she went into this sales pitch. And if you ever seen Wolf of Wall Street, where he gets house, you know, it says Sell me the pain kind of thing was, was one of these moments, where she’s gone very predictably into this as the price of the program. But if you sign up boss, we’re on the call and say yes, now, it will be this price, and blah, blah, blah. And oh, by the way, here’s the value stack that we’re going to add on top of it as well. Now, because I’ve done lots of sales, it was fairly obvious to me to someone else, it may not have been mean very obvious, but it was almost too rigid. Right?
It was very robotic, it’s probably a good description about how she was taking me through this process. And there was nothing about, Hey, are we a good fit together? Right, you know, do we actually like each and think we can actually work together. And so there was all of that missing. And to be honest, when I got on the call, originally, I was not expecting to be pitched to at all so
Samantha (13:17):
Well, that just made it even worse.
Tim (13:19):
I’m like, I want to go through this, because this is just fascinating. And I’m sure I can use this in a podcast episode.
Samantha (13:27):
Ding, ding, here we are.
Tim (13:28):
But this is where I think rather than we really want to sort of be authentic and genuine and almost not follow a regimented script that have almost a framework that allows us to ask questions in a bunch of key areas, right.
So, you know, we’ve got things like, you know, where you’re at right now. And where do you want to be? Because that’s going to tell us where the right fit. You want to go from $6 an hour to 10 million, you know, in the next 30 days. Thanks very much client, but we’re probably not the right fit, probably not the right fit.
Okay. And it’s okay to say no, right. But if we got a yes, absolutely, I can do that. And if you don’t deliver on that promise, you know, you end up with egg on your face. Yeah. So this is where I think having this framework to sort of go, I know I need to So establishing rapport.
I know, I need to ask a budget question. I know, I need to ask a timeframe question. I know I need to ask a question or questions around, hey, who else is involved in making decisions in your, in your business in your organization? If it’s, you know, just you as the business owner, great sometimes, you know, the partner might you know, the significant other might get involved in the decision, and sometimes there’s a board and somebody needs to get on board. Sam, you were just talking about, hey, I don’t do proposals.
I do not do proposals.
Samantha (14:49):
I do not do proposals.
Tim (14:50):
Right. You know, the ones we’ve got that framework, and then we’ve got that I know I need to something, something about next steps and the timeframe and the actions and those sorts of things, it gives us flexibility and in the sales call to kind of jump where we need to jump, and not seem as robotic, and actually, it almost disarms. You know, our prospect, and a little bit because it feels more natural.
Samantha (15:18):
Yeah. And it’s not about disarming them, it’s actually about having a nice casual conversation. That is real. And this is why I say don’t follow a strict script. That’s like a tongue twister, because that is going to make the energy a little weird.
But you still do need to follow that framework to make sure that you’re getting all of the questions in so that you’re able to get to the end of the conversation and know that you’ve taken your prospect through the journey. They’ve got the information they need, you’ve got the information you need, so you’re able to then make a decision between you.
Tim (15:55):
Yeah, and also means if you’ve got that, you know, you collect the all of the information you need on it sounds cool, right? There’s nothing worse. I think, going, absolutely, we can help you achieve that. Now, it looks like it’s a good fit, I think we get along really well together. And then you kind of send over the details. And then like, oh my god, it’s that much money.
Now, if that doesn’t work, right. And that’s why we need to sort of talk about these things. And basically, the right fit is all about sort of drawing out the objections on both sides.
Samantha (16:30):
So really, what we’re trying to do is make sure that we’re having this conversation in authentic and genuine way, making sure that that your prospect feels comfortable around, what it is that you do, how it is that you can serve them, you’re comfortable that you can help them achieve their outcome. And then you’re just taking the next part of the conversation to heck we move forward together.
Tim (16:52):
What is that next logical step? You know, we’ve demonstrated that this this this this this next logical step for you? Is this. Any questions? Absolutely. Yeah, it is coming from that place of service. Right. And we didn’t go into business necessarily just screw people over.
Samantha (17:10):
We didn’t at all go into business to screw people over.
Tim (17:15):
Obviously, right. So I’m sure there’s some people out there that, you know, that’s absolutely their intent. But, you know, we’re genuine, right? We really want to see people succeed, right? Because when they succeed, we succeed. And when we come from that place of service, sales calls become just the opportunity to help people, not, you know, this confrontational thing that you may be maybe causing that nervousness in the first place.
Samantha (17:43):
Absolutely. Tim, what’s one thing that you would like to leave the listeners with in regard to this topic that we’re talking about today around nervousness and sales calls?
Tim (17:55):
Probably two things, I think, is good practice. You know, I guess in any sales calls. And that’s practice and review. There’s no substitute for a live sales call with someone you don’t know. But you know, how do you overcome nervousness, you overcome nervousness by being confident, and confidence comes from practice.
So if you’ve got a partner, a coach, you know that I know there’s sales trainers out there that will do this practice. And they can do this practice with you as well. But find somebody that you can role-play your sales calls with go through the process recorded, and then review it and look back at yourself.
And go, man, I didn’t do that quite right. Or I said the wrong thing there. How can I do that differently that next time, because that practice and review process will make you an absolute master at sales.
Samantha (18:53):
Love it, I could not agree more. And what I want to leave people with today is something that a mentor said to me years and years ago, and he said this for anyone that doesn’t like sales calls. Just think about what happens when you make a sale.
You get your mojo back, you feel excited. So it’s not actually that you don’t like sales calls. In actual fact, all of us love being on a sales call, where we make the sale where we convert our prospect into a client. So the more you can practice, the more people you can get on sales calls, the more that of that excitement you’ll have in your business.
Tim (19:37):
If you really hate and after all of that. outsource it, employ someone else to do it.
Exactly, exactly. But I think it’s really important to lock in, you know, that process that sales process that feels like it’s the right fit, and is authentic and genuine for your business before you do that. Otherwise, you could be bringing in an energy into your business that isn’t quite a fit.
Tim (20:00)
Yeah, I completely agree. Bang the gong to see us out relation. Sales Gong again. That was a very gentle one.
Samantha (20:15):
Ding ding. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, please give us a like, let us know what you enjoyed about this episode, and share it with anyone that you know would get value. And if you are on your app on your phone, please scroll up to the top and hit those three little dots hit the Follow button so that you’re notified every time an episode goes live, which is every Tuesday and every Thursday. Tim, thanks so much for hanging out with me here today.
Tim (20:40):
I really enjoyed tonight’s topic, Sam. So thank you for thanks for suggesting it.
Samantha (20:45):
Such a pleasure. And thank you for listening. We’ll catch you on the flip side next Tuesday for another episode of Influence By Design. Ciao.
Outro (20:50):
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Influence By Design podcast. If you want more, head over to samanthariley.global/podcast for the show notes and links to today’s gifts and sponsors. And if you’re looking to connect with other coaches and experts who are growing and scaling their business to come and join the coaches course creators and speakers group on Facebook, the links are all waiting for you over at samanthariley.global
Leave a Reply