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Thoughts on Rapport, Cold Calling & John Madden

Posted by Matt Bertuzzi on Thu, Feb 04, 2010 @ 08:52 AM
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The other day I was listening to an interview on selling blunders that Mike Schultz from RainToday, had with Dan Seidman, sales coach and author of Sales Autopsy.

Dan shared a truly horrific sales story, which I've transcribed:
 

Rick is a Field Rep for a printing services company. For 6 months, he's been tracking the President of a target firm to get a meeting. He finally gets the appointment and is let into his office. The office is so impressively decorated that Rick admits to being pretty intimidated.

Remembering that early on in his selling career, Rick was taught how to build rapport by looking around the room for the fishing picture or golf trophy. So Rick glances around the office, sees a picture on the gentleman's desk and says "Wow, a photo of you and John Madden with your arms around each other. That's a fantastic photo! How did you get a picture with John Madden, of course a NFL great."

The President of the company glares back at him and says "That's not John Madden, that's my wife."


 Wow. Thankfully in Inside Sales, we're spared from making that same atrocious (and fatal) slip-up.

But that doesn't mean that we in Inside Sales should not focus on building rapport the new-fashioned way. More often than not, with information that's publically available on the internet, we can learn 10x more about a prospect than we could from a quick glance around their office.

So why shouldn't rapport involve:

  • Doing some research
    Think 2-3 minutes on LinkedIn, Google, etc.

  • Being prepared
    Being ableto speak to shared connections and recent company news
     
  • Demonstrating that I'm a seller who won't waste your time
    I'm prepared to speak plainly. Maybe we're a fit, maybe not. Here's what I think I know about you and your company. Let's get to a go/no-go on qualification quickly and directly.

Nigel Edelshain shared an excellent example of the Inside Sales slip-up in his Sales 2.0 Vendor Cold Call that Sucked!. Here's an excerpt:

It kills me that this company actually has a pretty good tool that is VERY close to my social calling methodology and yet this sales person called me without any indication that they even looked at my LinkedIn profile. Their tool analyzes LinkedIn profiles! Killer. I'm actually shocked and I've seen plenty of sales mistakes.

...
This call may be the killer illustration of the fact that tools and technology are useless if people don't use them effectively -or don't use them at all! Here we have a (supposed) leader in the Sales 2.0 space letting their sales people call prospects without even using their own tools. If this sales person had used one ounce of the information available to them through their own tool this would have been a warm call. They turned any easy call into a stone cold call.


Nigel's point is spot on. In the comments on his post, Krista Moon makes the point that Sales people cannot be expected to both do the leg work of pre-call planning and hit the activity metrics defined by Senior Management.

Sales people are pressured to contact too many accounts, and they don't have the time to actually do it right, no matter what tools are available. The whole way "sales" is set up and the job sales people are expected to do is the same as it has always been, but the process has totally changed. Seems to be a disconnect there.

I would argue that meaningful conversations is the metric. Banging through a list with vanilla messaging, unaware of the business issues, interests and other unique buyer persona qualities of the recipient is a waste of resource (for the vast majority of sales organizations). The trick is finding the right balance between pre-call planning and activity that makes the process repeatable and scalable.

Would you agree?

(Photo credit: Ed Bierman)

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COMMENTS

Matt, 
 
Great post here, and you're totally right regarding THE metric. Meaningful conversations, quality conversations, are the metric that should be tracked first and foremost, certainly not number of dials. 
 
So, if the trick is , "finding the right balance between pre-call planning and activity that makes the process repeatable and scalable," what is your suggestion to get to that end? Determine the number of meaningful conversations per day that you want to hit, and then work back from there? Meaning, if you want to hit 15 per day, you need to make "x" number of calls while being able to spend "y" number of minutes pre-call planning. I know that sounds simplistic, but I'm curious as to what you think? 
 
Thanks, 
 
Chris

posted @ Thursday, February 04, 2010 9:46 AM by Chris Snell

Matt, 
 
Great post. I almost did not notice I was mentioned as I was so stuck on the John Madden story for several seconds. Ouch! 
 
Chris, 
 
Great question. In the end time management is maybe the most important sales skill in my opinion.  
 
Coincidentally, I just wrote a new blog post today based on some data from Joanne Black and David Nour that suggests combining a referral with some pre-call planning (on a platform like LinkedIn for example) is 117 times more efficient than volume cold calling. 
 
Now 117 is a huge multiple so my instinct is you can spend quite a bit of TIME preparing for one laser-focused call instead of doing those 116 unprepared cold calls. 
 
I don't have precise data for you on time comparison (yet, I think it's something we should do) but that's my first thought. 
 
What prep could one do in the time you would otherwise be making 116 smile-and-dial cold calls? A bit I think. 
 
Nigel

posted @ Thursday, February 04, 2010 12:23 PM by Nigel Edelshain

@nigel thanks for the data point 
 
@chris it's "the trick" for a reason - it is tricky. In mind math geek / marketer's mind, I would argue for a track/compare/optimize approach.  
 
#1 we have to tracking both "conversations" & "conversation results" (eg no interest, referral/shunt, next step, etc.) 
 
#2 do we have a point of comparison? is 1 of my Reps massively out dialing another (who does a little more pre-call planning) 
 
#3 once we find out which Rep is having more "positive" conversation results (in my words meaningful conversations), let's look for incremental improvement. How does adding an extra step, say linkedin / google news research impact the process? Positively? Negatively? Not at all? 
 
Just my quick thoughts. 
-Matt

posted @ Thursday, February 04, 2010 2:30 PM by Matt

Great post Matt, 
I remember reading that John Madden story before. It is a classic! Nigel, great points. Having an internal referral and a triggering event is magic. On the topic of pre-call planning and rapport, I would say that it does not end once you have set that first appointment. If we really are trying to cover too many bases and don't always have time to do our homework, we need to continually be adding value during the sales process. A little goes a long way. There really is no excuse with all the information readily available on the web. Sign up for Google alerts, visit their press releases, read the industry blogs, hell just pick up a newspaper! etc. Nothing better than pinging a prospect and congratulating them on their quote in the new york times as a way to wake up an opportunity or just build rapport.... 
If any of you are interested in a very systematic approach to pre-call planning that helps provide a re-usable framework and leverages software, check outwww.precallpro.com! 
Happy Hunting! 
-Brian

posted @ Friday, February 05, 2010 7:01 AM by Brian Karbel

Nigel, Matt - thanks for getting back to me! Appreciate the responses! 
 
Chris

posted @ Thursday, February 11, 2010 3:34 PM by Chris Snell

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