When I signed up to be in Direct Sales 18 years ago, I never imagined how HARD it would be for me to pick up the phone and call people. Especially since the 16 year old me LOVED to talk on the phone until all hours of the night. But suddenly, I was an independent consultant, trying to build my own business, and I was petrified! Have you ever felt like that? Felt like the phone weighed 50 pounds?
5 Tips to Making Phone Calls Easier
- Get over your fear that your customers don’t want to talk to you. Easier said than done, right? But remember, your customers WANT to talk to you because they WANT to feel important to you. They want to feel like their purchase meant something to you. So come from a place of service, and make them feel like they are your MOST important customer.
- Make a List & Prioritize! Every company I have worked with has used some form of a FRANK list to help their sales people brainstorm names of people to call. FRANK or FRANC stands for:
F=Friends
R=Relatives
A=Acquaintances
N=Neighbors
K=Kids or C=Church/Community
Make a list with 5 people in each category. Put a star next to the person in each category that you are closest with and START your calls with those people first. Calling your closest friends first warms you up to make the harder, “colder” calls later.
- Write 2 scripts: 1 for your introduction line and 1 for what you’ll say when you get someone’s voicemail. Just writing it down will help you practice the call, figure out what you want to say, and will give you the WORDS you want to use. Best to have it written in front of you in case you freeze up when they answer and your mind goes blank.
- Have an outcome for the call. If you don’t know what you want to get from the call, you might as well not make it all! You aren’t just calling because you are bored or lonely…you’re usually calling to get a sale, book a party, offer the business opportunity, invite them to an event, etc.. Instead of blasting them with that first, it’s best to ease into it. Here’s the format I like to use for calls:
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- Checking in on your last purchase. Did it arrive ok? Are you using it? Do you love it?
- Is it time to reorder… or is there an add-on item that goes with their last purchase?
- There’s a special I think you’d love… or I have an event coming up that I wanted to invite you to. This is a SERVICE, SERVICE, SALE format. I’m not calling to sell them something right off the bat. Most customers want to know you care about their LAST purchase before they’ll buy again.
- Smile when you make the call. If you were talking to someone face to face you’d be smiling, right? Try making the call in front of a mirror and smiling at yourself. Your energy will increase and the person on the other end of the phone will FEEL it, putting them in a frame of mind where they’re more open to your suggestions.
Great job! Now, your phone is lighter and you’re ready to make 10 calls a day. So how are you going to keep track of all your conversations and next steps? You can use a spreadsheet in Excel and make columns for Name, Phone number, Date of call, Outcome, etc. I know some people who write notes in a physical notebook. I have stacks of spiral notebooks at work with notes on all the calls I have made. But as you become more successful with more customers, these methods become harder and more cumbersome to use.
What if you had a system that could TELL you when it was time to call your customer again. A system that allowed you to write notes and set a reminder to mail out a new catalog in 2 months or to call them back in a couple weeks when they are back from vacation. Guess what? We’ve already created it for you.
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