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"I've been talking to my customers" On Friday morning I ran a success huddle with a small inside sales team in the Northeast. Every two weeks we take 30 minutes to answer one question: what's working? The first rep, Brian, said, "I'm making an effort to spend more time speaking with my customers." My first thought was: of course you are. You're in sales. Then he explained. For years he answered almost everything by email. Now, when an email comes in, he asks himself one quest

I heard a phrase recently that made me think about cold calling: “Strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet.” It’s probably a little optimistic. But I like the mindset. Because one of the things that makes prospecting difficult is what happens in our head before we make the call. We imagine rejection. We imagine someone being rude. We imagine interrupting them. We imagine the conversation going badly. And we haven’t even dialed the number yet. What if you approached the

Want to get better at cold calling? Be willing to be bad at it. That’s harder than it sounds. Most of us don’t like doing things we’re not good at. We want the perfect opening. The perfect script. The perfect response to every objection. We want to feel confident before we pick up the phone. But confidence usually comes after you’ve done something a bunch of times. Not before. Think about learning anything. Playing golf. Learning piano. Speaking another language. You’re not v

Here’s a challenge for your next prospecting conversation: Can you keep the prospect talking for 10 minutes? Not by pitching. Not by telling them about your company. Not by explaining why you’re different. By asking questions they’re comfortable answering. That last part matters. Salespeople often ask high-resistance questions too early. “Are you happy with your current supplier?” “Would you consider changing?” “Are you looking for another vendor?” “Can I quote your next proj

Could your discovery go deeper? Could you find out more? One of the biggest problems I see in sales discovery is that sellers ask a good question, get an answer… …and move on. “What’s your biggest challenge right now?” “Finding good people.” “Got it. And what are your goals for the rest of the year?” Wait. Finding good people? There’s an entire conversation sitting inside that answer. How long has that been a problem? What kind of people are hardest to find? What happens when

Salespeople don’t learn from managers they don’t like. That might sound harsh. But think about your own experience. How open are you to feedback from someone you don’t trust? Someone who only talks to you when there’s a problem. Someone who doesn’t seem particularly interested in you. Someone you think is judging you. Probably not very. Now imagine that person saying: “Can I give you some coaching?” Good luck. Before you can coach someone, you need to earn the right to coach

Salespeople hate rejection. But sometimes the prospect didn’t reject you. You invited them to. Think about some of the questions salespeople ask: “Are you happy with your current supplier?” “Yes.” “Do you have any needs right now?” “No.” “Would you be interested in looking at another option?” “Not really.” “Do you have a few minutes to hear about what we do?” “No thanks.” We walk away thinking: They rejected me. But look at the questions. Every one of them made saying no incr

You ask a prospect a question. They pause. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. And your brain starts screaming: SAY SOMETHING. So you do. You rephrase the question. Offer them an answer. Give them a few choices. Or move on completely. But what if they weren’t uncomfortable? What if they were just thinking? We tend to treat silence as a problem. Especially in sales. We feel responsible for keeping the conversation moving. But sometimes silence means you’ve asked a question

Your sales team completed the training. Great. But can they do the skill? That’s a completely different question. A Learning Management System is great at delivering information. Watch the video. Read the material. Answer the questions. Click complete. Now the dashboard says: 100% completion. But completion isn’t behavior change. Imagine learning to play golf that way. Watch a 20-minute video on putting. Answer five questions. Score 80%. Congratulations. You can now putt. Of

The moment a prospect gives you an objection, your instinct is probably to answer it. Don’t. At least not yet. “We’re happy with our current supplier.” “We don’t have the budget.” “Your price is too high.” “We tried something like this before.” Salespeople hear those statements and immediately start constructing a response. We explain. Defend. Reassure. Solve. But an objection is usually the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. Get curious first. “We’re happy with

Prospects tell you where to go in discovery. The problem is, we often don’t notice. Listen for emotional words. Frustrated. Concerned. Excited. Disappointed. Nervous. Overwhelmed. Those words are invitations. I call it double-clicking. A prospect says: “We’ve been pretty frustrated with our current supplier.” A lot of salespeople hear: Current supplier = opportunity. And immediately start selling. “We could definitely help you with that…” Too soon. Double-click the word. “Fru

Most sales teams spend a lot of time talking about results. Revenue. Margin. Pipeline. New accounts. Calls. Appointments. But results are the end of the story. The more useful question is: What behaviors created those results? You can’t actually do revenue. You can’t wake up tomorrow and say: “Today I’m going to do $50,000 in sales.” Revenue is an outcome. So if you want the number to change, what does someone need to do differently? Maybe they need to make five pproactive ca

Sometimes the problem with cold calling isn’t the call. It’s the language. Listen to the way a lot of cold calls begin: “I wanted to introduce myself…” “I’d love to tell you a little about our company…” “We’re a leading provider of…” “I was hoping to get 15 minutes on your calendar…” Every sentence is about the salesperson. I wanted. I’d love. We are. I was hoping. The prospect has been on the phone for 15 seconds and already has a pretty good idea where this is going. So the

Trade shows are full of salespeople asking terrible questions. “So, what brings you to the show?” “Have you heard of us before?” “Can I tell you what we do?” Within seconds, the conversation feels like a sales pitch. Try something different. I teach salespeople a simple Conversation Stack. The idea is to start easy and gradually move deeper. Think of it as four levels. 1. Start with the person “How’s the show been for you?” “Did you travel far to get here?” “What have you see

Ask almost any sales team what they need to do more of and you’ll hear: “Be more proactive.” Prospect more. Reach out to customers before they call us. Look for opportunities. Plan ahead. Develop accounts. Everyone agrees. Then Monday morning arrives. A customer has a problem. There are 37 emails waiting. Someone needs a quote. An order is late. The phone rings. And suddenly it’s 4:30. We didn’t decide not to be proactive. Reactive work simply won. That’s the problem with pro

When we want people to change their behavior, our instinct is often to push harder. More accountability. More reminders. More motivation. More pressure. But sometimes the better question is: How could we make the behavior easier to do? Let’s say you want your salespeople to prospect more. You could tell them: “You need to make more calls.” Or you could look at everything that has to happen before they make one. Who should I call? What should I say? Why would they want to talk

A company gets acquired. The new leadership wants growth. So they tell the sales team: “We need everyone making 30 calls a day.” Makes sense. More activity should create more opportunities. Except there’s a problem. The salespeople weren’t doing 30 calls a day before. Maybe they weren’t doing five. And now, overnight, the expectation is 30. What happens? For a few days, activity goes up. Managers track the numbers. Everyone focuses on the new initiative. Then real life gets i

Imagine a football team saying: “We don’t practice. We just play games.” It would be ridiculous. Yet that’s exactly how a lot of sales teams operate. We teach salespeople a skill. Maybe we show them how to ask better questions. Handle an objection. Open a cold call. Conduct discovery. Then we send them out to try it on a real prospect. The game becomes the practice. And the problem with practicing on prospects is that there’s something at stake. The salesperson doesn’t want t

“I’m just following up…” “I’m just checking in…” “I wanted to circle back…” Salespeople use these phrases every day. And they give the prospect absolutely no reason to respond. Think about it from their side. They open their inbox and see: “Hi John, just checking in to see if you’ve had a chance to review the proposal…” What exactly are they supposed to do with that? You haven’t added anything. You haven’t created any curiosity. You’ve just reminded them that they haven’t res

Think about the last presentation you sat through. How much of it do you actually remember? Probably the beginning. Maybe the end. And a lot less of the middle. I call this The Hammock. Imagine a hammock hanging between two trees. It’s high at both ends and sags in the middle. Our attention often works the same way. At the beginning of a presentation, attention is relatively high. It’s new. We’re curious. We’re wondering where this is going. Then attention starts to drop. We