Why Teleprospectors Should Not Take the First NO When Cold Calling?
At times teleprospectors have to face the harsh reality that we will not always be appreciated by those we call throughout the day. I would say that some would view what we do as a slight step above getting a call from a bill collector. As a result we've conditioned ourselves to expect the unexpected. Our experience on the phone can range wildly from a hang-up as we are half-way the first sentence of our introduction, to someone saying we had great timing and they appreciate the call since they are actively evaluating a solution.
I wish I could say that we run into the latter situation regularly, but unfortunately that is not the case. And while it's not a regular occurrence that we get hung up on immediately, the most common response, hands down, that we hear from prospects after our initial pitch is:
"Nope we're not interested. We are all-set in that area but thanks for calling"..and then a dial tone.
Honestly, from our perspective they may as well have hung-up on us right away since we got absolutely nothing out of the call. We understand that not all everyone wants to hear from us but that response gives us no indication why they are not interested.
The question is does your inside team find a response like that acceptable? Do they just mark that account as "not interested" and just move on?
It's unfortunate but from what I've seen many inside reps DO find that acceptable. Why? You've gotten nothing of value out of this prospect to indicate why they view your service offering as something they would not need.
Are they not interested because they recently implemented a competitor? They don't have the budget dollars? They have a homegrown solution? These are the questions you should have answered before you let the prospect off the hook.
So where do we take it from here? I've got a simple answer: Call someone else at the company! Even if you've gotten a C-Level or VP-Level person live and they give you the canned statement above, that is still not good enough. My suggestion would be to call the Director or Manager working below them. With each company you are prospecting into pull in a minimum of at least 3 different contacts at different levels within the organization. Eventually you are bound to hit someone who is willing to share some basic information with you. You may not be looking for a detailed rundown of their IT infrastructure, but just a tid-bit of information to justify why we should just move on.
A positive by-product of calling into multiple contacts, outside of getting a legitimate reason behind a no interest, is you may uncover an active project after all. I can't tell you how many times we've been blown off by a VP only to find someone working in their group that actually does have an active initiative. Let's face it, most high level execs probably tune out during your pitch or you could have just caught them on a bad day where they'll say no to everything. You owe it to yourself to dig around a bit more in these organizations...you might be surprised at what you uncover.