A select group of telephone sales professionals have got together on LinkedIn and agreed to investigate the sound of a sales call in order to identify the optimum "sound of success".
We are hoping to find the sound that makes receiving a sales call an enjoyable experience and the process profitable for the caller.
Three pioneers have left a voice message on 01425 240 050 stating the following three phrases and the results can be seen in the diagrams embedded in future posts below...
1. Will you people please stop walking on the grass.
2. We must do this before we start doing that.
3. I am very excited about our trip to the seaside...
I have analysed the results to the best of my ability and think you will be excited by my conclusions but before you make your own conclusions, I would like you to know the background to my proposals.
I have been making sales calls happily and profitably for 23 years. There is nothing I enjoy more than a cold sales call. Engaging with another's emotional well being and identifying what they really want, often well before they have ever done it themselves is a unique joy. As far as I am aware, it's like giving birth, without the pain, so you would be right in thinking that I have found my dream job except on the occasions that I tell others what I do. Picture the scene in a pub on a Friday on Saturday night. There is always a point when couples and groups say hello and swop notes and it doesn't take long for someone to ask me what I do. I could of course make up a story about being a doctor or oil rig diver, impress my fellow revellers and avoid the problem but I am on a mission to prove to the world that telephone sales can be a beautiful thing and I wouldn't have become the man I am today if I hadn't experienced the following reaction a hundred times. "Oh you're one of them" they say, "one of your lot called me last week/month/year. I had the dinner in the oven, Coronation Street on the telly and baby in the bath and this idiot wouldn't take no for an answer". Unusually, in our "profession", we are unable to stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us but I just see this as a fabulous opportunity to really make a difference. Our assult on the public cannot continue but fortunately a new breed of telephone sales sales consultant is emerging. Men and women who care for the interaction between buyer and seller more than they care for the money. We are wise enough to recognise that making sales calls enjoyable, manageable and sustainable is the best way to generate loyal customers who spend more and do it regularly and the bonus will be that I may be able to hold my head up high in the pub next time.
In the 1950's Eric Berne developed his theory of Transactional Analysis which is everything to human communication and the starting point for our investigation into the sound of success. Essentially, he defined that we have three ego states which I am going to call "attitudes to each other". Once you recognise this, you will find yourself constantly entertained by other people at work, socially and even at home, Transactional Analysis is all around us. The theory advocates that sentences in their raw verbal form are "transactions" and these can either be "accepted" or "crossed". You will recognise the former (a series of accepted transactions) as a "conversation" and the latter as an "argument".
While I am oversimplifying things, we may as well categorise potential customers' requirements as either "patent" which are recognised needs or "latent" which are as yet unrecognised.
You can have a simple conversation comprising accepted transactions with the former and still make the sale but you have to "cross" the transaction at least once if you are to have any chance of making the sale with the latter. Crossing the transaction is achieved by changing ego states but the danger is that when you do this, you start an argument so you have to be prepared to change back to your original ego state or you may be responsible for an "aggressive sales call". If, however, your cross is accepted, you will have made a sale to a customer with latent demand.
Enough of that for now. What I have been working on recently is how these ego states are represented on the phone, what do they sound like?
Eric Berne describes the ego states as Parent, Adult and Child and after a great deal of research during my workshops, we have defined these states as sounding Directive, Logical and Passionate respectively.
These sounds can be further defined in the following four ways...
1. In her book, Body Language at Work, Mary Hartley refers to pace, tone and timing, recognising that the average pace of a conversation is 125 words per minute and on analysis of hundreds of sales calls it is clear that a Directive sound is slower and a Passionate sound is faster.
2. Tone can be compared to the cadence of music. Cadence is labeled as more or less strong or weak, depending on the sense of finality it creates so that Directive has a low tone, Logical has a flat tone and Passionate has a high tone.
3. The famous iambic pentameter describes a particular rhythm and through testing we have established that Directive has irregular timing, Logical has regular timing and Passionate has rapid timing.
As an aside, just to lighten the mood for a minute, D. H. Lawrence points out that a "living rhythm can only be achieved when the artist resists the temptation to maintain a distance between himself and the material" and in effect he is saying that good telephone sales consultants have a natural ability to connect with potential customers but if we can define the science in what we do and I'd say we are close to doing that, we can help others make great sales calls too. Accordingly, I have been testing pace, tone and timing during sales calls but something was missing which brings us to the final point.
4. In his novel, The Return of The Native, Thomas Hardy says that "reticence represents a consciousness of superior communicative power". Wow, that really made me think. What he is saying is that if you distance yourself from your subject, the listener will more readily accept what you say and this distance is represented by an up or down turn at the end of a sentence similar to piano or forte in music. I call this attonation.
So finally, here we are, ready to analyse our brave participants statements. The outcome will be a categorisation of them as a sales call (ice) Breaker, Closer or Opener.
A Breaker will easily get what he/she wants from the call to a potential customer with patent demand which typically amounts to 10% of any target market but may struggle to identify what the potential customer actually wants and therefore miss out on that other 30% of latent demand.
A Closer is what he/she sounds like. They have no trouble crossing the transaction and closing the sale but may struggle to engage with the potential customer and build rapport unless they are working in very logical environments like IT or finance.
The opener will comfortably talk to anyone about anything and is commonly found using Audience Specific Language in telephone sales. The downside is that they are often unwilling to cross a transaction and close the sale.
In truth, we are all a combination of these three categories and you will see what strengths each of our participants have in a percentage measure which may define a clear "default emotional state" or more likely a complex "emotional personality" that can be refined to achieve the "sound of success".
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