1f62

You’re probably a lot more effective over the phone than you think you are.

And potentially, you’re great, even if your voice is a little raspy or you don’t sound like one of the mellow DJ’s on a jazz station.

The challenge is to get enough experience under your belt so you can teach yourself how to excel.

I’ve received some great training in telephone effectiveness and telemarketing, and it has helped me. But I’ve made the greatest gains by letting my instincts guide me to success.

For example, I promoted my seminars, consulting, and speeches through a number of universities. And before I called them, I knew, having been a professor, most of them wouldn’t respond well to conventional sales calls.

So, I asked myself, “What text, and tone, and timing should I use with them?”

My answer: Less than you’re used to using!

In other words, I decided trying to sell them through a one-way tele-speech would fail. They needed to feel they were buying and not being sold.

THEY NEEDED TO SPEAK.

They’re used to instructing and holding forth, so let them!

This led me to create a very brief introduction of myself and my seminars and that was followed by a broad and somewhat modest question:

“How would we pursue the prospect of offering these courses through your university?”

I’ll leave it to you to reverse-engineer this question to understand why it worked so well for me.

For now, please take this insight away with you. Phone calls are begging for original treatment, for scripts that sound unscripted, for new strategies, and you’re capable of devising them.