Regardless of what you sell, one of the most important lessons in professional selling and especially cold calling is that not everyone either needs or wants your products or services. For example, take Apple computers. Although there are tens of thousands of customers lining up every day to visit Apple stores and buy Apple phones and computers, there are just as many customers who don’t want to buy Apple. These people would prefer to buy a Samsung phone or something a Hewlett-Packard laptop. The point is that even the most successful computer companies, car companies or even fast-food chains won’t appeal to everyone. This is why you must understand how a sales funnel works and use it to benefit when you are making cold calls.
During our cold calling training, you will learn how a sales funnel works. You will have many people at the top of the sales funnel you will call who we will regard as “suspects”. We call them suspects because we don’t know whether they have any interest in learning about our products and services. We don’t know if they need our products and services, hence the term “suspects”. However, if a suspect expresses an interest and wants to know more about what we do, the “suspect” becomes a “prospect”. From there, as the sales funnel narrows, we convert prospects into buyers.
This concept could be an entire book in itself, and you’ll find plenty of books on Amazon that explained the funnel process. We teach the funnel process in detail during our cold calling training. Suffice to say that when you get on the telephone and start making cold calls even to the right people, not everyone will want to talk to you. Not everyone will want to buy from you. That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with you or your product. That’s why you need to understand your sales ratios, meaning the number of suspects you need to call to end up with prospects and then buyers.