How to Screw Up a Call
How to Screw Up a Call
- Piss off the gatekeeper
- Talk too soft or too loud
- Forget to find out if you got to the right person
- Don’t find out if they can’t possibly talk right now
- Mumble
- Eat while on the phone
- Distracting or embarrassing background sounds
- Blather on about trivial nonsense like sports or the weather
- False ingratiating insincere flattery
- Glad-handing and false cheerfulness
- Overbearing and won’t stop talking
- Using clichés “till the cows come home”
- Ego-driven gratuitous use of technobabble
- Failure to simplify complex topics
- Failure to qualify prospect financially or make payment options available
- Gender, age, racial and other insensitivity, stereotyping, and prejudice
- No research or preparation for call
- Ignorant about product and industry
- Clueless about how business works
- No sales process to follow, instead wings-it
- Easily capitulates to questions allowing prospect to guide conversation
- Too cowardly to ask for an decision
- Won’t shut the X up when the client gives buying signals
- Agrees to “call back tomorrow” while prospect “thinks about it”
- The best way to screw up a call is to sound like a telemarketer – reading a script, monotone robotic voice, no prior research, few meaningful questions, answers not sincerely listened to.