Episode #74: Do Your Homework When Selling

I take the phone call and I noted they were asking for me in particular, rather than to speak to the boss. That tells me they know who I am, but I don’t recognise the company name when my assistant is transferring the call. I get a blast of words strung together down the phone line which I cannot quite catch. I ask them to tell me the name of their company once more. I still can’t get it, so I request “could you please spell it for me?”. This is when I realise the person calling from their investment sales company is totally mispronouncing the name of their own company. Okay, how about that for a first impression in a sales call!

I explain to the caller, whose name by the way, I never caught either, that she is mispronouncing the company name in English and I model for her how to say it correctly. After we get through the mini-English language class on the phone, we move on to the point of the call. She tells me she saw my profile on LinkedIn and that I am big shot in town, hence the call. My doubts are rising further as we progress with this conversation. She then says the snapper, “You are an American aren’t you”.

I ask her why she thinks I am American? She says she read that in my LinkedIn profile. I tell her that would be an impossible assumption if she had actually read my profile. “Why did you think I was an American from my profile?”. “You went to an American university”, she tells me. Now I realise I am dealing with an idiot.

I challenge her about whether she really did read my profile? She assures me she did and I tell her I am not an American. In my profile it mentions that I did stints at Harvard Business School and Stanford Business School as part of Executive Courses, provided by my previous company. I also studied at Jochi University here in Tokyo, but no one thinks I am Japanese.

It gets worse as the conversation unfolds. I ask her how long she has been in sales and she says a year. I ask if she has ever had any sales training and she says she has had some. I ask who trained her? She can’t deal with this line of questioning and I can hear the panic starting to build. Of course this call went nowhere and it should have gone nowhere. I always take these types of sales calls though, because I want to see if the caller is any good and if there is anything I can learn. If they hopeless I try and be helpful and suggest they go get some sales training.

The caller had obviously done a very poor job of researching me before the call. In this day and age there is simply no excuse for that. Her boss is also a dud, if this is how he or she trains the team. The callers company’s products are high end investments, which often pay a very high commission rate to the broker – usually 5%-8% and the deals involve large sums of money.

I am the President of my company and so I am a good prospect for them, who could potentially be worth a lot of money to the broker. You would think that doing good research would be an obvious requirement to land a big fish. It begs the question as to why salespeople are not spending their time better researching the client before they call or meet?

We know that today buyers are checking out the sellers on-line before the meetings, to a much greater extent than ever before. It is natural because there is so much readily available information out here, only a few clicks of the mouse away. I am active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. There is a huge amount of publicly available information on me and yet she blew it for no good reason.

Company annual reports are brilliant because they have glossy pages of the President sitting in some cool office and talk in depth about the direction the firm is going, refer to major initiatives they are involved in and give a host of other key details from other senior executives in the firm. It can be skimmed through pretty quickly and we can grasp some of the key issues for the company.

If we go to the social media accounts of the executives we are going to meet, we can gain a lot of useful information. When we are in the initial stages of the rapport building stage of the sales call, these are great entry points to start the conversation and start building the relationship. In our non-business social life we are looking for people who have similar interests to us, so that we can hang out together and have things in common to talk about. Business is not that different.

Check your staff are doing the research on the clients before their sale’s calls. We might assume this is happening but it may not be. The amount of time this takes is really minimal, so it is not such an impost they don’t have time to do it. If you want to see how wide of the mark she was, go check out my LinkedIn Profile. Next ask your salespeople about the background of the person they are going to meet. You will know immediately if they are doing a proper job of doing their homework before the calls.