Yes, I know, it’s hard to get started after a holiday so here are some of the reasons why you might take a while to get going on your calls and some ideas how to get over them.

1.  You avoid doing the calls because you  find a lot of things to do like the filing from last year, the email inbox to sort out, the paperwork to prepare for 2012, meetings to attend., the diary to plan

2.  You fear you won’t be well received because people are only just back at work.

3.  You believe the prospects on your list will never buy from you so what is the point in calling them?

4. You think the calls can wait till next week.

5. You have no goals/motivation so you have nothing to aim for yet

6. You don’t feel good about yourself and have a negative self image at the moment

7.  You need to learn more about your new products you are selling before you feel confident to talk about them. Product knowledge is vital.

All of these avoidance behaviours are not going to serve you if you want to have your best year ever. Think about it this way, one hour of procrastination per day equals 225 selling hours wasted a year (based on working 45 weeks a year). There is a way to get round all of them.

Write down the behaviours you personally act out to avoid the calling? Being aware of those is the first step.

7 Ideas To Kickstart Your Telephone Sales (more…)

To be successful in sales, one of the most important things to be sure of is that you never allow negative thoughts of failure to even enter your head.
I’ll give you an example of how allowing a negative thought into the mind lost a sale for someone last week. My husband and I have shares in a winery in South Australia and a salesperson rang me to see if we would like to buy some of our own wine for Christmas. I told the guy that I am sure we would be interested but that the best person to speak to would be my husband as he likes to decide which wines we buy. I told him when my husband would be available and sure enough, the guy rang back at the time specifiied. I answered the phone and I said I would transfer the call to my husband. Excited and ready to buy, my husband went to pick up the phone and unfortunately I put the phone down too soon before he actually connected with the guy. He was cut off. Now we both expected the guy to call back and he didn’t. He must have assumed my husband was not interested in buying and had hung up on him. My husband tried to do “call recall” to get the number to call back but it was a number you could not call back. Wow, what a waste of a big sale that that guy could have made. He let a negative thought get the better of him. He thought we had just hung up on him.
Next day another wine society called with a great offer. My husband bought it.

What To Do When You Get A Negative Thought (more…)