Get out of the cold-calling business! Share this video with your people who might struggle with getting introductions. This video is a part of our new series with Mark Trinkle: The 10 Commandments of Sales Success. Today we dive into Commandment #3! 

Watch all of the Commandments Here

Hello, this is Mark Trinkle, Chief Growth Officer with Anthony Cole Training Group, and today I am bringing you commandment #3 in our 10 part series that we are calling the 10 Commandments of Sales Success. Now, if you've been following along, you might remember that commandment number one was thou shout always do a pre-call plan, and commandment number two is thou shout always be prospecting.  Commandment number three for today is thou shout always remember to ask for introductions.

I'm sure the most hated part of selling universally is having to make cold calls. And ideally, you'd like to get to the point in your career where you have been able to get out of the cold calling business. Listen, we know cold calls don't work. Here are a couple stats for you. One statistic is the average success rate of a cold call landing you a new piece of business. It has been estimated to be 0.03%, not 3%, not 0.3%, but 0.03%. And several graduate business schools have conducted studies where they've surveyed the C-suite, and the most striking number to me is the number 80%. About 80% of C-suite executives when surveyed said, if they don't know you, if they weren't expecting your call, if no one has referred or introduced you to them, 80% said they're not coming to the phone. They're not calling you back, and they're not replying to your email.

So we use the term introduction instead of referral. And, it's more than just a subtlety. A referral is, "Hey Bob, why don't you call Mary? She runs a business on the other side of town that I think would be a good fit for you. " And introduction, by contrast, is where you have asked someone (a center of influence, a business associate,  or a client) to actually introduce you so that when you call your prospect, they're going to know exactly who you are.

And it's really pretty simple. It's very straightforward. You want the person introducing you to tell the target, your prospect, four things.

1. "I would like to introduce you to Mark from X, Y, Z company, and you should take his call."

2. "Mark is a good person."

3. "He's done great work for me, and his firm is very reputable."

4. "After you've spoken with Dan, if it does not make sense to continue the conversation, it's okay to say no. If now is not the right time for you and your company to move forward, I know he would understand and appreciate that a lot."

Now, number four is important, okay? That is a pressure relief valve. It helps the person that you're calling to understand if they're not interested, if your message doesn't resonate, they can simply get off the phone and tell you they're not interested. And it should also be a pressure relief valve for you, and a reminder that you are not there to sell anything and that you can be a good listener. And if your message doesn't resonate, you'll happily move on down the road. That's it for commandment number three. Have a great day selling.

In this blog, we discuss the best habits of highly successful salespeople and sales managers.  Being an extraordinary sales manager is grueling and time-consuming. 

It requires attention to detail, the ability to have tough conversations with those who are not meeting their numbers, the desire and commitment to grow yourself and your salespeople, consistent activity and patience. 

The sales management activities that you perform today create the results that you achieve today.

What activities are you doing now that are creating your current unsatisfactory results?  It is up to us as sales leaders to set higher standards for sales behaviors and hold people accountable so that we get better results.

It is a given that successful sales management requires contributions on many levels:  skill, time, effort, effective execution, and systems and processes to support coaching, performance management and recruiting.

To help understand what makes a successful sales manager, it is helpful to review the Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople. 

I recently asked the participants of a workshop to identify and share those habits that they believed contributed to the success of their best salespeople.  Below are some of the common habits identified:

• Develops great relationships
• Networks regularly
• Good time management skills
• Gets to decision makers
• Selective in prospecting
• Provides exceptional customer-service

Then I asked them to talk about the flip side of the list – those habits that inhibited or hurt a salesperson’s ability to close more business.  Below are some of the habits they identified:

• Sells on price
• Inconsistent prospecting
• Procrastinates
• Presents to the wrong people
• Sells to anyone that "fogs a mirror"
• Poor prioritization skills 
• Is too comfortable

How about you and your habits?  What are those habits that you can point to that you KNOW have a positive impact on your team’s sales behaviors and results?  Here are some that I observe and hear about:

• Coaches in-the-moment to get a deal closed
• Reports sales results
• Makes joint calls
• Sets goals
• Conducts regular sales meetings
• Reviews and reports pipeline

This is a good list and with some additions, it can become a great list when we identify the skills of a great Coach, one of the most critical roles of an effective sales leader.  To examine what else you might want to consider, take a look at the following list of elements necessary for successful coaching:

• Debriefs sales calls effectively
• Asks quality questions
• Controls emotions
• Allows salespeople to fail
• Implements and manages the execution of a consistent sales process
• Motivates when coaching based on individual/personal goals
• Coaches to improve skill and change behavior
• Gets sales people to follow through on commitments

It’s not enough to just have the skill.  In order for managers to be successful at having a sales team built for growth, the manager must be in the habit of using those skills.

Being an extraordinary sales manager is grueling and time-consuming.  It requires attention to detail, the ability to have tough conversations with those who are not meeting their numbers, the desire and commitment to grow yourself and your salespeople, consistent activity and patience. 

Like the coach of a winning team or conductor of an extraordinary symphony, you have the ability to positively affect the success and the lives of your salespeople and company. 

According to an excerpt in Don Miller's "Building a Story Brand," in order to help someone with a trust issue, the salesperson has to provide their prospect with a plan.  

This plan must help them arrive at the‘ buy now’ button on their own. Or, it must be a plan that helps them feel more confident after they’ve pushed the ‘buy now’ button. 

So, how do you go about getting your prospect to hit that button?  

I’m stuck this morning. I’m reading “Building A Story Brand” by Don Miller and I'm looking over my own book “The Best Prospecting Book Ever Written”.  Don points out in Chapter 7 that in order to get a prospect to push the ‘buy now’ button they have to trust that everything is going to turn out okay. That means that they have to trust you and everything you’ve said and presented to them.

That’s a tall order if you are selling high-ticket items.

In my book, I just read the intro to Chapter 11 where I recount a meeting with Ron Rose at a Cincinnati GAMA meeting. I was a rookie in the Insurance business where Ron, on the other hand, was a 30-year veteran and multi-year MDRT (Million Dollar Roundtable) agent. I asked him what his best method for gaining prospects was and he took me through a series of questions that started with: “If I had your family locked up in a closet with a bomb, that was going to go off in 24 hours if you didn’t make a sale, who would you call on first?” I said, “somebody I already know”.

And that’s how I got stuck. 

Over the last 25 years, I have literally spent thousands of hours learning more and more about how to build a sales practice, craft a strong sales message, present solutions to get people to say yes, and more effectively guide my prospects through their buying process.

Having said that, there are very few books, articles or presentations I’ve read that didn’t address prospecting. I’m in the middle of writing a script for our Instructor Lead Training Session on Getting Introductions. In the process of writing the script, I googled ‘Getting Introductions-- Tony Cole’ to see what else I may have written about the subject and that search took me to my book.

And that's where I got stuck.

You see, in Don’s book he points out that in order to help someone with the trust issue you have to provide your prospect with a plan. A plan that helps them arrive at the ‘buy now’ button on their own. Or a plan that helps them feel more confident after they’ve pushed the ‘buy now’ button. He used the analogy of putting down stones for the prospect to cross a creek.

That lead me to think about you and your sales approach. It caused me to stop and ask this question – what is your test drive? How do you help people get comfortable enough with you and your process so that the anxiety of making a mistake is minimized?  Imagine you’re buying a $50,000.00 vehicle without a test drive. Now put the number at $500,000.00.

And that is where I got unstuck.

Imagine how much easier it is for any prospect of yours to make a decision if you made it a habit of getting introduced to the person that is eventually going to ask you to write a check for $500,000.00.

Doesn’t getting introduced eliminate some of the anxiety and stress because someone you already trust and have confidence in has taken the test drive?

I'll let you find this one out on your own...