Anthony Iannarino’s May 5 post “How to Design An Effective Sales Call Plan” has several great insights into selling today: “the time we spend with our prospects and clients is too valuable – and too rare – to not put a little thought into what we are going to do with that time.”
Anthony gives several specific suggestions including:
“What are they going to find most valuable?”
“You need to have the advice that makes you someone who can fill in the gaps in your prospective client’s knowledge and experience.”
I categorize Anthony’s advice as: initially establish and maintain your Relevance to the prospect.
Today most selling is done remotely. This has two major impacts:
- Prospects will not give you much time to establish relevance. You will get a reasonable chance to establish relevancy in face-to-face meeting, but prospects are not that courteous in phone calls – it’s too easy for the prospects to come up with reasons to stop the call if they are not initially engaged – “sorry but I have to take my dog outside”, etc.
- Statistics show that less than 10% of your prospects will answer their calls. Therefore, you waste 90% of the call prep time because the prospect doesn’t answer.
Anthony’s totally correct that you better not start a call without being prepared to be Relevant to the prospect.
We believe the solution is to use AI to prepare opening statements and Talk Tracks for every call:
Active Intelligent Conversations (AIC) Can Guide The Conversation To Establish A Trusted Advisor Relationship By Creating:
Opening statements that reflect everything known about the prospect:
- Demographics – title, industry, company size etc.
- Activity – time spent on your website or videos
- An accurate Story So Far of all previous interactions with you and others in your company
A Talk Track or Call Guide that is AI Generated to be exactly:
- The discussion points of interest to the prospects
- In the sequence to maintain the prospects interest
- To build the prospect’s recognition that you are competent
- Professionally written messages to build their trust in you
AIC that uses the duration of the points discussed to:
- Actively evolve the Talk Track during the call
- Suggest “the next thing to say” based upon what is known about the prospect
- Suggest “the next thing to say” based on what you are learning during the call
- Dynamically rebuild the Talk Track during the call
Active Intelligent Conversations – AIC – Will Have Your Prospects Saying, “Glad You Called!”