A large percentage of hr TEAM's business is in designing and delivering sales and sales management development programmes. We can now offer an extended service via a newly formed co-operation between Teleopen and ourselves.

Teleopen specialise in developing skills for the front end of the sales process - getting to the initial meeting with a prospective client. As Teleopen point out, this can be one of the most challenging stages for sales people, but is often the skills development area that is ignored. The following article by David Festenstein provides an overview of this new approach, and the results that it can bring.

"Opening doors to senior decision-makers"

You will almost certainly have been a victim of the avid cold calling brigade. Those callers who start off in a really nice way asking you for a couple of moments of your valuable time and then drag you relentlessly through their script. They never seem to be listening when you say you are not interested and usually out of frustration you end up slamming the phone down on them!

The reason why these calls are so painful for you is that the caller is in "their" own world wanting to talk about "their" product and "their" business and not yours. Even more exasperatingly they have not even bothered to find out much if anything about you or your business, except your telephone number. They are so enthusiastic about what they have to offer and say, anything about you seems to be irrelevant.

The other prevailing factor about these calls is that the caller always seems to sound irritating. They do not appear to adapt their communication style to take into account that they are speaking to you. You really could be a group, a dead line or even a blank wall! The irritation is always compounded by the fact that when you do, as often happens, demonstrate your disinterest through the tone of your voice, it goes completely unnoticed!

How often do I hear, "I do not want to be perceived as a cold caller and therefore I will not pick up the phone unless I have some form of introduction or some prior interest has been expressed in our offering". Overwhelmingly it is the fear that, even though one is passionate about the value of one's product and service, at the end of the day the "cold called" will turn around and tell us to go away.

When I dig deep into this fear as a coach, going back in time with clients into their childhood experiences, I often find that at some point they were exposed to personal ridicule or rejection for being enthusiastic about something they wanted to show or present to a parent or teacher. Successful selling is all about acceptance and being acknowledged for what you have to offer. Unfortunately making new sales calls from "cold" can often lead to a continuous path of recurring rejection.

What do I and Teleopen provide that will help you with this?

From a background perspective, I have spent the best part of 13 years engaged in various forms of telephone selling and in the later part of my career worked in a new business development role for The Hoskyns Group Plc, which later became part of the larger IT Services Group Cap Gemini. During the latter part of my working career as an employee, I trained as a communication specialist in NLP and began to examine my own success strategy for reaching senior executives and setting up productive meetings. It was whilst on my NLP course that someone said "your cold calling strategy is really excellent as it is everything that cold calling isn't"! "You should set up your own company to train others to copy your approach". So Teleopen Ltd. was born and here are some of the most common headaches that our approach helps to address and remove:

" We have ambitious plans to grow the organisation but the process used to access senior decision makers in our target markets is lengthy and costly. This is probably because our sales people are more comfortable engaging people lower down in organisations and tend to go out on face-to-face meetings which could be more easily and cheaply qualified over the phone"

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"There has been a great deal of interest generated in our offerings but the downside to this is that we are working reactively and closing a number of small revenue deals. We need to work more strategically in order to build relationships at a much higher level, so we can achieve the size of deals we need to reach our growth plan"

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"We all seem to be incredibly busy in our sales and marketing departments, but the activity over the phone and in our marketing campaigns is simply not producing the results we need. I believe we need to build a greater awareness of how we are engaging over the phone in terms of our communication style as well as how we are presenting ourselves and our message as a whole"

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"I feel very uncomfortable about making new business development calls from "cold" to senior directors"

"Once I am in front of a board level director, I feel very confident about the value we can bring to their business. The problem is getting there in the first place!"

"Tough market conditions mean that I find myself competing against many more companies to get work. The best way to deal with this is to build relationships with senior directors before the projects are initiated"

How are Teleopen's services delivered to achieve this?

We offer:

• In-house training workshops on "The Teleopen Way"
• Individual face to face or telephone coaching of "The Teleopen Way"
• Outsourced high quality lead generation using "The Teleopen Way"
• Tutorial groups on how to use the phone more effectively as a business tool

Benefits of "The Teleopen Way" approach

The approach will help you to:

• Feel that you are not "cold calling" senior decision-makers
• Reduce the number of calls you have to make to gain access to your target executives
• Transform the PA's from "gate-keepers" to "gate-openers"
• Use targeted e-mail and or fax to set up the meetings for you
• Establish a few sentences that will make immediate impact on your target executives
• Reduce the time wasted in travelling to face-to-face meetings and ensuring that they are properly qualified
• Dramatically improve your conversion rate from "cold lead" to "confirmed appointment" with a senior decision-maker

What Teleopen Clients say about the approach;

"In terms of results, I can access 90 to 100% of the executives that I target and then I am able to engage them in a mutually beneficial discussion. Cold calling used to be a stressful activity to me, now it is a very enjoyable one" (Maciek Janowski MD of Quovado Ltd)

Regarding the efficacy of a workshop:

"Clever men learn from their mistakes, intelligent men learn from other people's" Bismark (Tony Duarte, Freelance Film Producer)

"It addressed the part of the sales process most disliked by the sales force and where they get the least support" (Henry Blythe: Freelance Consultant)

"Thank you for an excellent day - I would strongly recommend this to anyone who needs to get business, - I wish I had had this when I started out 8 years ago!" (Simon Mills - Delivering Business Process Solutions)

Contact us now, to discuss how hr TEAM and Teleopen can enable your sales team to become more effective at opening doors to senior decision makers...

• 01435 865 711
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• info@hrteam.co.uk