On this week’s episode of On the Mark, host Mark Tewart discusses ways to build up your energy and motivation when making follow up phone calls.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Mark Tewart: Hi, I’m Mark Stuart and thanks for joining me on this week’s edition of On the Mark on CBT News. On today’s show, I want to talk to you about outbound phone calls in specific, follow up phone calls to your customers. I want you to, first of all, stand up when you take or make a call. Why? It gives you energy. If you think about it, when you are on the phone and you’re standing up, you tend to bounce. You tend to gesture. You tend to use the body language that they cannot see over the phone, but now they can feel it over the phone. You will have more voice inflection. You will have better tonality, you will have better energy. When you sit down, you tend to move downward. You tend to have bad body language. You tend to have lesser tonality and energy. I want you to just stand up.
An age-old technique that still works today is you need to take the curse off the call. When I call somebody, I like to ask them, am I reaching you at a good time? I hear a lot of salespeople say, am I reaching you at a bad time? You are conditioning, the subconscious brain of the customer to tell you why it’s a bad time. So what I want to do is I want to reach their subconscious brain and condition them to find a good time by saying, “Mr. Customer, am I reaching you at a good time?” And when they say yes, I want to take the edge off the call and I must give the reason for my call. Today more than ever, people are getting bombarded with phone calls, are getting bombarded again by robo calls. And we have phones with us all the time.
So when we get these phone calls, we’re not always happy to take these phone calls. So I want to make sure I take the edge off and respect somebody and I tell them that you must give a reason. And the way that you do it is you say, “Mr. Customer, I know you’re really busy. I want to respect your time. So I’m going to get to the reason for my call and get right to the bottom line.” When you do this, people will be more respectful of you because you’ve respected them and you’re getting ready to tell them the actual reason for the call. Now they can stay engaged with you.
Another key tip is make sure that you have preplanned alternatives. If somebody visited you at the dealership and did not buy and you’re just calling and saying, “Hey, I was just checking up. Hey, I wanted to see if you made a decision. Any questions?” I’m not saying any of those things are wrong, but you’re going down a bad path and you’re boring people to death. You have to get into somebody’s brain, and the way that you do that change the decision they got to make. The way that you change the decision that they’re going to make. You have to give them some other reason to do business. You have to give them an alternative. It could be a lease versus the buy. It could be a longer term versus shorter. It can be a pre-owned. It could be a demo. It could be going from a pre-owned to a new car, could be a rebate change, whatever it may be. It could be more for their vehicle. It could be two trades instead of one. It could be no trades, whatever it is. Before you get on that phone, think about what you’re going to do to change the decision that they’ve already said no to you when they were in the dealership.
Make sure you give them something else to make a decision on. While you’re doing this, make sure you give them confidence. How do you do that? Is there any type of guarantee that you can give them? Is there any way that you can do something assumptively. “I can assure you, Mr. Customer, that this is a great deal and you are not making a mistake. This is a great deal and you are not making a mistake.” We have talked about that close before. That is a close. It gives people an essence, a guarantee that they’re moving towards pleasure, away from pain. They’re not making a mistake. You’re taking away the fear and you’re allowing them to do business and to feel good about it. And then always you got to know what your final thing is you’re looking to do. Is it to set an appointment for them to come back in or for you to go to them, which is a go see. A lost art in the car business.
There is nothing saying that the customer has to come to you. Second car I ever sold my life was a go see at the customer’s house. Easiest deal you’ll ever do. So make sure that you have an assumptive way that you’re now asking for the appointment. “Mr. Customer, would it be better for me to come see on Tuesday or Wednesday or do you want to come in? What’s the best day of the week? What time?” So make sure you had an alternative choice close and make sure you’re going for that appointment.
My best tips on making outbound phone calls for followup and now coaches corner. Extend your edge. My son plays football at the University of Cincinnati and his coach talks about you have to be able to extend your edge. We have in our minds what we think our capabilities are. All of us, you may say, “Oh, I’m unlimited. I can do anything,” but trust me, we all have preconceived thoughts about what our abilities are, what our talents are, what our physical limits, what our mental emotional limits are. And the only way you’re ever going to improve is if you test that and you test that by going further than you ever have before. It’s what you call extending your edge.
Once you extend your edge, you know you can go there. And when you extend it enough, you know that others probably can’t get to where you’re going. So all of a sudden competition becomes easy because now you begin to believe through experience of extending your edge. That at that moment when you need to dig deep, people can’t compete. You’re going to get the best of anybody you’ll compete with. And you do that by extending your edge right down a game plan today on all the different ways that you will extend your edge.
And now for my segment, Stop It. I do something in my training class that I would like for you to do individually. I’d like for you today to write down five traits of what you feel traits are of unsuccessful people. Is that their body language? Is it the way that they talk? The things that they do, is that their work ethic? Write down and quantify five things and then ask yourself, am I doing any of those five things? Now ask two or three or four people that you trust to be real with you and say, do I do or do I have any of these traits that I display or do on a daily or weekly basis? And have somebody be real with you. It’s called coaching and if they are, you have to put a game plan on how you’re now going to eliminate any of those traits that you just wrote down on what creates unsuccessful people. Then write down what your traits would be for successful people. Replace the bad with the good and watch what happens immediately. You will begin to walk, talk and act like a different person.
My name’s Mark Tewart. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week’s edition of On the Mark. Make sure you tune in for next week’s show and as always communicate with me, give me a call at 888-2-TEWART. You can email me at info@tewart.com and our website is tewart.com as well and please check out our latest leadership and management workshop that are coming up in different areas of the United States and you can check that out at tewart.com/register thanks so much and I look forward to joining you next week and great selling.
Thanks for watching On the Mark with Mark Tewart. This has been a JBF business media production.
