Preparing for a Sales Call

During our weekly sales training workshops, we pick two topics and go around the room sharing our experiences and personal best practices on the topic. The goal is for sales managers, cold callers, and sales reps to learn from each other in a collaborative, peer-to-peer environment.

Today, one of the discussion topics was how to prepare for a sales call.  We broke it down into two sub-categories: cold calls and scheduled demos. The following best practices emerged for cold calling:

• Look up the person in LinkedIn and record relevant pieces of information in your CRM (we use Salesforce.com)
• Google the person’s name and spend no more than two minutes looking for additional information
• If possible, stand up when making the call
• Smile when talking
• Think positive thoughts about how the call is going to be a success once the phone starts ringing

Of course, this amount of preparation is for selectively calling companies that fit your ideal customer profile; it is overkill for trying to make 80 calls per day.

Preparation makes all the difference between success and failure, assuming you put yourself out there. Making a sales call is already a challenge and going into it with these tips will increase your odds of success. Stay tuned for part two – talking about preparation for a scheduled demo.