The CRAP Report

So, if you read yesterday’s CRAP Report, you know that I’ve already written about pre-call planning.  Also, if you understand basic English and read the title, you probably figured that I’ve already written about pre-call planning as well.  Well, after reviewing it, I feel like something was missing, so I wanted to add what I felt was left out, and something that I think is really one of the most important parts to pre-call planning.   If you’ve outsourced your lead gen and teleprospecting efforts, or if you’ve got a team doing that for you in-house, you may want to pay attention!Knowing who you’re calling is an important step in preparing to make B2B lead generation calls, and knowing why you’re calling is probably even more important.  However what I think is paramount to both of those steps is this:  what do I want to happen during the conversation?  From afar, it’s a stupid question, right?  I mean, what do we all want to happen when we’re making teleprospecting calls?  We want to find a lead, and a fully qualified one at that.  If we dig deeper and really look at what the question is asking, though, there is a lot more going on.

What action do I want the prospect to take as a result of my conversation with them?  What can I say that would help the prospect along to get them to my desired outcome?  Planning these types of strategic questions before you pick up the phone can only serve to make a phone call that much more effective.  You want to make sure that before you talk with your prospect, beyond any product knowledge that you have, you want to make sure that you know the direction that you’re going to lead them to and how you’re going to lead them there.

How about this:  what happens if they ask a question that you don’t know the answer to?  Have you thought about any and all questions about your product or service that a prospect might ask?  Chances are that most people are going to come up with questions that you’ve never thought about, so get some help on this one.  Ask colleagues what they’ve heard as a result of their own sales prospecting.  Even if a question arises that you really do not know the answer to, you’ve got to be able to transition a prospect from their question back to one of yours so that you control the conversation.

Lastly, what other products do you know about that you can also share with a prospect?  Make sure that if the prospect isn’t interested in “service A” that you know about “offering B,” which may just interest them.  I suppose to echo the Boy Scouts again, you’ve got to be prepared.  It does you no good if you get caught off-guard during a teleprospecting call, so do all that you can to be as prepared as possible.