Inbound SEO, Sales, Service and Marketing Blog | Ability Growth Partners

Read This if You Want to Get Better at B2B Sales

Written by Adam Singer | Mar 4, 2020 9:02:43 AM

If you want to get better at B2B sales, but you only have about 45 seconds just read this:

  • Call each prospect 4 times to get a connect call
  • Email each prospect 4 times to get a connect call
  • Spend 15 minutes researching how to help your prospect before you make your call
  • Be prepared with free stuff or useful advice to give your prospect
  • Stand during your phone call
  • Have a positioning statement ready
  • End your connect call after about 12 minutes (soon after the prospect begins wanting to know more)
  • Send a meeting link for your exploratory call while you're on a successful connect call
  • Say goofy things to get people to smile (if their LinkedIn profile shows that's their style)
  • Make time to practice all of this with other people (otherwise you will NEVER get good at it in time)
  • Pause

If you want to learn more proven tactics to improve your B2B sales read on:

What is a Connect Call?

And How to Get Business Without Ever Cold Calling Again

HubSpot describes about three types of sales phone calls:

  1. Connect Calls
  2. Exploratory Calls
  3. Goals & Challenges Calls

Each type of call describes a phase in your relationship with the prospect and has a different purpose.

The connect call is a phone call you have with a prospect that includes the prospect learning who you are and experiences some value that you can add to her. It is tempting to think of this as a cold call, but that's not really true.

What's the Difference Between a Cold Call and a Warm Call (Connect Call)

Outdated sales reps make cold calls to prospects they don't know to sell something the prospect may or may not want. Inbound sales reps make warm calls to people they understand something about and are prepared to help immediately during their initial call. In other words, a warm call means you know something about the prospect:

  • You have reason to believe you can help
  • You have some piece of advice or free tool or content ready to give as a way of helping

Why Make 4 Phone Calls?

It's a matter of data. If you will call each prospect 4 times, you will connect more than 80% of the time. If you only call 3 times, you will connect about 70% of the time. Call twice, and you can expect to connect 60% of the time. And if you are like most sales reps and only call once, expect that you will connect only 40% of the time.

As of this writing, I'm hoping to publish a part II of this where I go into each of the other points and add more info. watch for more later. In the meantime, please enjoy this video about the HubSpot Pipeline Generation Bootcamp Lion Troop 1604 BOOM!