“I’ve gotta have it!”
-Prospect
You’ve Probably Heard This Before
Imagine calling a completely cold prospect trying to pitch your product or service, and before you even have a chance to get your full sales pitch out of your mouth, the prospect cuts you off and says “Sorry, but we wouldn’t be interested. Thanks.” And you have no response…
Pew! A cold shot to the knee before you could even break into a full sprint…
This is the biggest problem that sales people facing when prospecting within any organization, and unfortunately it’s not something that most salespeople ever learn how to deal with THE RIGHT WAY!
Why This is Such a BIG Issue
I don’t have to tell you how much this scenario eats away at you as a salesperson, not to mention when this happens to you multiple times every day!
Not only does it break your spirit, but you aren’t building your pipeline and closing deals. You aren’t bringing home the commission that you were expecting to pay for your mortgage, or day care, or Christmas presents, or Disney+…
Prospecting is the cement foundation of the sales process. If you don’t have any interested prospects, you have nobody to buy your product or service. If you have no buyers, you have no revenue. If you have no revenue, you have no business!!
Set Hooks and Take Names!
If you want to gain more interested prospects to potentially buy your product or service, you’ve gotta learn to set big nasty hooks!
What is a “Hook”? A hook is anything that makes the prospect stop their natural train of thought (which is to brush off all salespeople)…something that shocks their system like a mental car wreck, something that elicits so much curiosity that they can’t help but get engaged! It can be either a question or a big claim.
You’re basically saying anything that will make the prospect ask themself “Hmm, could you really do that?”
The truth is that people run on autopilot 95% of the time, and your typical sales call is no different. If you’re calling a decision maker of any kind, you certainly aren’t their first solicited call…
Now since we already KNOW what the prospect is going to say (the big 4 objections), we need to not only handle the objection itself, we need to have a handful of razor sharp hooks at the ready!
Examples of hooks:
- My product can put another $1M into your business this year, and I just need 35 seconds to show you how!
- If I could save you 50% over your current distributor, would you at least give me 20 seconds?
- What could you do with another 500 leads every month?
- My product is guaranteed to help you increase your company’s sales in the first 7 days days, and it just takes a minute to give you free access!
- What your family prefer to use natural soap that hasn’t been linked to skin cancer?
The key to a great hook is to make it so crazy, so outrageous, so insane that the prospect has to first think that you’re either lying or you’re a genius! They needs to be shocked and curious.
Now what you’re claiming DOES have to be attainable, because you never, ever, ever want to lie to anyone about what your product can do. But you also should not reference the “average” results that people can get with your product.
You should always talk about the most extreme results (at least at first), because you aren’t the one to judge what type of results each customer will get. You never know when you’re talking to a customer that’s going to set a new benchmark in terms of results!
Your Take-Away
Now that you understand the importance of setting giant Jaws-like hooks, and how to set those monsters, you can come with a few different big claims and questions to serve you in your prospecting efforts.
I hope this helps you as much as it’s helped me in my career, and you gain thousands of new customers over the course of your career because you learned how to set hooks like the masters!!
P.S. If you want to learn everything there is to know about sales & negotiation, visit my home page and request your free 7 day access to Cardone University now!
Your Hero,
Jake “The Legend” Martincic
JakeMartincic.com 