By Larry Prevost, Dale Carnegie Training Instructor

If you recall in my last post, I had a rather lackluster cold call encounter with "Bob" who was selling phone book advertising.

After the initial cold call, I wasn't sure if I was ever going to hear from Bob again. So I had just written the whole incident off.

However, a week later, Bob called back. And when he called the office, he wasn't able to reach me directly. So he spoke with Traci, the very same person that introduced me to Bob on his first cold calling encounter.

Now, Bob had written nothing down on his first cold calling visit and he didn't get my email address or phone number to follow up on his original call. This meant that he had no way to thank me for my time or to set up a future meeting.

When he called to reschedule the meeting with Traci, that conversation sounded something like this:

Bob: Hi, I'm calling for a guy I spoke with the other day. I think his name is Jim. (I kid you not!)

Traci: Uh, we don't have a Jim here.

Bob: Are you sure? I spoke with a girl there when I walked in and she introduced me to him. I think she's head of sales or something there. Her name is Cathy.

Traci: Uh, we don't have a Cathy here either. What are you calling about?

Bob: Well I was there last week and I spoke with this guy, Jim. He's the head of IT and we were supposed to talk about advertising.

Traci: Oh, you mean Larry.

Traci told him that I wasn't in at that time, but we eventually did connect. Bob apologized for not being at the original meeting because something had come up on his end.

Normally, I'd leverage this incident to take a pass on Bob's services. It's quick, convenient and relatively painless. But it's really a smoke screen covering the real reason. I know that I'm not going to invest in phone book advertising because I don't see any real value in it. It's quicker for me to tell Bob that I can't do business with someone who can't pay attention to detail.

It's been done to me, and your prospects have done it to you. It happens because you, the sales rep, didn't show some type of immediate value in the initial conversation. You didn't provide a compelling reason for them to want to sit down and discuss their challenges with you in any detail. Your prospect is now looking for any way they can to conserve the one truly irreplaceable resource that they have, their time. Given a choice between spending an hour in a discussion that has no value from their perspective and spending three minutes telling you that you don't respect your clients, they'll take the three-minute hit and be done with it.

However, I agreed to sit down with Bob again and hear what he had to say. Not because I thought that he was going to come up with some magic that was going to have me buying tons of phone book advertising. I agreed because I wanted to be the prospect for a change. I wanted to have someone else go through their sales process and sell me something. I wanted to review my own internal feelings and personal state while someone else was really selling me something so I could gain a better understanding of what my prospects go through.

Next Page: The Second Meeting Was a Very Painful Experience

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