Evaluate Your Sales Equivalent of a Golf Swing

No doubt about it the phone is your most valu­able tool.

It is the method of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with prospects and clients. When you think about it noth­ing hap­pens in most sales jobs with­out a phone call.   You can’t build your pipe with­out it and you cer­tainly can’t close with­out it.

What amazes me is how bad some sales peo­ple come off over the phone.  And I’m talk­ing about both really skilled pro­fes­sion­als, the just learn­ing and the fakers.

When you break it down, it comes to two things, skill and technology.

Lets start with technology.

The head­set you use? Well it blows.  That cheep ass thing that came with the phone either takes all the bass out of your voice or it picks up every sin­gle piece of back­ground noise imaginable.

That means all the bark­ing dogs, door­bells, and flight announce­ments.  Back­ground noise is a dis­trac­tion. When you are on the phone you need your client/prospect lis­ten­ing to YOU.

But back­ground noise is not near as bad as a weak hol­low voice that sounds like you are a pris­oner at the bot­tom of a beer can.  Cheep head­sets take all the low range res­o­nance out of your voice.  Low vocal range sug­gests power and author­ity.  It’s all tre­ble and you just sound annoy­ing.  You don’t need to sound like James Earl Jones to be  suc­cess­ful but you for damn sure don’t want to come off like Screech from Saved by the Bell.

If you’re a head­set per­son, pony up some change and get your­self a qual­ity head­set.  I’ve put a cou­ple of good ones in the Hand­picked Sales Tools Ama­zon Store for both cell and land line*.

It’s an invest­ment in your career that will pay off in spades.  Once you get your qual­ity head­set in place, call some folks you trust and have them cri­tique the qual­ity of your voice.

On to the skills.

There are zil­lions of books and web sites devoted to this, just Google “phone skills”.

I’m not going to start coach­ing phone skills.  Not here in this post­ing any­way.  Mostly because a style is an indi­vid­ual style, I promise that in later blogs I’ll give hints and tips that work for me.

No, today’s les­son, young Sky­walker, is the ulti­mate, best phone skills train­ing tool ever devel­oped. Oh and it’s also the most painful thing you’ll ever do, unless you find your­self in a Turk­ish Prison.

THE key to suc­cess is to record you, on the phone, dial­ing for dol­lars. And then … and this is the painful part … lis­ten to it.

You will be mortified:

“I sound awful.”     “I sound like Screech!”

Actu­ally you sound fine.  You wouldn’t be suc­cess­ful and read­ing this site if you weren’t. But lis­ten­ing to your own recorded voice let alone cri­tiquing your­self is tough.   Every ‘um’, ‘ah’ and stu­pid state­ment will jump out and kick you right in the head.  But you will be acutely aware of what you are doing.

And that’s the point. To get  bet­ter at your profession.

Tiger Woods records his golf swing and Tom Brady watches games films until his eyes bleed.  It’s what pro­fes­sion­als do.  It’s how they become aware of good traits and bad flaws.

You should do the same.

Then if you are really bold, call that per­son you trust to tell you how your head­set sounds and have them eval­u­ate your sales equiv­a­lent of a golf swing. (How good do you dare to be?)

That is the sign of a true professional.

*While we are not in the habit of pro­mot­ing any­thing other than our own knowl­edge and expe­ri­ences for sales peo­ple. We do have this Ama­zon Store (and other ads sites) where we’ve posted tools we know work, and use our­selves.   If you buy through it, we get a really, really, really tiny com­mis­sion that helps us off­set the cost of host­ing Sales Swamis. Click here to go there