How to Get a Prospect Talking: A Peek into a B2B Sales Call

Brace yourself for profundity, people: not all #B2B #Prospecting calls lead to well, leads. If you did a thorough job and the result was a disqualified lead, your call was still a success. Granted, it’s not as satiating as the alternative, but it’s not a failure, as it allows you to focus on finding the prospects that are a great fit for your company.

Unfortunately, some of these good prospects love to immediately slam down wall of wariness seconds after that first hello. So how do you counteract this? Let’s start by taking a look at an actual call from one of our “cold-caller extraordinaires”.

(Names and companies have been altered to protect privacy. This call was on behalf of a client that provided career- and compliance-based training and technology to banks, mortgage lenders, credit unions.)

Cold Caller Extraordinaire: “Hi Ruth this is Lex calling from Bankers Sword. I was hoping you had a couple minutes to talk about training….is this an okay time?”

Ruth, hesitant: “Uhhhh, yeah, well, yeah.” (Both start laughing)

CCE: “Thank you – I completely understand… ‘well no, I wasn’t just sitting around waiting for someone to call me.’” Both laugh. “Are you familiar with Bankers Sword?”

Ruth: “Yes, I’ve heard of you. I don’t think I’ve used you before.”

CCE: “And my understanding is you handle compliance and training for compliance?”

Ruth: “Uh the operational side more than anything, but yes. I do the – yours is an online product too, correct?”

CCE: “Correct.”

Ruth: “And I’m not sure but I thought we actually reviewed it a year or two ago. We were looking at changing and then, I don’t know, we didn’t. We were going to think about doing it this coming year but we are doing a core conversion this year. And there’s no way we’re going to change training sessions upside down.” (laughing)

CCE: “Right, I completely understand.”

Ruth: “Yeah because we were – ‘let’s hold off on fixing our system for 2020 and let’s do this and this’ and then it was like – if we’re doing a card system, we are not changing that, because that at least is consistent. And so I know we will probably look at a new, different system towards – well our system conversions is August/September so – and we will usually set up our next years in November/December, so I would prefer if we’re going to talk about a system on training, you would give me a call back in early November?”

CCE: “Ok!”

Ruth: “Yeah because I can tell you, nobody is looking at it this year other than ‘do what we did last year’” (laughing)

CCE: “Yep yep, I completely understand.”

Ruth: “So if you could do that, that would be great.”

CCE: “Yeah! I would love to! Tell me, who are you working with right now?”

Ruth: “BAI”

CCE: “Ok and about how many users do you guys have?”

Ruth: “About 110.”

CCE: “110 okay. I do have one question though – on the sexual harassment, does yours cover the California sexual harassment program?”

Ruth: “Yes.”

CCE: “Completely?”

Ruth: “Yes, we’re partnered with um, you’ll have to excuse me because I’m fairly new to the business – partnered with a California Bankers – whatever the association is locally there –“

CCE: “PCG?”

Ruth: “Yes. Yeah we looked at a couple of other ones and they meet the federal standard but they didn’t meet the California. And they said ‘oh, you can train for that other’ and I’m like ‘no’.” (laughs)

CCE: “Now does BAI offer it?”

Ruth: “Yes, they do offer it – it does a 2 hour class, a mandatory class.”

CCE: “Ok, because I was going to say, if that’s a need you have right now, you can – “

Ruth: “No no we don’t have a need, it’s just something with others that we have looked at a year or so ago. They were like, ‘Yeah, we meet the federal standard’. Then I ask about California and get, ‘Well, no – just have someone train for that other hour.’ (Laughs.) No, if I wanted to do that, I would just train myself. (Laughs) Yeah so if you wanna give me a call back, like I said, the first of November, that would catch me at least to say whether we even have the resources to study it for 2017 or not.”

CCE: “Ok – makes sense completely.”

Ruth: “I just know that we are not making any changes this year.”

CCE: “Ok – makes sense. Oh yeah I was gonna ask – who are you switching your core processing too?”

Ruth: “FIS.”

CCE: “FIS, okay. That’s what I thought you might be saying. And then I had one more question….oh do you, if you don’t mind, I’m going to send you our catalog now via email, just because if anything does come up, we’re one of the only companies out there that does this – we’ll break off and work with you for one course, or one suite. So if something comes up between now and then that you need and BAI doesn’t have it, or they wanna charge you an arm and a leg for it because they’re known for doing that, let me know and we’ll work with you at a very competitively price – that’s kind of like our foot in the door with a lot of people.”

Ruth: “Oh well that’s good because there was - I can’t remember what the lending people asked me for one time and we couldn’t find it and I just, I’ll have to ask the lending lady – “

CCE: “Oh yeah! We have a brand-new lending program actually that does an assessment for lenders, so you can get a sense of what they know and then you can say, well, ‘you don’t know enough about these three areas and you need to get more training on it’ and it’s really cheap. It just kind of does this assessment for them. A lot of folks are really liking them right now.”

Ruth: “Oh! Well okay send me the catalog because I will actually share it with her and ask her ‘what are the classes you were asking me to find and we could never find?’ (Laughs.) It’s been a long time since she asked me that – I did some research on the internet and couldn’t find what she was looking for so. But it was for newbies that didn’t have experience and she needed something.”

CCE: “Yeah that would be great. And some of my other customers use it even when they hire a lender from another bank who’s been doing it for 20 years, but they don’t – not to sound rude – they don’t really know what they don’t know, because they’ve been doing the job for so long. So this assessment is really nice because it’s like okay, ‘you’re new to the team, let’s assess you and see where you’re at’ and it gives you a good understanding of well, ‘they say they knew about this but they didn’t pass that section on the test.’ (Laughs) So what do they really know.” (Laughs)

Ruth: “Yeah (laughs) you’re right – what do they really know. Right.”

CCE: “Okay well I’ll send you that stuff. Give me your email…Okay well I’ll send that off and let me know if anything were to change or if you guys do have interest in the lending stuff, otherwise I’ll call you that first week in November. In the meantime, good luck.”

Ruth: “Ok thank you.”

Look for an metrics driven examination of this call on Monday!