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sales calls do you love them or do they make you feel a little bit screamish and uncomfortable are you excited relaxed and you feel powerful on the phone or are you more worried about what might go wrong rather than what could go right well when we're working with the sales professionals in our community over at salesman.org well the salespeople who love their sales calls they tend to do more pre-call preparation than the folks that don't really enjoy them now the good news is that this pre-call preparation can be done in just a couple of minutes it's really seamless so if you want to find yourself much more relaxed focused and effective on your next sales call then stay tuned [Applause] hi my name is will byron i'm the founder of salesman.org where we help salespeople master selling in just 42 days now pre-call planning there are five steps to an efficient pre-call plan and your pre-call plan can be done in under two minutes it's literally that quick but it can dramatically change the fate of your calls does that sound pretty cool well there are five steps to an effective pre-sales call plan and they are to do a buyer review to come up with some goals for the phone call or the meeting itself to create some catch-up questions come up with some common objections that you're probably going to have to deal with and then put together your support materials so let's take a very quick look at each of these five elements of an effective pre-call plan so that you can put one together this afternoon before you start making phone calls so the very first thing to do before you pick up the phone is to open your crm or open up linkedin and jam up a little bit on the person that you're going to be speaking to i want to try and be able to answer these questions before you move on to the rest of your pre-core planning so the first question question one when was the last time that you spoke with this person number two what has changed in their world this month this has to be timely this has to be relevant and then number three are they qualified to do business with you because if they're not qualified to do business with you maybe you shouldn't be making the call at all next you should have a couple of questions in your mind to catch up everyone who's involved in this conversation to get them up to the same point in the sales process so you'll catch up questions for the beginning of your call well they could be one you're still in the market to make changes in your business you could ask number two we've just made whatever change in our product do you think it could help solve one of your problems and number three is it fair to say that x is still an issue or x is still something you're focused on you just want to get everyone on the same page by asking one or two questions whether it's just you on the phone call or whether you're walking into even a sales meeting with 15 executives and you're close to getting the deal done you want everyone to be on the same page so that everyone can take that leap forward in your sales call and i tend to jot down one or two of these questions before each call so that i can look down at the page or the ipad or whatever i'm scribbling them down on so that i've got firm starting point for the conversation and this allows me to put my nerves if i have any at ease because i know i'm going to jump on the call i'm going to say hey how's it going then i can jump into one or two of these questions and the conversation is now flowing next up we've got call goals because well unless you're super human and i've never seen this you're never going to close a sale on every single phone call that you have with a buyer but it's important to always have a golfer for the call that pushes the buyer towards a close every interaction every email every phone call needs to have a goal that pushes the buyer towards a close now furthermore at this point i like to get the buyer to agree on the goal of the call before i even pick up the phone and make it now this usually happens at the end of the email that set up the phone call or at the end of the the previous call that we've both been on and all it takes to close an agreement on the next goal that you're going to be moving towards on your next phone call is just to ask on our next call does it make sense to do x this is the most important bit does it make sense to do x now if the buyer says yes it does make sense to discuss this it does make sense to get barry involved in the conversation then you've got a clear goal for your next call if the buyer says no they turn you down then your response is easy you just say what agenda for next week's call would make sense to move this forward i'll say that again what agenda for next week's call would make sense to move this forward when you ask a question like that you're allowing the buyer to coach you to getting the deal done and that's the quickest way to make it happen next up one of the traits of high performing sales people that we've uncovered with our research over at salesman.org is that high performing sales people are optimists and look this this is not rocket science if you never think anyone's ever going to close if you never think this is going to happen then you're not going to make the the effort to close them which is then going to lead to less chance of someone getting closed and this is going to go round and round and round in this vicious circle and this is what pessimists who sell have to deal with every single day you have no personal belief that you can get sales done so no deals happen which then leads to an even deeper lack of personal belief that you can get anything done so with that said most high performing sales people are optimistic about the outcomes in their selling conversations now i'm optimistic as all hell just in sales in life in general for whatever reason it's how i'm wired but i still think it's worth taking a minute before you make a call to ponder on what potential objections might come up on the the phone call the sales meeting whatever it is and i don't necessarily write them out every time and i don't you know create a list and come up with a bunch of rebuttals for every single phone call i make because it would take forever and you'd only get three calls done each day but i do spend 30 seconds or so before the call in my own head just staring at the screen coming up with perhaps a few objections that may come up and this just gives my subconscious brain a little bit of time to process some possible rebuttals now i will say this if you are brand new to sales you should keep what i call an objection journal so an objection journal is just a notepad a couple of pieces of paper whatever you want where you just scribble down any new objections that come up in your conversations because you're new to sales or it's a new product or it's a new job you're going to see lots and lots of objections that you've never seen before objection journals allow you to see what objections are coming up regularly and coming up with a rebuttal for your most common sales objections will save you a ton of pain day-to-day on the phone and closing deals and finally in our pre-call planning i want you to put together any information or materials that could make your call run more smoothly again not rocket science but it's something that a lot of sales people for some reason miss out on nothing makes you look more amateur and just ridiculous than having to fill three minutes of awkward silence when you're on the phone as you try and find that random scrap of paper or that random post-it note that you've stuck somewhere with some important information it just makes you like an idiot on the phone so i want to put together everything you might need for your sales call beforehand and bonus points if you're your company that you work for as is using some overpriced sales enablement software or tool to allow you to put this content together in one place online or if you're doing this yourself why not just sign up to evernote and push all your selling materials to there so it's all searchable and you can find whatever you need in real time so there we have it the importance of pre-call planning and the five steps to putting together an effective pre-call plan as well if you enjoyed this video make sure to give it a thumbs up and why not click one of the videos that are on the screen right now to continue your own selling education