Overcoming Call Reluctance

A Guide to Boosting Sales Confidence & Understanding Call Reluctance

Call reluctance is a common barrier for sales professionals, often fueled by the fear of rejection or lack of confidence. Most articles will tell you that call anxiety is a mental hurdle rather than a reflection of your abilities. They would be wrong.

The number one reason salespeople have call anxiety/reluctance is their lack of phone sales skills and techniques. You don’t want to learn how to “deal with rejection”; you want to learn how to avoid/minimize it to the point where you are winning more than you are losing. And to do that, you need to know the proper way to sell by phone.

Actionable Steps to Overcome Call Reluctance

1) Know Your ICP: Knowing your prospects and understanding their pain points is critical BEFORE you call. You are not calling to find out their problems; you are calling to help them eliminate the problems your solution solves. So, if you do not know how to pick your zebra out of the herd, start there.

2) Phone Sales Stages:

There are four sales stages when selling by phone.

1. Openers
2. Qualifying
3. Presentation
4. Closing

Contrary to most LinkedIn sales gurus, there really is a systematic, step-by-step sales process for selling, especially over the phone.

The top 1% of sales pros either know it because they’ve studied it or are Unicorns with natural instincts. Most sales managers look to hire those 1% and are often disappointed when they can’t find one.

What’s missing from their thought process is all the top 1% of sales pros sucked at sales at one point. So knowing that, you would have more success with hiring self-motivated, coachable individuals and then training them on how to excel at selling by phone.

3) Practice Regularly: To get better faster, you must be coachable and willing to role-play. On Tuesdays at 1 PM Eastern time, students log in to the SalesBuzz training course, and we do live role-playing. (Join us!)

Side note:

Practice does NOT make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. You want to make sure you are role-playing with someone who has already achieved the level of success you are after so you can avoid reinforcing bad sales practices.

Conclusion

Overcoming call reluctance is about developing technical phone sales skills to such a high level that your mind never worries about rejection. By preparing well, practicing regularly, and dealing with rejection head-on, you will boost your confidence and increase your dial rates.