One key to being a successful salesperson is finding a way to be persistent without being annoying. Most salespeople try to minimize or avoid being annoying by not reaching out too much. However, it is not the reaching out that is annoying to prospects; it is what most salespeople say when they reach out that is the problem.
I will provide five very clear and easy-to-implement tips that will help you avoid being the annoying salesperson when you reach out to prospects.
1. Don’t talk about your product
The main reason salespeople annoy prospects is that 99.9% of them use a product-selling sales pitch.
I am with Company X
We sell Product Y
Do you need what I sell?
And while that sounds like a logical approach for a salesperson who has been hired to sell a product, there are three problems with this approach:
- Prospects are getting sold to a lot
- The prospects are likely not in buying mode
- This approach is “all about me”
When you add all of that up, if you reach out with a product-selling sales pitch, you immediately trigger “salesperson trying to sell something” alarms, which could start to annoy the prospect.
If you were the only salesperson reaching out to your prospects, you might be able to get away with this type of approach. But you are not, so you need to understand that and modify your game so that you don’t look like the next annoying salesperson trying to sell something. The first step is to decrease how much you talk about the product or service you sell.
2. Focus on the value you offer
You may hear that and think, “If I don’t talk about my product, what will I talk about?” The trick here is to replace talking about your product with talking about the value your product delivers.
For example, if you sold Peloton exercise bikes, there are a lot of fancy and interesting features and details of the bike. When you talk about these, you are talking about the product and leaning toward a product-selling sales pitch. And what you can do is minimize that and focus on the benefits the product delivers:
- Make exercising fun
- Easier to get into a consistent exercise routine
- Reach and exceed health improvement targets
- Improve and transform health and life
Not only does this change in focus decrease your annoying salesperson image, but it also helps you talk more about what the prospect really cares about: “What is in it for me?”
3. Make it more about the prospect
Another way to be a less annoying salesperson is to make it more about the prospect than you. This is also different from what product-selling salespeople do because when they talk about their product, they are “all about me.” Not only is it annoying to have a salesperson push something on you, but it is also annoying to interact with someone who is only interested in their own stuff.
You can immediately flip that by making your interactions and communications more about the prospect than about you and your product. Not only will this be less annoying, but it will also make your interactions with prospects more engaging.
4. Talk about the prospect’s challenges
One thing about the prospect you could shift toward talking about is the challenges they are having or the areas where there is room for improvement. While talking about any challenges is better than pitching your product, the optimum way to do this is to try to talk about challenges in the area where your product or service can help.
To help with this, try to create a list of pain points your product or service can solve, minimize, or avoid.
Ask good questions
And the best way to get conversations centered around the prospect’s challenges is to ask good questions. You can actually take your list of pain points and create a question or two for each pain point. This list of pain questions can be the centerpiece of your sales script for cold calls and appointments.
Not only will these questions help you learn more about prospects and uncover leads and opportunities, but they will also make you less annoying because you will look more like a consultant than a product-pushing salesperson.
