How to Prospect as a New Salesperson?

Imagine a new salesperson, selling door to door in 45-degree heat. It’s the first day – who has received zero training. How do they prospect?

Chris Beall, a Sales enablement leader, faced this challenge when he started his career nearly 40 years ago.

In just two weeks, he went from a ranked rookie to a top seller in his state for his company Fuller Brush Co, an American direct sales iconic company that in its glory days had 35,000 US door-to-door salespersons.

This was Chris’s method of breaking the ice while prospecting:

#CHRIS: “Hi, I’m Chris. I’m your new Fuller Brush man. You probably don’t know what Fuller Brush is. I sure don’t too.”

He said this and kept quiet. An awkward silence & pause.

#PROSPECT: “How can I help you?” – more to end the conversation than anything else

#CHRIS: “Well, I have no real idea what we sell but I have heard that we have some products that are really good around the house that you cant find in the stores. If I were to go and do some research & find one or two of those that I think really change your life? Can I come back & share with you that?

#PROSPECT: “Yes!”

Chris explained later:
“Everybody said ‘yes’. It was a way to make me go away, shut the door, escape the heat & feel good about themselves being in control. The insight – the very beginning of a sales relationship is often an ambush. You don’t know a salesperson is at the door.
The salesperson has a goal. Customers want to shut the door. But a salesperson has a constraint on wanting to keep their image intact while not being a jerk.
How to ride that wave – tension in the customers’ minds between the goal & the constraint?
As a salesperson, you offer to do something for somebody. It lets them go about their business & they trust you a bit.”

Chris did that and went back with two products at a very low price – 1$ each. So unless they hated Chris, they would buy something from him!

Once you broke the ice and the customer is buying something – the customer may let him kill a spider for her – and buy 12 cans of spider spray for 120$. And turn the salesperson from an annoyance to a guest!

This is taken from a podcast interview ‘Outbound Metrics’ by Morgan Williams.

Link to the podcast:

https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/outbound-metrics/155-how-to-have-8-10x-more-vMc2x-NgVlf/

sales #career #rookie #prospecting #research