Four Tips To Improve Tonality During Outbound Sales
Our voice and tonality plays a big role during outbound sales since the prospect has no visual information to factor into their decision making
. With that being the case, here are four tips that can help to improve our tonality while selling over the phone.
1. Don't Worry, Be Happy
What we can often overlook is that our internal feelings and moods can easily be displayed to others through our tonality when we speak. With that being the case, you can sometimes listen to the way somebody says something and pick up on how they feel at that particular time.
Applying this to cold calling, if we are nervous, unhappy, or don't feel like making phone calls, it can likely be heard on the other end of the phone and this could establish a poor start to a cold call. On the flip side of this, if we are excited about what we are doing and thoroughly enjoy it, that feeling will be communicated through our voice while talking over the phone and this can have a very positive impact when cold calling.
But how often do we really get thrilled about or enjoy making cold calls? One trick to use here make it sound like we are enjoying our cold calling even if we are not is to actually grin or smile while talking on the phone. This simple body language change will actually make us sound happier and friendlier over the phone.
2. Effectively Displaying Confidence
One of the easiest ways to give off a positive impression during outbound sales is to sound confident in our voice. It is very understandable for us to not be confident when cold calling as the person on the other end in some ways has more power since they can ultimately chose whether to talk with us or not. But if we truly believe in our products, in our company, and in the value that we offer, then we should be able to carry ourselves with a high level of confidence and have that communicate through our voice.
3. Communicating with Curiosity
We can sometimes communicate with a tonality that has a bit of curiosity during outbound sales to try to enlist the gatekeeper or prospect's help. This can be a frame or tone that expresses that we don't know exactly whom we need to talk to and we could use help being pointed in the right direction.
One way to accomplish this is to use tone and inflection that almost adds a question mark to some of our sentences. Below is an example of taking a very direct statement and turning it into more of a question creating a tonality that invites help and information.
Please connect me with the human resources manager.
I am trying to connect with the human resources manager?
4. Sound like You Don't Need the Deal
One way to greatly improve the way you sound during outbound sales is to sound like you don't need the deal. The two extremes for the impression that we could make with the prospect are a sales person that hasn't sold anything for a while and is worried about keeping their job and paying their bills and the other extreme is a sales person that has a line of prospects that are ready to purchase and is almost indifferent as to whether the prospect purchases or not. There is a tremendous difference between how a prospect perceives these two different sales people and we can improve our results by using tonality that presents us as being on the positive and strong side.
It is likely that we will fall in the middle of that spectrum but we will fall on one side or the other in terms of the impression that we make with the prospect. If we give off the impression that we "need" the deal, which is different than showing that we "want" the deal, we are not only giving up some power when it comes time to negotiate, but we are also sub-communicating fairly negative vibes about our experience, our credibility, and the quality of our products and services.
The best way to sound like we don't need the deal during outbound sales is to present ourselves in the same way that we would if we have already hit and exceeded our sales targets. If we carry ourselves like we are above plan and in a very comfortable position in terms of sales and pipeline, this will come through in our tonality and create a more positive impression with the prospect. We will always know how badly we want and need the deal, but if we at least act like we don't necessarily need the deal, not only might we present ourselves as very confident to the prospect, but if we do that long enough we may actually begin to trick ourselves to start to create real confidence that does not need to be faked.
by: Michael Halper
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