The following is from a conversation between a fan of HPS and the author, and is published here with permission.
Hi Carl
Though I’m now retired I absolutely admire your HPS system, so enjoy following your posts etc including the latest “calling businesses/leaving messages”.
May I respond to this one with a thought. Do your students have to consider what their recipients experience when they cold call?
My pet cold calling irritants as a recipient are when I hear their obvious sales pitch. It instantly makes me immediately disinterested.
My pet hates are:
- “How are you today”
- Speaking their intro too quickly just to get it out of the way
- “I’m calling to save you money on your . . . Phone/energy/other “
- Thinking I should be interested in that!
So I wondered what others don’t like to hear when they get cold called. Might help them understand what needs to be removed/modified.
Ian Clark
Hello Ian,
What you say makes a lot of sense.
High Probability Selling was not created from any logical reasoning. Jacques Werth observed and documented what the top producing salespeople were actually doing, regardless of whether any of it made sense or not. So he discovered HPS. He did not invent it.
Most of your pet peeves are things that really effective salespeople already avoid doing. So we teach our students to stop doing those things. Not because it makes sense (even though it does), but because it works better.
I find that making sense of something is useful, because it helps me remember details, but making sense doesn’t make an idea any truer.
Aristotle had an idea about falling objects that made perfect sense (and still does). It was so perfect that no one thought to question it for almost 2000 years. Then Galileo actually tried it out.
I think selling is a little bit like that. Traditional selling makes a lot of sense, until you look at it much more closely.
I’d love to put your thoughts (and my response) in an article on the blog. May I have your permission to do that? And if yes, do you want to be identified in that article, or not?
Carl Ingalls
Please feel welcome to add comments with your own pet peeves about what salespeople say and do when they call.
Author
Another one for the list: Trying to butter me up with “You’ve been specially selected…” – Nope!
Any form of the feel, felt, found objection handling technique. This one drives me nuts.