Sales is an Adventure,… Hope you got a toolkit?
Many years ago I started my sales career selling beer and bottled water. Back then, my company was a distributor for a competitor to Perrier called Ramlosa. Ramlosa was a mineral water imported from Sweden, and they hired tennis star Bjorn Borg to be their company spokesperson to promote the product in advertisements.
One particular day I happened to walk down the street I used to frequent, and saw the ‘Grand Opening’ sign for the Walken’s Cafe. A big sign saying ‘Grand Opening’ is a very good prospect for me so I went inside.
As I stepped inside I saw a man standing in the rear of the cafe with his back to me. The cafe was closed, and there were no customers today. Just this guy with his back to me. I must have walked in quietly because he didn’t even notice that I had walked in. I waited a few minutes, and then politely cleared my throat with a polite – “ahem”. Then the person turned around and looked at me with a crazy looking stare that went right through me.
At first glance I thought he looked familiar, but I didn’t say anything. I just stuck out my hand and introduced myself, and explained why I stopped in. About a minute or so into my sales pitch about beer, the man stopped me in mid-sentence and said, “Don’t you know who I am”? I told him that I didn’t, but did say that he looked familiar. Then he continued with, “Have you ever seen a movie called The Deer Hunter”? That’s when it hit me.
I said, “Hey – You’re Christopher Walken”! “What are you doing here”? Christopher Walken told me that he came to visit his brother Glenn, and it was he that owned the cafe.
After a bit more back and forth I walked out of Walken’s Cafe that day with a 100 case order of Ramlosa.
I think back about my encounter with the Walken brothers whenever I think about prospecting for new business. Today, I think about cold calling as more of an adventure than anything else. I’m always looking for my next ‘Walken encounter’. How about you? Are you dreading the very idea of picking up the phone and making a cold call, or are you looking for your next adventure like me?
If you are looking for adventure, you need to have the right tools. LinkedIn is a good source of leads for prospecting these days. With 300million people on it, you have lots of chances to have an adventure.
But one thing you do not get from LinkedIn is the phone number and email address of your prospects. Good news is, a tool like eMail Prospector can help you with that, it finds anyone’e business email address and phone# in seconds.
And once you get on the call, you have 10 seconds or less, to earn and hold your prospect’s attention. How to do that is an art, and I’ve packaged that art into a Kit which you can get – its called the Gold Call Script Building Kit. You can get The Script Building Kit right here.
And if you like both the Account-Researcher software AND the Gold call script Building Kit, you can get it for a $150 discount over here.
Cheers to your next adventure!
