Odds are your pitch loses more than it wins, but you can break the bank!
Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas, where you can break the bank, or end up broke, or where you dress for success yet you can lose your shirt on one hand of poker.
Listen to the audio version of this article here:
In a casino, there’s a rule everyone knows, that “the ‘house’ always wins” and yet they gamble anyway, just for fun! But, is it fun losing it all anywhere else in life than the casino floor? Why would we take this philosophy anywhere outside the Disneyland of win, lose or draw?
Would you take uncalculated business risks with the precious, few marketing dollars you’ve managed to allocate, investing in things that maybe will bring you new business, putting it all on “red 7” and praying “daddy needs a new pair of shoes?
I didn’t think so. Neither would I.
So why, then, would you gamble on pitching to a prospect you don’t know that well, or that you’ve talked to for only a minute or so? That’s what you’re doing when you start detailing the bullet-point features and benefits of what you’d like to sell them.
This is what you’re doing when you pitch, pitch, pitch to anyone who’ll let you sit and talk, talk, talk. But because you don’t know anything about odds in sales, you pack it all into your pitch and you fail, fail, fail!
But here’s a story I’ll tell you about someone who compelled me to delineate the ins and outs of just how he failed to get me to buy, by taking a gamble that I would like his pitch. And how he kept betting on that pitch instead of me, a sure thing, and lost it all.
And, better yet, I’ll tell you why, so you can see, not only what he did wrong, but what he actually should have done, the thing that would have actually gotten me to buy.
And I really would have too!
You see, WHY he failed is also the reason WHY people buy when they do, and WHY you fail a majority of the time and “the house always wins” the time you don’t mind this one, cardinal rule.
Why do salespeople “bet it all on Red 7” when odds are against it?
I’m not going to lie. I don’t have the answer to this question, but I have some logic, a couple of rules of thumb and a short story about it that will make the question most irrelevant, as the real question should be, “What SHOULD you bet on to succeed?”
I’m not a gambler. Never have been. I can’t seem to put up any dollar amount of so-called “play money” that I don’t mind risking, a philosophy a good friend of mine who likes to gamble told me, who also, incidentally, wins a lot of the time.
Not me. I’ve always tended to lose.
But this gamble was taken by a telemarketer way back in the late 1990s, who got a hold of me by phone and had me in the sales pitch equivalent of a wrestler’s “headlock” trying to “pin me” into submission to buy. It wasn’t that he was using force, though, so much as the fact that he was taking a gamble that I was interested or had use for what he was pitching about his product.
In the 1990s, cell phones were new technology and very few people had them. You basically had a landline telephone on which you had to have a “Long Distance Carrier” for non-local phone calls, for which you paid so many cents per minute. The industry was as competitive then as the mobile phone industry is today, in fact, it was way more vicious than it is today.
There were three main brands of carriers: AT&T (the top brand) and then two competitors, MCI and Sprint. It was quite a cut-throat industry, way more than cellular is today, and you would constantly get telemarketing calls, with salespeople trying to convince you to switch, giving you the best deal around.
Having prior worked as a long-distance telephone operator and for the local phone company as well, I had a lot of knowledge about this, something this guy hadn’t accounted for. I had some time, so I decided to have a little fun and see how good he actually was.
And if you’ve been following my writings, recordings and training, you know I also like to hear pitches. It’s a great investment of time.
Would you like to hear how he did and what I did in response?
How I shut down a salesman’s pitch and then taught him a valuable lesson in sales
I picked up the phone one afternoon at my desk and a young man was on the other end, obviously calling from a telemarketing center. He wasn’t so “scripty” that I wouldn’t give him the time of day the way I grew impatient and even hung up on some robotic, script-reading phone salespeople in the past.
He was warm and pleasant and asked if he could have a minute of my time, that he was calling from MCI long distance and wanted to ask me a few questions about my current carrier. I thought he was off to a good start and could communicate well so, I deemed it a valuable investment of my time. Who knows? Maybe I’d learn something, right?
His only question was to ask me who my current carrier was, to which I responded that it was AT&T. He immediately went into his MCI pitch about all the things that made MCI better. But they were all based on price and how much savings I could enjoy by switching.
I was a little saddened by this since he didn’t make any effort to prospect me outside of asking who my current carrier was and I knew he blew the sale with me right there. But I let him hang himself with just a little more rope I gave him to really dig in on his pitch, which was really to see if maybe he may have gotten a clue and figured out what was wrong.
He didn’t. So, then this happened…
How did what this phone salesman didn’t know about me make him lose a possible sale?
All he asked me, mind you, was WHO my current carrier was.
Had he asked me WHY I was with my current carrier, he would have found out the wealth of information from me that was a veritable diamond mine of my “go-buttons” and his only possibility of getting me to switch! (which admittedly and even to this day I contend he could have done despite the following…)
First, what he didn’t know (and I didn’t feel compelled to volunteer) was that I had once worked for MCI, not for the company, but for a data and teleservices division of American Express in Tucson, Arizona. This group provided long-distance operator services for MCI at the time.
Yes, I was MCI long-distance operator number 680 back in the day!
What my training as an operator had done was educate me on the entire industry, how long-distance service works, and what the various companies could and couldn’t provide. And, in training, we were taught that AT&T was still king when it came to the types of services only they could deliver. And they were around forever, before the law stepped in to break up their monopoly a decade or two before.
This isn’t what I withheld from him, however, while he was talking, not letting me get a word in edgewise, telling me about the tremendous savings he calculated I would get, frustrated (I could tell) that he seemed not to be getting through to me and that I “just didn’t get it” in terms of value.
So I let him finish. It was finally quiet
Then I told him this:
“I totally see that there would be a lot of savings and I want you to know I appreciate that you’re looking out for my bottom line but, I have to tell you, I’ve been with AT&T for several years, and I use them because they have the best service out of all of them, and I’m willing to pay more for it.”
Now it got REAL quiet. And then quieter. And still quieter…
I could almost hear him thinking. But what I was listening to, I realized, was his “thinking” short-circuiting. I was breaking down his “sales machinery” and getting through to the guy himself.
Yes, I could feel his disappointment, mostly in himself, as if he had just almost won a race and was overtaken at the last second in a heart-break defeat. But, strangely enough, I knew I had broken through.
I didn’t give him the sale, but this one thing I did give him likely made him thousands!
Now, I’m not saying I went easy on him, but I wasn’t rude either. I gained a few takeaways from this experience and left him with a bunch too, and I made doubly sure he would cash in on it on the next customer and every one after that!
In this short call, he probably got the entirety of my full-length prospecting system, the lucky devil! (lol) But, seriously, I’m sure he took it to the bank in this and all future jobs he took after.
What did I say? I merely reviewed the call with him and told him where he went wrong. In his defense, it wasn’t entirely his fault. He was a good “salesman type” and had the right personality and outgoing sense required of such a job. But he was working with a company whose only way of competing with AT&T was in price, or at least that’s what they hung their entire marketing campaign on and what they were telling their salesmen to say.
I let him know that he needed to find out a lot more from people and that THEY would tell HIM how to sell THEM. If you ask people enough about their relationship to a product like yours, you start finding all the answers.
Scripts are never necessary beyond that. And pushy, “hard-sell” (poor excuse for, hardly selling at all!), pile driving your pitch home never did anyone any good anywhere, even if you were selling pile drivers to pile driver operators who had broken pile drivers. Even THEY might not buy from such a sales rep.
He appreciated the advice and I can tell he was going to make it. I know for sure he never made the same mistake again.
And I can pretty much guarantee, he never “gambled” again and instead went ahead in the direction of a sure thing in each sale he attempted thereafter.
A jackpot of sales advice coming from the sales gambler who lost big…
The house doesn’t always have to win in life. You don’t have to play.
Just don’t gamble is the moral of this story. Learn how to prospect the right way and you increase the odds in your favor exponentially with each new thing you find out.
You can turn the odds on the house and break the bank. Find out something useful about how the person feels about the general subject matter and survey what types of issues he may have or if he even considers these issues, as I cover in my last two articles “How to Sell to People Who Have Settled for Less and Don’t Want to Change“ and “When You Offer Help But People Aren’t Buying“ all to find out the difference between how he thinks and how you do.
If my telephone sales buddy had just done this, he wouldn’t have pitched a shortcut but would have taken the scenic route to get me on the same page. Only then could he have brought up his pitch and sold me.
However, if he had done it exactly right, he wouldn’t have had to do the asking.
I would have asked HIM what he could do for me and plead my case to him for purchasing the service. Honest, it’s true.
Leave the gambling in the casinos, bet on the sure thing when you sell.
I can’t promise you’ll win at cards or craps, but I can tell you there’s a “can’t-lose” jackpot waiting for you when get out there and prospect.
Maybe you “have to be in it to win it” to cash in at craps and roulette, but you’ll have to stop gambling altogether on your sales to win big.
Odds are in your favor you will. Just ask my accidental apprentice!
Want to become better at prospecting and selling in 1 hour? Get hold of my 1-hour Accelerated Audio Training “Stop Pitching and Make Way More Sales” here!
