Call Planning for Call Success!

Ed Albertson

Vice President, National Accounts

Carew International, Inc.

“An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience.”

Ray Bradbury (1920 – ) American writer


“Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning." Thomas Edison

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." Dwight Eisenhower

“Hoping consumes as much energy as planning." Unknown sales professional

As sales professionals depart a sales training experience, one of the tools they typically take with them is some sort of call planning form. That form is accompanied with the best of intentions to use it in preparing for their next sales call. Of course, we all have heard where that road that is “paved with good intentions” leads and it is not a desirable destination.

Perhaps we’d engage in call planning more often if we paused to understand why call planning is so valuable to us and to our customers:

1) Planning focuses us on an outcome (Purpose);
2) Planning provides us with rehearsal time (Practice);
3) Planning reinforces our skills and process(Perfection);
4) Planning leads to improved results (Payoff).

Focusing on an outcome demands we consider what the purpose of the call might be, both for us and for our customers. That purpose becomes our guide for handling any deviation from the plan and sustains our discipline to remain on track despite interruptions, objections or unexpected reactions. Considering the limited exposure we have with each other in today’s business environment, being purposeful with time and others’ is perhaps the most considerate and strategic thing we can do in a business relationship.

Every skill-based human activity benefits from practice, be it an athletic endeavor or an artistic performance. Practice rehearses the mind and the body to function in unison and to produce consistent, superior results. Practice produces improvement in skills and provides a greater latitude within the discipline of process than without it. Sales calls have a smoother and richer quality for sales professional and customer alike because uncertainty is reduced and relaxed environment of confidence leads to a level of creativity that is obscured when we cannot escape doubt.

Skill improvement is typically experienced incrementally and in small, manageable steps toward perfection. Beyond practice, call planning with a planning form reinforces the skills learned, eventually resulting in those skills becoming good call execution habits, call after call after call. The very act of capturing our strategy and tactics in one place disciplines us to put into action the process we have learned.

Finally, every bit of data on the subject indicates that planning for anything always leads to better results. The payoff to a sales professional is measured in better use of limited and valuable time, improved outcomes, and further development of competitive skills. As we examine the other benefits of planning, it is apparent that each is inextricably related to the other, increasing the combined value of all.

Perhaps the greatest “take-away” from a training experience is not the skills we learn, but the application of those skills to produce the results we seek. Call planning takes us much farther down that road and deserves a second look from us in our pursuit of sales excellence.

Earning a Higher "Interest Rate" from Your Customers

Ed Albertson
Vice President - National Accounts
Carew International, Inc.

“Would you persuade, speak of
Interest, not of Reason.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
American statesman, scientist and printer


Telling versus selling: the great dilemma for sales professionals has rooted its way into the very foundation of human nature. A variety of research studies has consistently proven and quantified the fact that human beings are overwhelmingly self-focused and our perceptual orientation routinely reflects that fact. We can not help but see the world through a lens that first filters how any incoming information affects us and primarily in terms of what pain it may cause or what pleasure it may produce.

Such a self-centered preoccupation often drives sales professionals to resort to logic with their customers as they outline the features and advantages of their offerings. Assured that they are acting within the bounds of reason, they are thus stymied when the customer’s reaction to their efforts is, at best mildly positive and at worst, defensive and possibly hostile. Faced with such resistance, the sales professional draws on even broader substantiation and worsens the entire situation. Instead of resolving problems for customers, new problems are created and mostly of an interpersonal nature. A sales professional can literally be telling their customer not to be positively influenced by the sales professional’s behaviors and words.

However, the selling process can be made far more effective if the sales professional has a conscious awareness of this aspect of human nature and considers the consequences of acquiescing to its effects. Proactively employing behaviors like listening, acknowledging, and exploring as part of the selling process demonstrates a sincere desire to understand a customer’s point of view and projects the empathy that builds trust, credibility and rapport in a relationship. Through the effort of making these “deposits in the relationship bank,” a sales professional can reap a higher rate of “interest” by their customer, both figuratively, and literally.

Soft Sell versus Hard Sell

Chuck Terry
Executive Vice President - CSO
Carew International, Inc.

The terms “soft sell” and “hard sell” have been around for years. The marketing definition of “soft sell” can be summed up as a campaign or message that uses a more subtle, casual or friendly sales message. By contrast, the marketing definition of “hard sell” may be defined as a message or campaign that uses a more direct, forceful, and overt sales message. Unfortunately, the combination of the word “soft” with the word “sell” has left many sales managers feeling that a rep who “soft sells” customers is somehow less effective than his hard charging, fire breathing, “hard sell” counterpart. Perhaps we should refine the definition a bit further.

The Business Dictionary defines “soft sell” as a “sales philosophy oriented towards identifying the customers expressed and tacit needs and wants, through exploratory questions and careful listening.” The same source defines “hard Sell” as a type of selling “which promotes the application of psychological pressure to generate a relatively quick sale.” I don’t think many companies in today’s business environment would have much trouble quickly picking the “soft sell” approach as the most desirable process for their sales teams to employ. Most of the business leaders I meet with, who are looking to train their sales teams, are asking that they learn to sell in a more “consultative” manner, the definition of which looks amazingly similar to the definition of “soft sell” given above!

At Carew International we would break down the key elements of “soft selling” or “consultative selling” as follows:

1) Building Better Relationships: Most sales people I come into contact with are pretty good at building relationships that result in many of their customers becoming friends. This is a great skill to possess but one that must be enhanced to become a truly consultative or “soft” seller. The customer must trust you as an advisor that can bring value to their business in order to ask the type of deeper exploratory questions that identify the “needs behind the needs”.

2) Active Listening Skills: In order to truly understand a customer’s expressed and tacit needs a successful “soft seller” must learn to listen for understanding versus listening for opportunity. This requires leaving your own operating reality at the door and immersing yourself in the customers operating reality. Of all the skills we teach in our sales workshops, this skill takes the most practice and yields the best results once mastered.

3) Better Exploratory Skills: To understand your customer’s needs at a deeper level, a successful consultative or “soft” seller must learn to ask better questions. Asking better questions are, of course, a wild over simplification of the obvious however, we defined that in order to “soft sell” you need to indentify not only expressed, but tacit needs as well. Most successful sales people can uncover stated needs but uncovering tacit needs is a much more complex undertaking. A tacit need is defined as a need that is difficult to communicate to another person through writing or verbalizing. A good example would be trying to explain to someone how swim. In order to become proficient in “soft selling” you must learn to ask exploratory questions that enable the customer to partner with you in understanding those tacit needs that are much tougher to verbalize.

There you have it, a contrast of the skills required to successfully “soft sell” versus the “application of psychological pressure to generate relatively quick sale”, otherwise known as a “hard sell.” In my book, the better approach is really no contest.