This story is from a reader of Baseline Selling:

Please read Page 43 of Baseline Selling. Since I’m over the embarrassment of screwing up something so simple, here goes. After almost 20 years of selling, managing & coaching salespeople and now sales development, I just learned last week how to leave a voicemail!

Nothing beats a great first impression and although you can recover from less than stellar start, it certainly helps if your first 20 seconds causes your prospect to focus all of his attention on you.

The key to getting more appointments is your ability to have conversations where you can ask, “is that a problem?” and “would you like to fix it?”

When you’re prospecting and you do finally reach a prospect, it’s discouraging when the prospect says, “we’re all set”. But it doesn’t have to be discouraging. There are things you can do to turn these calls around but you might be uncomfortable with it.

Many salespeople, even veterans, go through periods when they’re not effective on the phone. Salespeople who are new to a company face this challenge when they must tell the new story or ask the new questions.

Every salesperson in every business encounters resistance in some part of the selling process. Most salespeople encounter resistance when cold calling while others encounter it at closing time.

When salespeople share the list of objections they most often receive, very few of them are industry specific and most of them are very popular. When we assign those objections to the base path on which they should have been handled, the majority of the objections take place on the way to first base.

Red Sox fans are getting a fairly positive impression of starting pitcher Julian Tavarez. It turns out that he’s a free spirit, hanging out and having fun in the dugout with superstars Manny Ramirez and Daisuke Matsusaka. He’s pitching well and Red Sox fans are quite happy to have him on their team. He’s always talking, laughing and having fun and seems like a great guy to have on the team. But it wasn’t always like this.

Last week I received an email from a salesperson who attempted to get me interested in her web site development services by telling me that there were both major and minor problems with two of my web sites.

This may seem like a rant about nothing but I happen to think it’s a big deal. I think most salespeople do a horrible job at saying hello to their prospects, customers and clients.