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.