Recent Articles from Sam Dobbins
Phone sales reboot 2015
There seems to be a dirty little secret in most businesses: We live or die by the telephone. Whether your inside sales team is following up on existing customers or your outside sales force is trying to get a foot in the door, the telephone is an essential tool to your company’s success. For the...
Cold calls, warm heart
Happy holidays! I can’t wait to add that phrase to my phone calls at this time of year. Everything about the season has so much to be excited for. I call it my “A-Game” time of year. Between Thanksgiving and the New Year a lot of sales people wind down, assuming that there can be no business cl...
Cold-call sales: Practice makes perfect
So, I'm in at a new client, and inevitably that client asks, "How do you make this cold-calling stuff look so easy?" Same thing happens with prospects. They shake their heads in amazement over what I can produce with just a few dials of the phone. I can get contact information, qualify a lead (or...
Why the phone still matters
Companies invest in social branding and sparkling websites then are left wondering about the return on investment for this effort. You engage in Facebook comments or personal news media and post blog entries and generally are left creating your company's news all day, every day (you can come up wi...
Harness your positive power
Self-motivation is the stuff of successful people everywhere. These "winners" in our society don't wait for permission to try the next bright idea, to put action behind vision, to start their lives. These people dive in wholeheartedly and turn their work into adventure stories with themselves as...
Courage to pick up the phone
They say that public speaking is scarier than death for most people. Standing up and putting yourself on the line is so intimidating most won't even try it. Teleprospecting can feel the same. Picking up the phone to interrupt a total stranger's day with a proposition that you work together is com...
The disqualified “yes”
There also needs to be a strong dose of skepticism when adding prospects to our sales pipeline. Payrolls depend on our accuracy. When we fail in this crucial area of our work, others become angry about our lack of performance, our forecasts become laughable and we're held in contempt. Our very job...
Stop those hang-ups!
The sound of being hung up on is the bane of every telephone prospector and sales person's efforts to sell. We try to be nice, interesting, even shocking, but to no avail. We're after just a few minutes of people's time. And yet . . Click! What's wrong with people? Don't they know it's rude to han...
Sales reality check: Excuses, excuses
The telephone sits on your desk, quietly waiting to take your message to some lucky person buried deep in the spreadsheet of names you have on your call list. You reach for the phone and . . . stop. Maybe today isn't a good day to reach out. Maybe your script needs a little polishing before you d...
Seven reasons cold calling will never die
Did you know that most people lie? They don't mean to, of course. They're usually very busy and don't want to spend time on the phone. So they'll tell you they're not interested in your product or solution while at the same time they're doing Internet research on buying the product you have to off...
Top sales tips for the follow-up
How much money are you leaving on the sales table? How many prospects disappear without your knowledge as to why? You designed a great marketing campaign last quarter. Why aren't the results what you wanted or expected? At the core, the answer to the questions above can be summed up in one thou...
The dialing for dollars game
As a pre-sales professional, you have cold calling as your main source of interest generation. It's a numbers game. Yet many sales people find picking up that phone intimidating or a necessary evil at best. But this needn't be so. Cold calling is a process of elimination. A no, and a no, and a no...