First Call Fiasco - First Impressions, Lasting Rejections.

Despite all the "science" that's gone into sales & marketing over the last 20 years, we're still grappling with an old challenge - the consistently low conversion rates from 'lead' to 'opportunity' to 'close.' But here's the kicker: the root of the problem lies right at the outset—the first call. Many sellers brush off this initial interaction as a mere icebreaker. In reality, the first call presents the golden opportunity to qualify, establish trust, and ignite preference. It's no time to 'clown around.'

By the numbers

According to the Bridge Grp the average conversion from Marketing Lead to Opportunity is one in eight. Add into this that the “generally accepted’ conversion of Opportunity to Close is between one in three and one in six. If we take the middle ground (one in four and a half). That means you need 36 Marketing Leads for every deal – and that means you need to have 36 “first calls” for each closed deal. At those conversion rates – that’s just too many. You have to change the odds.

The Criticality of First Impressions in Sales

The adage "You never get a second chance to make a first impression" is particularly poignant here. Psychological research underscores the rapidity and permanence of first impressions. Within moments of an encounter, humans form lasting judgments, influenced by a myriad of cues. In B2B sales, this initial judgment can significantly sway the prospect's perception.

The Reality of First Calls in B2B Sales

Many sellers mistakenly perceive the first call informally—an opportunity to introduce themselves and their offerings without delving into substantive discussions. This is a mistake. The truth is, first calls are more than just pleasantries; they're the first step in a complex dance of building rapport, establishing credibility, and aligning offerings with the prospect's needs.

The Role of Preparation in Elevating First Calls

At the heart of many unsuccessful first calls is a glaring issue: poor (or mediocre) preparation. This lack of readiness manifests in various detrimental ways:

• Lack of Prospect Research: A seller unfamiliar with the prospect's business, industry challenges, and specific needs can hardly tailor their pitch effectively, let alone demonstrate genuine understanding and empathy.

• Inadequate Solution Knowledge: Without a thorough grasp of their own offerings, sellers struggle to articulate the value proposition convincingly, and even worse fail to connect Business Problem/Opportunity => Your Solution = > Outcome.

• Unprepared for Objections: Sellers not ready to address common objections fail to instill confidence, crucial in building trust. The better opportunity here is to surface the “gnarly” issues. They’ll only come back to haunt you later anyway, and as Rick Page famously said, “if you’re going to lose…lose early.” For instance, if you’re “never the cheapest game in town” set the expectations up front (as well as setting some competitive traps.) You can then focus the conversation from that point on around “value,” as well as qualifying hard. Assuming you get to a serious pricing conversation, this will avoid any "surprises."

• Personalization Deficit: In today's market, a generic pitch is a missed pitch. Prospects expect personalized engagement that resonates with their unique challenges and goals. Sellers have to make two or three connections from the industry/prospect needs or wants.
  

Strategies for Successful First Calls

Transforming the first call from a procedural step to seizing a strategic advantage involves preparation. And then more preparation and then some more!

• Do your Research: Prior to the call, invest time in understanding the prospect's business landscape, pain points, and aspirations. This knowledge not only informs a more relevant discussion but also demonstrates respect for the prospect's time and challenges.

• Solution Mastery: Solution knowledge enables sellers to confidently navigate the conversation, aligning features and benefits with the prospect's specific needs.

• Synthesize the Two: Understand and explain the connection. This might involve taking some leaps – you can’t know everything about where the stakeholders are coming from until you engage with them. But with good prep you can eliminate most of the guesswork…most of it.

• Anticipating Objections: Prepare for potential objections by understanding common concerns within the prospect's industry. And hit the “awkward” stuff up front. Sounds revolutionary, I know, but be honest.

• Technical Preparedness: Ensure all technical aspects of the call, from software to hardware, are tested and functioning. A smooth experience reflects that you give a damn.
  

Implementing the Plan

Sounds easy – right? The problem? Lack of knowledge & lack of time. You don’t know what you don’t know and have less time to figure it out. Cognitive overload is imminent…Condition Red! Just dust off the old, vanilla first call “playbook,” that’ll work - right?... Probably not.

Conclusion

This is all about achieving what’s fashionably known as situational fluency and then moving on from fluency to dominance. It’s about inspiring confidence in your team and yourselves. If you don’t feel ready and well prepared, you’ve already lost. Who did that used to be …until a few years ago the Chicago Cubs? Or as Sun Tzu said, "all battles are won, before they are fought.”

Well, I suppose we can help you with that. See how.

Erase Sunday p"ai"n using ai g"ai"n. Finally - Beat the Sunday Scaries"

I always hated the Sunday Scaries (who doesn’t?), even in the early part of my career when sometimes I thought I had nothing to worry about. They weren’t bad when I worked for a good company that treated people well. That seems to be a thing of the past. The Scaries were much worse when you had a loser boss or “teammates” – particularly the bullying types, which seems to be the majority these days. Without dwelling on the toxic workplace let’s figure out what the Sunday Scaries are and maybe how we can use (yes, you guessed it…) artificial intelligence, to combat them.

What Are the Sunday Scaries & Why Do We Get Them?

The Scaries? They’re that feeling of dread that creeps up on you as Sunday afternoon starts to turn into Sunday evening. They’re the wave of anxiety about the impending work week. The shadow that’s cast by looking ahead. What's really happening in your brain and body during these moments? It's a fascinating interplay of psychology, neurology, and sociology.

1. Anticipatory Anxiety: This is your brain's natural response to upcoming stress. It activates the amygdala, triggering the release of stress hormones like cortisol, as you think about the upcoming workweek.

2. Modern Work Culture: Societal pressures equating busyness with success intensify feelings of anxiety and dread about work, particularly evident on Sundays.

3. Weekend-Weekday Contrast: The shift from weekend freedom to weekday responsibilities creates a psychological jolt, leading to heightened anxiety on Sunday.

4. Disrupted Routines: Changes in sleep patterns and routines over the weekend can disrupt your body's internal clock, contributing to Sunday evening stress.

5. Coping Strategies: Recognizing these patterns allows for better coping mechanisms, such as mindfulness, relaxation, and strategic planning (like using AI tools) to ease into the workweek.

How to Combat the Scaries

Now, let's not just wallow in our Sunday sorrow. Here are some tips to combat those Scaries:

1. Plan Ahead: You could spend a few minutes on Friday jotting down Monday's tasks. Don’t wait until Sunday night to do this, which is what most of us do. It's like leaving breadcrumbs for your future, anxious self.

2. Sunday Funday: Keep yourself engaged in activities you love. Distraction is a powerful tool. In my twenties, during the Summer months, I used to play cricket (it’s like baseball) ALL weekend.

3. Relaxation Rituals: Whether it's yoga, reading, or watching your favorite show, establish a Sunday ritual that calms your mind.

4. Perspective Shift: Remember, work is just one aspect of life. Don't let it steal your Sunday joy.

Focus on planning

Planning? What a bore! Lett's spice it up with a couple of (pretty good) clichés – "those who fail to plan, plan to fail." AND the law of the Seven Ps “proper planning & preparation prevents p*** poor performance.” As much as you want to defend the weekend and squeeze the last juice of joy from it, you don’t want the specter of last minute catch-up on a Sunday evening looming over you, but that problem isn't gonna solve itself. Plan your way out of it! Get the planning & prep out of the way on Friday and then crack on with your weekend.

Sales World

People not in sales tend to think of it as all back slapping & palm pressing, golf and dinner, and all that jazz. Newsflash - It’s not that entertaining. If you’re not travelling on a Monday morning (and even if you are) there’s usually “team” meetings coming up. You know the ones - where a cast of thousands want to review your pipeline and provide sage advice from their years of meaningful experience in development, or marketing, or HR or finance, or law or janitorial services – you know lots of useful (less) sources. Or there’s other team planning, deal meetings, and God forbid you have client/prospect calls to plan for.

The problem with this approach – proactive planning for the week - was that it took time. In fact you could spend all weekend planning the following week, and by the time you were done with the planning it was Sunday night already! Without being a bore, the era of artificial intelligence is able to better equip you and really deliver on the idea of working smarter NOT harder.

In spite of my trying to avoid being self-serving here – there are lots of emerging ideas and tools in the Sales sidekick category of ai. Whether you use ours is not really the point here – but our tool (and I’m sure some others) will literally save you hours and frankly do a better job with research, insights, thought provocation, preparation, strategy identification and helping you create plans, strategies, tactics & find answers, so you’re better prepared, faster and with less effort for the roller coaster ride of the following week!

Final thought – sales is obviously not the only “world” out there – but it’s what we deal with. There’s lots of jobs where you suffer the Sunday Scaries, and you can plan your way out of all of those just as well. What you shouldn’t do is kick the “Monday Morning” can down the road into Sunday night. One of the things we dread, whether is Sunday night or not, is being unprepared. Who doesn’t, or hasn’t, suffered the dream of showing up for an exam to realize you know nothing about the subject…plus you may, or may not, be wearing any clothes! Having a considered plan that we feel good about can take hours, if not days to formulate, and it can cloud your mind when you’re trying to enjoy your weekend. In the case of sales, whether it’s an account plan, a territory plan, or a reactive plan to changes in a sales pursuit, they are challenging and time consuming. With the selective use of a.i., the cliché of “working smarter, not harder” might actually be achievable.  

When Just-in-Time Beats Just-in-Case

Imagine a seller we'll call Jack. Jack just sat through a week-long sales boot camp (in person or otherwise) – in person or even worse on seemingly endless, soul destroying (but cheap) zoom calls. By Friday, his brain is like a sponge that's been left under a running faucet—dripping with excess information and incapable of soaking up another drop. Jack, like so many in his field, is a victim not just of bad timing in training, but also of the corporate belief that when it comes to training, more is always better. Spoiler alert: It's not.

When Just-in-Time Beats Just-in-Case

Traditional sales training operates on a "just-in-case" model. It's the equivalent of learning how to fix a tire before you even know how to drive—sure, it might come in handy someday, but by the time you need it, you'll probably have forgotten which tool does what. Contrast this with the "just-in-time" model, which is like having a mechanic show you the ropes when you're roadside with a flat. This method ensures that learning is immediately relevant and applicable.

The benefits of just-in-time learning aren't just anecdotal. The Forgetting Curve—a concept first introduced by psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus—demonstrates that without reinforcement, we start losing the memory of learned knowledge in a matter of days. In fact, research suggests that within one hour, people will have forgotten an average of 50 percent of the information presented. Within 24 hours, this number rises to 70 percent, and if a week passes without that knowledge being applied, up to 90 percent could be lost. That’s not just a curve; it’s a cliff.

Imagine we plot Jack's training retention on a graph. It wouldn't be a slow, gentle slope but a steep dive, like a rollercoaster when you've just reached the peak and are bracing for the drop. Now, that’s the type of adrenaline rush you want your sales team to avoid - right?

Cognitive Overload: When More is Less

Then there’s the information overload. It’s the age of big data, but bigger isn't always better, especially when it comes to learning. Cognitive load theory tells us that our working memory has limits. Bombard it with too much information, and you'll jam the gears. Sales training is full of too much information, and crammed with complexity.

In our age of multitasking myths, cognitive overload is the supervillain. It swoops in when we pile up the sales techniques, sales methods, strategies & tactics, industry insights, political know-how, psychology, neuroscience, expecting sellers (veterans, rookies & everyone in-between) to switch gears at lightning speed. But here's the kicker: A study published in the journal 'Computers in Human Behavior' found that participants who multitasked during cognitive tasks experienced significant performance drops. In terms of sales training, this means that the more we dump on our trainees at once, the less they’re actually learning. It's like expecting Jack to learn to juggle while riding a unicycle. Entertaining, yes. Effective? Not so much. And as our window of opportunity to spend time with prospects continues to close – we have to be at our best when these opportunities present. 

It's complicated…and expensive

There's a peculiar badge of honor that sales training seems to pursue—complexity. Somewhere along the line, we started to measure the effectiveness of a training program by how intricate it could become. Instead of sticking to the core principles of sales we've entangled the process with a labyrinth of techniques, acronyms, and processes and the modern affliction of “cleverness.” This convoluted approach may have succeeded in making sales training seem like an arcane art only accessible to the few with a Rosetta Stone, but in reality, it has done a disservice to many sales professionals. They're often left with a toolbox so overstocked and disorganized it's nearly impossible to find the right tool when the moment of truth arrives in front of a prospect. Simplicity is the soul of efficiency, but sales training has forgotten this, opting instead for a complex system where more is less.

The sales training response to this has been the deployment of the “invaluable” “deal coach.” This is a  more recent phenomenon (compared to the much older one of getting bent over by the sales method & training experts). This is where company leaders seem to admit that they are unwilling or incapable of quarterbacking their sellers through more convoluted deals, and bring in expensive, fraudulent “experts” – deal coaches. Once again the actions of the leadership come into question. Clearly the question should then be “well if you can’t guide & coach your team through the more challenging deal cycles and sales motions (another fabulous BS phrase), what are you doing?”

Shining the light

So, what’s the takeaway? The old approach to sales training needs to be put out to pasture. And this idea of needing the modern version (the deal coach) is an admission of defeat.

Instead, it's time to accept the weaknesses of training & take a new approach. —use targeted, timely, readiness thinking, ideas and tools. Provision advice, insights and ideas as close to the prospect engagement point as possible, getting  sellers better prepared, faster and with less effort. Let's give Jack and his colleagues what they need when they need it, so that information is a tool they use, not a flood they feel will drown them.