How to actually convince Local Business Owners to Listen

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Barbarian

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So there has been a lot of activity on two posts based around local and selling to local businesses:
http://www.wickedfire.com/affiliate-marketing/16559-easy-way-make-100k-year.html
http://www.wickedfire.com/affiliate-marketing/21700-recipe-200k-per-year-job.html

One thing that has been relatively glossed over is that cold calling is hard. Selling is not easy - if you are targeting 'arrowhead marsh restaurants' - while it may be nice that you have some site up there, calling and saying 'Hi I'm from SomeSite.com' is like asking to be turned off.

A lot of the talk also has been on upsell - once you get the business into your 'clutches' (so to speak), you can then start squeezing more money out of them.

So what we've done effectively is essentially piggyback on the big brands - Google, Yahoo, and MSN. When calling we don't mention our site at all. We say hi! Want to make sure you are listed in Google Yahoo and MSN, alongwith SuperPages.com and YellowPages.com? Those sites get 200 million visitors a month! For only $50 a year we can get you properly listed. Search for 'business name' and you see they have a map in Google. Search for 'your name' and you see they have no map.

Of course the above language is generic and meant more as a guidance, but it is an effective solution at the main problem - making sure your cold call is listened to. Once you have a business 'in' Google then you can sell your services. Show them their OneBox listing on Google, and then talk about how SomeSite.com gets 100 people specifically a day, and how you can get them calling your business. And so forth and so forth.

I should note that this DOES take work. Submitting to all those sites is not an easy task. But you simply write down their info, and can have some outsourced person spend the actual time submitting it to the directories.

Hope this helps :)
 


Yes. Selling is not particularly easy if you are not used to doing it.
Nevertheless, it is a skill that can be acquired relatively quickly with some study and practice.

Also, outsourcing is a must or you'll lose your mind.
 
I remember when I used to do door to door sales when I was in high school. One of the largest keys to getting people to listen is to name drop services or companies they are already familiar with and then tie in your service or product to give yourself some credibility. Remember the common consumer can identify over 1000 company logos and what they provide, since they are constantly bombarded with ads every single day. Use this to your advantage and you'll have their attention for around 8 seconds to get your offer in.
 
I telemarketed for about two weeks when I was a teenager.
Other than being a contributing factor to my current neurosis vis-a-vis personal contact with strangers, I DID learn a few things about selling and coercive psychology.

1) NO ONE LIKES YOU CALLING THEM!
I was selling something that is now a very popular product, but before it's time. Those stand alone ATMs in the corner of shops and restaurants. They're everywhere in Aus now, but at the time, people would just tell me to fuck off.

2) IF YOU WANT TRUST, DO IT IN PERSON
People would Umm & Ahhh over the phone, but the guys that did the roaming sales got results, because they showed up. They had a laptop, and some nice glossy brochures with graphs & pie charts. It was all very impressive, and I get the feeling it inspired trust in the clients more than a phone call managed.

3) SHOW, DON'T TELL
If you have your product ready, even if it's only half a dozen businesses that you listed for free, that'll give you a lot more credibility. Have the website already active and show it to them.
Back to my experience: The roaming sales guys had videos of customers coming in and using the ATMs from surveillance footage. It looked easy for the customers to use. This was backed up with testimonials from some of the larger nightclub owners saying how they were making a couple hundred bucks a month from their cut of the transfer fees, but the real bonus was the extra money people had on their person, which led to increased sales as they didn't have to think about how little they had on them.
 
Right - #3 is the most important. Have a few businesses in Google/Yahoo/MSN and just show them with their nice little OneBox Map.

Yes cold calling sucks and people will hate you for it, but it is all about return on [time] investment.
 
When I was doing outside b2b sales years ago (merchant payment machines, supplies and services for same) I made it a point to saturate a fairly tight local area with brochures and cards. I'd go in, find the owner, tell him that I was lnot there to talk to him about the service as I was between appointments, but give him a brochure, make a little small talk about his business and possibly drop the name of either a nearby business or competing business that already had used the service. Keep it short, thank him for his time, be super polite and get out of his hair so he can get on with his day.

This rapport building process is time consuming but helps with conversion rates, because you are connecting with people before you ever pitch them.

Within 90 days do a blanket calling to set up two appointments in the area you were canvassing, and spend the rest of your time dropping back in as you did before. If you close one of the two appointments, you have a reference, and your chances of closing on the non-appointment "drop in" is much higher.

Pay attention to the people with whom you're speaking -- some might be seriously interested right off the bat, and might lead to business right away. Never ever do this when you actually have an appointment coming up, because you'll screw yourself by either cutting off a prospect early or showing up late for appointment.

If you need some confidence training, look in your local paper for job listings that say stupid shit like "Need 10 sports-minded, motivated people for expanding national company." Those are almost exclusively cold call outdoor sales gigs, and they can be brutal -- but will help you develop your pitch-on-the-fly skills.


Frank
 
fm1234 said:
When I was doing outside b2b sales years ago (merchant payment machines, supplies and services for same) I made it a point to saturate a fairly tight local area with brochures and cards. I'd go in, find the owner, tell him that I was lnot there to talk to him about the service as I was between appointments, but give him a brochure, make a little small talk about his business and possibly drop the name of either a nearby business or competing business that already had used the service. Keep it short, thank him for his time, be super polite and get out of his hair so he can get on with his day.

This rapport building process is time consuming but helps with conversion rates, because you are connecting with people before you ever pitch them.

Within 90 days do a blanket calling to set up two appointments in the area you were canvassing, and spend the rest of your time dropping back in as you did before. If you close one of the two appointments, you have a reference, and your chances of closing on the non-appointment "drop in" is much higher.

Pay attention to the people with whom you're speaking -- some might be seriously interested right off the bat, and might lead to business right away. Never ever do this when you actually have an appointment coming up, because you'll screw yourself by either cutting off a prospect early or showing up late for appointment.

If you need some confidence training, look in your local paper for job listings that say stupid shit like "Need 10 sports-minded, motivated people for expanding national company." Those are almost exclusively cold call outdoor sales gigs, and they can be brutal -- but will help you develop your pitch-on-the-fly skills.


Frank
Click to expand...

Man this is so true. About 3 years out of college I worked for this company
that reeled me in with an ad just like that. They also claimed that I'd make $5,000 a week if I just did 1 sales call a day. I was drawn to the idea of sales because you can make as much money as you wanted if you were skilled enough and worked hard enough. I always hated the idea of being capped by a per hour number. Same reason the Internet drew me in as well...


I was selling water treatment systems. You'd go into a persons kitchen, test the tap water (it was always full up debris) and proceed to try to sell them a $2,500 - $7,000 water softener.

Man that shit was brutal at first. You'd drive up to a person's house for a 7pm appointment and they'd refuse to let you in. If you got in and sold the shit and got the homeowner to agree to the company financing, most of the time they would have (according to the cocksuckers in the company finance department I was working for) subpar credit and only qualify for only a portion of the purchase price. That means that rather than collecting the $1,000 commission the company promised you got $50 bucks because of a "partial financing deal".

All in all everybody who lasted at that company for more than 3 months were absolute sleezeballs. I quit because they started changing the payout schedule at will when I got good at selling those damn things. I later found out that they lied about clients partially qualifying so they could skim your commission... Assholes

But I'll tell you this. That experience made me a fucking selling machine. Their training was great and it made you fearless. Made me better with women too... :) I couldn't care less if you rejected me, no problem move on to the next chick.. Ahh.. the good ol days...

Anyway...

If you got a plan to do local SEO sales and you need a crash course on sales, one of those outside sales gigs will get your ass up to speed in about a month flat. Take the skills and move onto your own thing...
 
Right - we do a great job on selling to businesses that come to our sites and update their info.

Slightly warmed-up.
 
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