Cold Calling Lessons from Elf You!

Just before Christmas I sent you a link to a funny, funny promotional piece sent to me by a colleague who lives in Paris, France and Cape Town, South Africa. The link was entitled "Elf You". Just in case you didn't see it click the link below to see what all of the chatter is about

- BEWARE: this may take a full minute or two to load.

- REMEMBER: you can copy and paste this into your browser if the link doesn't work for you:

http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1481770178

From left to right you'll see: Kim Duke; Jill Konrath; Wendy Weiss; and yours truly Leslie Buterin ... each of us recognized experts in our fields, we sure do look goofy ... what a hoot! Many of our subscribers sent me emails about this piece. Some had problems opening the darned thing, others were laughing so hard they just about busted a gut as they wrote to me.

We'll get to the profitable lessons that we were reminded of ... but first let's look at how predictable business problems can be used to bring laughter.

Why is laughter so important? Because laughter builds trust and trust is the foundation of every rock solid relationship. Be sure to read every word of this important post so you too can profit from business problems.

More times than not sales pros are fearful of the mistakes that can happen as their product or service is introduced to a prospect. Let's put this into perspective. Mistakes are going to happen ... period. No need to be fearful of them. In fact you can use them to your advantage.

If you've been in your business arena for more than 3 months odds are you already know 97% of the problems that can, will, or are going to occur with your new and existing clients. As a subject matter expert in your field, having foreknowledge of these predictable mistakes should ease your mind.

Get a load of this ... when you cold call executives and present your product/services those same high-level, decision-makers EXPECT problems.

Yep, that's right, they have never, ever seen a seamless installation of anything. The reason they are in their jobs is that they are fully aware that problems are the stuff business is made of, their jobs then are to do what they can to minimize risk and do what they can to reduce the number of anticipated problems.

Are you with me? If so, read on. If not read those paragraphs until they make sense to you!

Why not address the potential problems right up front and use them as a trust builder?

A few years ago I wrote a little book that goes by the title of "Outrageous Temp Stories". After collecting a bunch of stories from Staffing Professionals (who loved telling and laughing about the crazy things people say, such as "Oh, I gave you two social security numbers? That second one is my emergency number!), I wrote the stories up, had them edited and illustrated, and printed.

Now, our coaching clients in the Staffing Industry use those little books with their prospects as a way to bring laughter (and see if their prospects have even more stories of their own), a way to introduce the kinds of problems that in real life to come up, and to assure prospects that if/when these kinds of things happen they will be taken care of within 24 to 48 hours.

You can do these kinds of booklets for your industry as well ( or if you want our office to handle it for you, arrangements can be made to do that) and take laughter with you into each and every appointment. This is important because ...

Laughter builds trust and trust in the foundation of every good, solid relationship business and personal).

Now, for lessons learned from "Elf You". Here's the link again in case you missed it the first time:

http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1481770178

A. Some readers were unable to open the link. Here's what I do differently now because of their difficulty opening the link. I let my clients know that:

1) REMEMBER: you can copy and paste this into your browser if the link doesn't work for you

2) BE AWARE: this may take a full minute or two to load, which seems like a long, long time when you used to split second responses with the click of a mouse.

These reminders do not remove the problems, but they do let clients know that the problems may come up and what they can do to resolve it. This way clients feel taken care of which in turn reduces - even eliminates frustration.

B. I took advantage of the opportunity to correspond with Office Max -- and let them know that our readers ran into S-L-O-W loading and clicked off of the link in frustration unfortunately they missed out on a terrific idea altogether. This is a way to show Office Max (one of our prospects) that we're on their side and want them to succeed - yet another way to build business relationships.

C. Existing clients and prospects wrote back saying "this is hilarious" which in turn we'll leverage as testimonials for more fun, laughter filled promotions.

D. We're reminded that our scope is world wide and that appropriate business-buidling laughter is just a click away.

Visit: www.coldcallingexecutives.com

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