Mastering The Phones: The 3 Cs of Phone Skills Mastery (PART 2)

 

Mastering The Phones: The 3 Cs of Phone Skills Mastery (PART 2)

TRANSCRIPT: So, with those 3 C’s, it doesn’t matter what your actual word tracks are. If you can attack the phone as a competent speaker, with confidence in your abilities, and keep control of the call, you’ll win over 95% of the phone “battles” that you enter.

Let’s talk competence, alright? Competence is the first and the most important of the 3 C’s. Competence describes how well you know the material. This is the most important because, without knowing the word tracks ‘by heart’, as they say, you will struggle to build enough confidence to keep control during the call. Whether the word tracks are provided by a phone skills trainer or something you’ve developed yourself over time, can you repeat these verbatim at a moment’s notice? Can you, if put under pressure by a rude prospect, find, and regurgitate, the right responses every time? In other words, do you know the material backwards and forward? That’s competence.

This takes practice and there are no shortcuts. There are no magic pills or magic beans to give you competence. The key to learning the material, and gain the necessary competence is practice. Lots and lots of practice. Now, just like an actor learning his lines, you need to practice saying the words over and over again, until they roll off your tongue in your natural voice.

The best way to practice any word tracks you plan to use with prospects is to role play; and to role play every day. I’m not talking about the awkward, semi-formalized, and most often, worthless, role playing that occurs at training classes or in a Saturday morning sales meeting. Those are often too embarrassing to do anything but sink your confidence (another one of the 3 C’s).

See, we’re trying to build all three; competence, confidence and control. With competence, the role playing I want you to do is like an actor in an environment of your choosing and control. That’s where role play becomes effective.

So, how do you set up role playing in an environment that you can choose and control? Well, listen, if you’ve got kids who are old enough to read, create some index cards with all of the objections that you might get, on the phone, on the lot, wherever. Hand those cards to your child and tell them that whenever Mommy or Daddy (whichever you are) walk by to read you one of the objections, right? This type of role play turns learning the word tracks into a fun activity without any of the pressures or humiliation you get when you do it in front of a room full of peers.

If you don’t have any kids that can read; ask your spouse, ask your roommate, ask your ‘significant other’ to quiz you with these index cards. You will become great very, very quickly because you won’t be under that pressure that you are in another room.

Now, if you live alone, or you have a roommate you hate, no problem. You can still role play by yourself. Use post-it notes. Put them all around your mirror. Every day, when you are shaving, putting on your makeup, brushing your teeth; you need to take one of those post-it notes down, read it, read the objection and then overcome it.

Do it again, again, and again. When you feel great about it, put that post-it note over in a pile. Once you feel you’ve mastered that objection, place that post-it note over in the pile and then, over time, you will have all your post-it notes off your mirror and in a pile. Once they are all off the mirror, you feel CONFIDENT, right? You’ve got competence and you’ve got confidence and you think you can stay in control of the call; well, then, put all of the post-it notes back up around your mirror and start over.