Opening Sales Statements: Worthwhile or Worthless?
When it comes to opening statements, I guess I'm a purist. I believe that an opening statement should include a hearty hello, your full name, an identification of your company, and your reason for calling. Pretty simple, but simple is good.
Tony Parinello, a writer for Entrepreneur, disagrees. He thinks it’s not worthwhile to state your name and business after the initial hello. “It's too early in the relationship for you to pass along that kind of information,” says Parinello.
Too early? To say your name? To say why you’re calling? Okay …
Parinello advocates offering another pleasantry after the initial hello (“It’s an honor to finally speak with you!”) and then diving headlong into a scripted “hook,” which clearly is just a buzzword for “canned spiel.” Here’s his example of a hook: “"We've helped (three of the top five widget corporations reduce overhead costs by twelve percent this quarter--and they did it without laying off staff or sacrificing product quality)." Ugh. Maybe it’s my cynical Gen-Y makeup, but if I were on the receiving end of such a “hook,” I’d be checking my email before the guy knew the line was dead.
It gets worse. The big goal in your opening sales statement, Parinello says, is to “make it sound conversational.”
Call me crazy, but I think that you should endeavor to start an actual conversation with a prospect, not a phony one. And you should always tell the prospect who you are and why you’re calling. That’s just basic manners. And manners aren’t arbitrary—they exist for a reason, and if you master them they will help your cause tremendously. Being coy with someone you don’t know? Hitting the person with talking points before introducing yourself? Not cool. Worse, not effective.
Parinello’s “long-standing, well-proven statistic” is that you have eight seconds to make an impact in sales call. Here is Parinello relaying a story of how a colleague expressed doubt about the feasibility of his “statistic:”
Daniel was a bit skeptical about my eight-second standard. He looked at me and said, "Boss, eight seconds is too short a period of time! That's hardly enough time to take a deep breath, let alone make a meaningful opening statement."
We happened to be waiting at a red light when he said this. As the light turned green, I kept my foot on the brake and started counting: "One thousand one, one thousand two...." People started honking. By the time I got to "one thousand four," Daniel was begging me to get moving. By the time we hit the sixth second, the guy behind us was starting to get out of his car, and Daniel was looking for a place under the floorboards to hide. When I finally hit eight, the intersection was a symphony of honking horns, "pointing fingers" and shouting mouths. I hit the gas.
Parinello’s anecdote inadvertently makes a completely different point—one that actually undermines his argument. If you’re looking to make an impact in eight seconds, you have one option: Make them angry. Eight seconds is not long enough to engender a strong positive reaction. Remember: Negative reactions come easily. Positive ones come much slower, particularly on sales calls. You've got to earn it, not force it to fit into an eight second window.
What do you think? Am I being too hard on the guy?
