Each year, Alice Wheaton puts together a list of 150 potential clients she plans to cold-call.

She is prepared to be rejected by every one of them, and wouldn’t feel slighted in the least.

Chances are she’ll hear at least 150 objections, reasons her services aren’t needed. Chances are she’ll make more than a few successful sales pitches.

Selling is in her blood, and she understands the game’s nuances – knowledge she’s culled since she became the first female sales rep hired at Xerox Canada in Toronto in 1978. In her first 12 months there, she was named Salesperson of the Year.

Today as the Calgary founder of CoreGrowth Foundations Inc., she helps clients develop strategic sales systems. For the past dozen years she has worked as a consultant, trainer, professional speaker and author.

Alice Wheaton photo
Alice Wheaton doesn’t like to take ‘no’ for a final answer.

This week at the Calgary Chamber of Commerce (Sept. 18), Wheaton will talk about creating opportunities and closing more deals in a breakfast session entitled Cold Calling Strategies for Chickens, Cowards, and the Faint-of-Heart.

Everyone would be more successful if they had the ability to pick up the phone and promote their business, she says.

“Anyone in business who has an idea, or anyone who needs to influence someone else to get the job done, needs to be a salesperson.”

At the chamber, she’ll talk about motivation, fear, consistency, scripts – and she’ll answer a lot of questions. Typically, most feedback will focus on the objections a person encounters when cold-calling, or “prospecting” a potential customer – the stage where salespeople most often fall flat. The objections sound like this:

* “Your products or services cost too much.”

* “I already have a supplier I’m happy with.”

* “I’m too busy – send me a brochure.”

* “We have no need of your product or service.”

Too often, the salesperson accepts the objection and hangs up the phone.

When a potential client raises these objections, two things can happen, says Wheaton. First, these objections really do work to get rid of incompetent salespeople. Conversely, they help a potential client identify a good salesperson, who may have a product or service that the client may in fact require.

Wheaton explains that if a salesperson has a gracious way of responding to an objection, it’s the opening they need with the potential client. The client will want to hear more.

She uses this example to illustrate her point: “Imagine that the prospect says that the price of your product or service is too high. If the salesperson responds with a rhetorical: ‘If I could show you how you can save time and money’ . . . they’ve lost.”

Wheaton says that kind of response is ordinary, almost stupid.

Instead she suggests this response: “. . . money is important, and price is important, and before we get a chance to do business we’ll talk a lot about price. For now, would it be OK to discuss all the concerns that you have, all your requirements? And if you think there’s a match, then we’ll come back and talk about price a lot more.”

Wheaton says this response moves the price objection, a valid concern, to the side.

She has acknowledged the potential customer’s need for a good price, but also shown leadership to the client.

Wheaton has worked with thousands of salespeople and consistently finds that many have neither developed a concrete list of the objections they hear, nor have they developed good responses. When people know how to answer those objections, their fear of rejection is reduced because they have a system in place. They will be more willing to make cold calls, less inclined to accept defeat when the client raises an objection.

It’s human nature to govern our lives so we won’t be rejected, but when it comes to cold-calling, people have to learn to detach themselves from that emotion, she says.

“When I make a plan to cold-call 150 people, it’s OK if they reject me. There’s no emotion, no pain, no drama . . . I don’t need to be liked, but I do need to be respected.”

Like most entrepreneurs, Wheaton has had her downtimes – two-and-a-half years of “real impoverishment,” she recalls – but she always maintained a regimen. “In my downtimes I continued to cold-call. I was willing to fail. And I was consistent. That’s what created the upturn.”

Wheaton began her career as a nurse, and later earned her MA in education, curriculum, development and instruction. She was drawn to sales (at Xerox) because of the financial opportunity and challenge it offered. In 1984, she moved to Calgary, and a year later, not knowing a soul in the business community, started her own graphics company. Twelve years ago, she moved into sales training, speaking and writing.

She has drawn on her own experiences – she has now written three books to help convince people they can be successful, and has an international clientele.

If people are willing to be uncomfortable, willing to make mistakes and be consistent, they can succeed, she says.

In her training sessions, she helps organizations look at creating sales scripts that their salespeople can believe in – scripts that make sense and that have a value proposition.

Wheaton explains that too many entrepreneurs and people with great ideas fail because they don’t know how to cold-call. They print up a nice brochure, distribute it and expect that the business will roll in, that someone else will make it happen for them.

People who learn to cold-call, to prospect for clients, put themselves in charge, she says.

“And there’s absolutely nothing better than the feeling you get when you make a hit, when you make a cold call and get an appointment. That customer will be more loyal to you than if it was a client you got through a referral, or if you’d inherited an account.”

It’s a tremendous payoff for having the courage to pick up the phone and cold-call. It’s why she never fears rejection.

Web watch:
www.alicewheaton.com