Precall Planning and Opening the Call

Successful selling starts where many challenging undertakings start—with careful planning. In this course, you’ll learn proven techniques for planning your calls so that you know what you want to achieve and how you will achieve it. As a result, you will come across to the customer as prepared, confident, and professional.

Once you’re prepared, the next critical step is getting off to a strong start. In this course, you’ll learn or review important skills for opening your sales calls, ensuring that you get the customer’s attention. While "opening the call" sounds easy enough, there's a lot more to doing it successfully than meets the eye or ear.

Topics for this course include:

• How to plan
• Finding the time to plan
• Why you need objectives for every call
• What a good sales objective looks like
• Why it's essential to get the customer's immediate and undivided attention
• How to get past receptionists, nurses, and secretaries
• Techniques for building rapport
• The key characteristics of effective call openers 
• How to use those key characteristics to continually create successful openers
• Types of openers and how each is used