How to Plan, Prepare, and Impress on Your First Sales Call with Finesse

Do You Give Away Your Power on the First Sales Call?

If you’re like most consultants in digital marketing agencies or media houses, your instinct when meeting a promising new lead is asking “How can I help you?” or “What would you like to do next?”… you’re trying to be helpful and customer-focused. But what if that first question is actually damaging your ability to close the deal and attract high-paying clients?!

Without thorough prospect research prior to the call, advisors enter conversations blind. And when you open the conversation by giving the prospect complete control over directing where things go, you simultaneously give away your power in the relationship. And that makes it infinitely harder to then reposition yourselves as experts they should respect and value highly enough to pay your full rates.

So if you feel like you’re scrambling to serve clients more as an order-taker than a valued advisor… you’ve reached the right page.

There is a simple shift in how you open your first call that changes that dynamic completely, and today you’ll learn all about it if you read this post until the end. Here we’ve outlined:

• Why asking “How can I help?” ruins your positioning
• What to say instead to gain control
• How you must conduct yourself if your prospect tries to take control from you

If you’re ready to master leadership positioning in sales relationships and attract local business clients who will value and invest in your services rather than nickel and diming you… let’s get started!

Open-Ended Questions Only Look Harmless, But They Backfire

Opening a sales call by asking “How can I help you?” or “What would you like to do next?” seems harmless. A section of digital sellers tend to think such opening lines show care toward clients’ needs, but in contrast, they make prospects see you as a less valuable aid. Here are the risks involved:

You instantly give up control. By opening the floor for prospects to make any request or demand, you put yourself in a reactive position instead of leading the conversation. This makes it difficult to wrestle back control and direct things.

You’re dethroned from your position of an expert. You appear to be willing to simply serve whatever random needs prospects come up with instead of having defined solutions they should pay for. And there’s another angle to it. If you come unprepared to attend sales calls, it makes you look unorganized to prospects. Consequently, you end up relinquishing your ‘foot in the door’ advantage by not using the opportunity to propose a low-hanging offering, which could entice the prospect. Ultimately, you give away that early shot to make an impression and unfold bigger conversations.

You allow your clients to undervalue you. If your tone is overly accommodating on the very first call, your small business clients might see you as unlimited help on-demand rather than premium specialists offering high-value services worth investing in.

Your introductory wordings can pave the way for wasting your own time. How? Some prospects will take advantage of such ‘pleasantries’ to waste your time on endless calls asking basic questions with no commitments when you could be pursuing serious clients.

You see, in-detail research about your target SMBs (which should be a part of your preparation) lets you anchor the initial call strategically and go past offering generic help. Precisely, if you’ve done your homework, you’d be able to spotlight specific pain points around growth, efficiency, or retention and match them to proven solutions. You can reveal industry insights they likely haven’t considered from outside perspectives. Most importantly, you can hyper-personalize messaging, meeting budget realities and the requirements of key decision makers.

What To Say and What Not to Say: That Is the Question

Initially, Guide the Conversation on Your Terms: What to Say on the First Sales Call

Lead with your proven value. Highlight your signature solutions and the unique expertise you put to work for valuable customers. Match your expertise to their business needs and digital maturity. Mix in competitive insights to make your proposal more compelling.

We have an example for you, “Your Google Ads seem to be driving a good amount of organic search traffic with over 4000 keywords and a substantial number of visitors. How about expanding your reach with display ads on Google to increase brand visibility and reach a wider audience?”

The above example clearly states three things:

• You are loaded with client insights
• You have defined offerings to address client needs
• You, as a seller or a consultant, are leading the engagement

Rather than just waiting for the prospect to tell you what to do, get your dialogues enriched with strategic prospect insights. BuzzBoard’s generative AI-powered platform Ignite is an advanced smart selling option for B2SMB sellers that opens new doors with effective conversation starters.

A comprehensive digital SWOT analysis for each of your prospects is a good starting point to prepare you for your first sales call with these prospects. SWOT analyses help you understand your prospect’s needs and pain points along with competitor insights, earning you the position of a trusted professional. Remember, you need to be the one saying, “This is how it’s going to work.” Using specialized generative AI tools to produce auto-generated SWOT analysis reports can save you a tonne of time and make you efficient with your prospect research and pre-call preparation. They help you identify talking points that you may miss in your manual research processes.

Don’t Frame the Discussion Around Client’s Commands: What Not to Say on the First Sales Call

While we’ve already covered most of it by now; don’t lose sight of the following during your preparations:

• Never present a vague menu, like “I can offer a variety of services…”. You must never convey your agency as a jack-of-all-trades, as it will fail to cement your core competencies and best-fit offerings.
• Never put yourself in a passive position by saying, “Let me know what you’re looking for”. You’re responsive experts, here to guide your small business prospects with your star solutions.
• Never be suggestive in your approach. As a seller or media consultant, when you communicate through, “We’ll figure out together what works!”… you’re giving your prospects a hint that there’s no established methodology or spreading an amateurish vibe. This may drive down the pay.

How to Maintain Control If a Prospect Attempts to Take Over The Initial Sales Call

The first sales calls might not always go as planned. At times, even when you position yourself clearly as an expert advisor, some prospects may still attempt to take the wheel and steer sales conversations off-track based on mere impulse, sidelining actual business needs. We suggest, you must stick to an organized process in such unexpected situations. The following could be your plan of action:

• First, guide discussion towards confirming they align with your ideal customer profile and are truly ready to address key operational priorities in a strategic way. If mismatched, politely decline to pursue further.
• Next, use your conversational expertise to draw out details on current business challenges. Now this might not be a cakewalk! Guiding the prospect to openly discuss their true pain points and everything negative that are impacting operations is the most critical phase. They may initially downplay issues to appear strong, but you must dig deeper by asking incisive questions to expose real business challenges. This conversational approach builds rapport while gathering intel. Then, probably, you can match issues to proven methodologies you’ve successfully implemented for similar firms.

  Sharing a digital audit report can oftentimes steer the conversation in the right direction and can be your best aide in establishing trust and being taken seriously. BuzzBoard’s Small Business Digital Audit Tool instantly analyzes any small, local, or mid-sized business by its website, revealing its digital truth. This absolutely FREE tool offers digital sellers and media consultants the complete health audit of any customer company by evaluating its digital presence across nine different dimensions, including Google reviews, social media, content, and SEO. The downloadable report is simple to share with prospects, initiating effective dialogues and impressing them with your confident and expert approach to achieving objectives.

• Time for solutions… but here’s an important lesson. Resist stating fixes outright. Take the path of explaining a clear game plan that you used to address a near-identical situation in the past and garnered client success. Remember, you must always spotlight real outcomes over empty promises.

Who you are, what are your areas of expertise, and how you can deliver real value—clear all of this at the onset to gain control of the initial sales call with your prospect. Clarity makes you close deals faster!

Of course, preparation and practice hone the discipline needed to drive exchanges with greater confidence levels. Additionally, pay attention to your soft skills, and take charge… not by overpowering clients but by showcasing total competence.