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52 GEARS November/December 2007 A sk any good fisherman: You can get Mr. Fish close to your fishing boat with good rod- and-reel technique, but if you’re going to get him into the boat, you better reach for your net! Try pulling him out just using the line, and PLUNK! — he’s off your hook and back in the water, swimming toward an encounter with some other guy, in some other boat. Now, you’d never think of com- paring trolling for fish with trolling for customers, but we will say this: The guy who can pull ’em in comes home with dinner; they guy who can’t goes hungry. And there’s nowhere in the sales process where this is more true than in the very beginning — when you’re on the telephone with a prospect who has a car problem. It’s here on the phone where the biggest percentage of fish get away, er, where seemingly-interested prospects have their heads turned by the glitter of someone else’s shiny lure. So why does a good salesman let so many customers drop — KERPLUNK! — off the line, when they had their telephone receivers hooked so firmly in their mouths? Because he didn’t use the net, that’s why. Converting a caller into a living, breathing customer in your waiting room — with a troubled car panting outside — is a specialized skill, with a special objective, and it takes a procedure that’s quite separate from the other aspects of selling transmission service. Which is where the new ATRA Telephone Procedure comes in: It’s all the net you need to pull ’em into your boat, and keep ’em out of the next guy’s. It’s simple… it’s effective… and you only need to make sure it gets used with every call to your shop. More on that in a moment. The new procedure is actually a complete system; the centerpiece of the new package is the ATRA Telephone Appointment Pad. It helps you make notes about the callers, remember key Focus Facts that’ll help you sell later on down the line, and give you all the words — so you’ll say just the right thing in response to anything the caller might ask. Uh-oh! Suddenly our little watercraft is pitching! Could it be the phrase “give you all the words” that’s causing the tur- moil? At first, a lot of guys bristle when they get a sales procedure that contains a script. (You may feel yourself bristling even as you think about it!) They like to think they’ve got what it takes natu- rally to be a smooth, successful salesman who can “button-up the close” and “put the sale on ice,” and all those sales manager-type, rah-rah! clichés. But put ego — misplaced ego, it turns out — aside, and you’ll see that when there’s a lot at stake, a lot of really smart com- municators work off a script. Every president and presiden- tial candidate for the last 50 years (since the dawn of the TV age) has had fully-scripted answers to every conceivable question; and then, for debates and press conferences, has practiced to make bad news sound good — all right, maybe that’s a bad example. Every telemarketer who calls you at the stroke of dinnertime has a script that he or she is using to sell you some- thing — okay, another bad example. But all kidding aside, smart sales guys and smart communicators use scripts for one simple, and simply imperative, reason: When you use a script, you’re freed! You don’t have to worry about needing to think up the best answer — you can invest your energy listening to the customer, and making sure you know exactly what he’s asking… a much more productive investment. Take a look at the illustration of the Telephone Appointment Pad on page 53. On the right-hand side, there’s an actual pad that takes you through the course of a telephone contact. First Make Room in Your Tackle Box for Great New ATRA Phone Procedure! by Steve Bodofsky
