Selling isn’t easy when you’re an introvert. It involves interacting with people, distinguishing yourself in a crowd, and putting yourself at risk of failure – none of which comes easy to someone with an introverted nature.
Despite these challenges, being introverted comes with secret weapons that can benefit sales. For example, you may be better able to keep your composure during difficult conversations or when building connections with others.
When you learn how to use these traits to your benefit, sales conversations can be fun (yes, even for introverts!). Here’s how to do it:
Cold Calling Tip #1: Be Prepared
Operating off-the-cuff may feel especially difficult for introverts, who often struggle with the idea of cold outreach. Being as prepared as possible takes some uncertainty out of cold sales calls.
Here are a few steps you can take to feel more prepared:
- Research the person before you contact them. A quick social media search can help you find commonalities, such as schools you attended or previous work relationships. Putting a face to a name (even if you can only do so digitally) will help you determine how to customize your pitch so that it feels more personal.
- Determine how each prospect could benefit from doing business with you and communicate your value. How would your products or services improve their business or impact their bottom line? To help shape these conversations, you can leverage interactive value selling tools such as ROI or TCO calculators to collect real-time data from buyers and quantify and communicate the value of your solution.
- Gather your talking points. You want to sound like a human being, not a robot. Prepare a customized script and process to feel more confident in your sales outreach. That will also ensure you hit critical discussion points you might forget if your nerves set in.
Cold Calling Tip # 2: Anticipate Objections and Rejections
One of the reasons introverts struggle with sales – and with cold calling in particular – is a fear of the unknown. What if the prospect you called gets upset that you interrupted their day? What if they challenge you on something, and you fail to come up with a good response on the fly?
While it might not be possible to anticipate and prepare for every outcome, identifying potential objections and rejections ahead of time allows you to think through an appropriate response before they happen. That way, you’ll be more prepared to resolve problems while on the call or ease concerns to pave the way toward productive future conversations.
There is a good chance that your prospect will have questions about pricing, how your product is different from something they may already have in their tech stack, or the value of your product. Being prepared to address these concerns as they come up will make you much more likely to close the deal.
Cold Calling Tip # 3: Record Important Information
As an introvert, mustering up the courage to make the cold call in the first place can be challenging. But remember, even after you hang up, you still have work to do.Â
Whether or not you believe the call was successful, take the time to record important information. A few notes you may want to add to your CRM include:
- Was your prospect unable to commit? If so, make notes about their hesitation or circumstances to make follow-up contact more seamless and relevant.
- Was the contact a decision-maker? If your prospect was below the power line, get and record the name and contact information of the person with the power to approve a purchase so you can engage them as soon as possible.
- Did you reach the prospect at a bad time? If so, add times they prefer to be contacted to their record and schedule a follow-up call for a more suitable time in the future.
Mediafly provides a flexible, AI-powered sales enablement solution so you can seamlessly integrate with CRM to automate data entry. That ensures the most pertinent meeting notes and content presented always end up in the appropriate CRM contact record without creating more administrative work for sellers.Â
Cold Calling Tip #4: Revisit Sales Conversations and Identify Opportunities to Improve
Introverted (and extroverted) sales reps can leverage a Conversation Intelligence tool to listen to previous calls and identify areas for improvement. Listening prepares sellers for more efficient, relevant, and meaningful interactions. Sales reps can learn from themselves while gaining invaluable insights from top-performing peers and valuable coaching from their leaders. Â
Managers can also use call recordings to stand up more productive rep and manager one-to-ones, coaching reps through past calls and better preparing them for future conversations.Â
Here’s a checklist you can leverage to help.
Conversation Intelligence can help you identify trends, coaching opportunities, and insights to improve the confidence of introverted reps and help them close more deals.
How Introverts Succeed in Sales
Being an introvert doesn’t mean you’re doomed to fail in sales. Recognize the innate strengths you bring to the table as an introverted salesperson, and use the tips above to build a sales playbook that works for you.
When you stop trying to emulate others and start working with your own strengths, you’ll see your sales performance soar.
Looking for more tips to improve sales rep performance? Check out our recorded webinar Growing in a Recession: 6 Steps to Sales Coaching Success.
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