How to blow an inbound sales call in 10 seconds

Happy 4th of July everyone!

Just like countless sales professionals, I use my cell phone as my main number to be reached out since I’m mobile and travel quite a bit to see clients and prospects.

On Thursday afternoon, I happened to get a call from Ontario, Canada.

Usually I answer the phone in some sort of variance of, “Good afternoon, this is Ray.”

I had just gotten an email via LinkedIn from a company in Canada and thought it was this company following up by phone so I answered “Hello?”.

He didn’t identify himself but started asking questions so I assumed it was a follow up sales call.

It wasn’t! It was a tech company who came across my website and was interested in my lead generation services.

Ouch!

I tried to explain this to the gentleman but no success and I wasn’t able to get the conversation on track.

2 takeaways:

1.  If you’re not ready to take a call for whatever reason, don’t answer it and let it go to voicemail. It should be obvious to me after doing this for 12 years, but we all make sales mistakes.

2. We all get inundated with calls and sometimes we don’t know if they’re personal or professional. Always err on the side of being friendly professional. This guy who I checked out on LinkedIn was part of a technology company which is in my target audience and I blew it.

There’s an old saying that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. How true!

Please don’t make the mistake I just made. It could literally cost you thousands of dollars in revenue.