Speaking with Intention

Timothy Atkinson graduated from Bennington College with a BA in Liberal Arts and concentrations in Theater, Japanese, and Design. While having a much different background than the typical sales rep, Timothy managed to capitalize on his eclectic education in the arts and earned a promotion to Senior SDR within just 6-months of working at memoryBlue. Upon hitting this milestone, Timothy shares some of his greatest insights since excelling in the SDR role and demonstrates how his theater passion actually gave him a rare advantage in the tough art of cold calling.

He has now joined our Campus Recruiting team and looks forward to guiding college students through the process of entering the world of tech sales and jump starting their career with us!

Building Rapport

Sales is about controlling what you can control. There are unstoppable defeats and there are unstoppable wins, but nothing crushes a workday flow like getting stopped by prospects before you even offer your solution. Although it’s hard to blame them as we’re hitting the crisp season of fall, a cold call starts to feel even colder. Chilly walks to the office do not beget warm conversations at 9:00am!

In this HubSpot Research study, it was revealed that Salespeople are only trusted by about 3% of the population. For reference, doctors and firefighters are at a little under 50%, and professional musicians are clearing us by far at 10%. We are trusted less than a Rockstar. Take that in.

Clearly, there’s an uphill climb from the initial answering of a cold call. And many times, we call people who say “no!” 100% of the time. However, there are also those who say “yes!” 100% of the time. In sales, it is our role to keep those who say “no” 99% of the time on the phone long enough to qualify them. How do we do that? Let’s start off generally: rapport-building.

My friend and I are walking down the street when a robber appears out of nowhere, stabs my friend in the thigh, steals their backpack and runs away leaving an open femoral artery. The first aid merit badge I earned in Boy Scouts whispers “apply pressure with cotton.” I rip off my crisp, white Hanes tee, ignore the guarantee of irreparable damages, and press as hard as I can against the wound. I also treat them for shock, but I digress.

Rapport-building is the salesperson’s crisp, white Hanes tee. My rule of thumb is for every ounce of rapport you build on a call, you can make one ounce of mistakes. Rapport applies pressure on the prospect to hold on a bit tighter while you work through the kinks in a new and unique conversation.

I want to get more specific with this and loop back to the beginning on how to keep prospects on the phone to hear your opening statement. The key is to build a strategy for rapport-building within the first five seconds. Let’s look at what the first five seconds are:

“Hi, ________. This is ________ with ________. Am I catching you at a bad time?”

Not a lot to work with here, but the most important time to build rapport is at the start. A Gong Research Labs study found that the top-performing salespeople build rapport in the first 20% of any given call. If I left my house to visit my friend without that crisp, white Hanes tee, who knows where we’d be. You have to leave the house with rapport in hand. But how do we offer that in a cold call environment where our visual cues aren’t available?

Using our Voices! Most salespeople think of the voice as a vehicle for their sales technique. It’s time to think of the voice as the technique itself.

But how?

So many questions, dear reader. Luckily, outside of Boy Scouts, I have trained and worked professionally in voice and theater. Someday you’ll be finding me in the next A24 film. But for now, I am helping you stop your calls from bleeding out.

I recognize that stating my theater background won’t build any credibility of my capabilities, so instead I’ll give you some of my accomplishments from my 6-months in tech sales to assert a clear intersection between theater, voice, and sales proficiency.

	I’ve reached a lifetime hold rate of over 85%.
	I’ve achieved an average of 160% for quota attainment.
	I’ve exceeded quota every month since starting.

Now let’s dive in.

Voice as an Asset

Being intentional with your voice isn’t necessarily a common thought, but it allows us control over those first five seconds of a call. To utilize your voice properly you must first understand how it is perceived. This is where you need to ask around about how people view you based on your voice. There are two important factors for vocal perception: pitch and weight. Pitch is about how high or low your voice sounds, and weight refers to the lightness or heaviness of the voice. Think of Morgan Freeman versus Michael Jackson in terms of voice. I think you can guess where their voices fall.

Whether we like it or not, our voices involve themselves in how we can speak to people. So often, we replicate the speech patterns of others without considering if it matches our pitch and weight. A voice like Morgan Freeman’s holds gravitas—the voice itself lends to being able to command the call (honestly, look at how he often plays God in movies). Not that sales should ever be pushy, but heavy-weight voices can guide the call differently than light-weight voices.

My voice is higher pitched with lighter weight. How people perceive my voice allows me to control the call differently. People may view me as more of an advisor rather than a commander, and therefore I work to guide them to their own conclusion. Ultimately, ask people how they perceived your voice when you first met them and see what you can find out!

Past that, there are a few general practices that will improve your first five seconds with a prospect. Largely, what’s most important is activating your voice. Konstantin Stanislavski, the father of acting, put it best:

“In every physical action, unless it is purely mechanical, there is concealed some inner action, some feelings. This is how the two levels of life in a part are created, the inner and the outer. They are intertwined. A common purpose brings them together and reinforces the unbreakable bond.”

 

Action-packed speech allows emotion to peek out from behind your voice. Therefore, we must activate our bodies and voices so that we can give the proper care to those who we are trying to hold hostage on the phone! Here are some general tips for all:

• Standing while calling—activates your diaphragm better than sitting, allowing for better vocal control and strength
• Smiling when you call—the voice sounds warmer when pushed through a happy face
• Writing out character thoughts

A quick guide to writing out character thoughts:

1. Write out your introduction and opening statement, putting every new sentence into a new line.
2. On the left of each line, write out an active verb or adverb (something that makes you feel something when you read it—the more extreme the better as you won’t come through as intensely over the phone) that matches with how you want to present a sentence.
3. Read out each of your lines, following the action you wrote next to it.

Here’s an example of my first five seconds:

Writing out character thoughts is the best way to ensure an intentional opening to your calls. Intentionality is key in sales. There is no guarantee of booking anyone, but controlling what is controllable is vital, and if you’re not including your voice in that, you’ve already bled out.

Now quit stalling the inevitable and get back to dialing!