Cold calling 100 people a day every day for 9 months, except Saturdays and Sundays: Saturdays it was 50, Sundays I took off.<p>I sold insurance and investment products, and would grab the phone book and just pick a section and call the numbers/people in it.<p>Day 1-10 I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out. Rejection is personal and becomes internalized at this point. It sucks A LOT. You either get through this period and build VERY thick skin or you quit and decide sales is impossible and only doable by those "born with it".<p>Day 11: You realize talking to people is becoming easier and you are stuttering/stumbling/mumbling/apologizing less. You know 95% of all objections to your sales pitch. You realize your sales pitch either sucks or is non-existant, but you can verbatim introduce yourself and explain your product/service. However, you realize you are not actually asking for a sale effectively or handling objections properly. You are beginning to see the problems with your approach.<p>Day 11-30: You experiment with various WRITTEN sales scripts and objection handlers to see what works best. You weak this script until you have something you are comfortable with and works effectively to<p>1. Introduce yourself and your expertise,
2. Explains your product and service succinctly,
3. ASK for the sale effectively,
4. "Handle" prospect's objections and reiterate your service's benefits<p>After a month (hopefully much sooner) and after perfecting your script, you will learn that not everyone you speak with is worth your time nor is a potential customer. You will learn what makes a potential customer and how to qualify a prospect before asking for the sale and once you do this, you will vastly reduce how many objections you need to "handle".<p>You will also learn very quickly that sales is a numbers game: The more prospects you talk with, the more potential customers you will find, and the more sales you will make. If you understand that not every prospect is a customer and it typically takes 100 prospects to find 1 customer, you can gamify the process. My numbers always looked like this:<p>100 prospects -> 30 talk-tos (actual people i spoke with) -> 10 appointments set (people said they'd meet me/seemed interested) -> 3 appointment show-ups (actual interested people that showed up to meet me) -> 1 sale<p>End of day it takes practice and incremental improvement. I tried reading books, a lot of books, but realized I was simply wasting time trying to find a process, when the only thing to do was actually put in the work and improve the process I was already doing.