Successful Cold Call Selling: Over 100 New Ideas, Scripts, and Examples from the Nation's Foremost Sales Trainer

This is an incredible book, both for learning about sales and for brushing up on old techniques. It is much more than the title suggests. It gives suggestions on how to find sales opportunities and gives techniques for capitalizing on those opportunities. This book was recommended to my by my boss, and it has helped me to become the top salesman in my region. My boss, who has been in sales for 20 years, still reads through it every now and then to keep his skills sharp. I highly recommend this book to anyone is sales, newbie or vet!

Boyan's book really follows through with the idea that it's not about you it's about them(the potential customer). He really focuses on looking for benefits and presenting these benefits to the client. This idea of helping other's to see potential in ideas they hadn't thought of before is really where the heart of this book is at. The only reason it's not five stars for me is that it seems a bit lengthy and repeditive in a couple of spots, but beyond that two thumbs up. :)

First of all, my career background touchesmany fields, such as computers, internet, customer service, sales, telemarketing, insurance, finance, telecommunicationsand so on.In a previous existence or job, I handledthousands of outbound sales calls, mixedwith inbound, as well.I've done veyr well well in my field, but also,I've witnessed some sales superstars with equaland sometimes, even better sales experience and results than my own.Reading the 260 pages of this book, by Mr Lee Boyan,I have to admit this man is the right man to coachveteran and newbie sales reps alike.The door-to-door selling, or in personal sales,coupled with telemarketing or outbound sales,advice is obviously, plainly based in reality.Frequently, the advice he gives, I find I've beenpracticing many of those points all along, bylearning through my own mistakes, but also, byknowing what worked the best, and by natural talent,and also, by picking up from co-workers.The bottom line, is that this book will easily FINE-TUNEyour own techniques, approaches. It will inform youof new skills, perhaps you've never used in a jobsituation (either on the phone, or in person, orsetting appointments). It will make you realize of manysmall tricks you felt were "your own" but actually, aretechniques all pros should be using, all the time, on the job.This book was written 1983, and then revised in 1989,yet it feels like it was written this year !!!That's how good it is.

The author did a very good job of sticking to his objective of only teaching you cold calling techniques; that is, techniques to get the appointment, not techniques on how to sell once you got that appointment. He had many, many good ideas; some of which I learned, some of which I knew but had to be reminded of. I would recommend his book to anyone wanting to do a better job at cold call prospecting. The one big negative I would say about this book is that he took too many pages to get his points across, much too verbose. I got tierd of reading it, and kept telling myself, OK, when is he going to get to the point. Other than that, I would highly recommend the book.

Boyan's book is essentially a book about prospecting and turning those prospects into appointments with potential customers. He teaches readers to present themselves as problem solvers to potential customers' concerns. The emphasis throughout the book is placed on the customers. Boyan devotes a chapter to customer psychology and gives consideration to the reasons why customers make purchasing decisions. Although somewhat simplified, his suggestion for addressing a customer's concern by paraphrasing it so the customer feels like you understand him, and then offering a solution can be used in a number of ways to persuade customers to make an appointment with you. The only problem is he only presents one way to address a customer's concerns and pretty soon the customer catches on to your technique and stops listening to you. But still I recommend it. It's worth [the price], and the techniques presented in this book have lead me to make appointments with customers that eventually lead to $5,000 aluminum siding sales, $8,000 kitchen remodeling sales, and $4,000 windows sales.