10 tips to mastering calls with your first customers

Sales calls aren’t easy but with preparation and training, they are an invaluable skill any entrepreneur can master. For anybody trying to master this "art", I'm sharing 10 tips to use in calls with interested potential customers.This process is a result of several iterations over hundreds of calls my co-founders and I have taken in the past. We distilled best practices and insights into what we’ve seen produce great results with interested potential customers:1. Approach inbound calls with the same seriousness as cold callsInterested prospects are great, but the job is only half done.2. Make a great first impressionThe first call is one of the most important stages in a sales funnel, simply because it’s a unique opportunity to make a great first impression.Interested prospects are usually evaluating other tools so you need to deliver more (and better) than your competitors.3. Take 5-10min to learn about the company and the prospectCollect information about: team size, fundraising, recent news, interests in common, etc.LinkedIn is probably the best source for this information and it will trigger a notification when you visit the prospect’s profile!4. Start the call by building rapportAfter setting a nice tone, make it all about them. I often get surprised by the amount of information prospects share when I ask open-ended questions. Example: "How do you feel about your current setup in terms of XXX?"5. Listen more than you talkThe time you spend talking on a sales call impacts your chance to close the deal. Top sales performers are known for consistently letting their prospects talk about 60% of the time so it’s your prospect who should be talking the most, not you.6. Make sure your research is well informedTry to get answers to your questions and have your prospects verbalized their pain points before you start pitching.7. Know when to give your pitchOnce both of you have acknowledged your prospect’s pain points on tip #4, give your prospect an adapted pitch about how your product solves their specific issue.8. Don’t try to oversell to unqualified leadsIf you don’t find good arguments to make your product useful to a specific use case, maybe it’s because it doesn’t qualify as a potential user.Acknowledge this and avoid wasting your time trying to sell. Instead, focus on creating a meaningful connection (they might be a buyer in the future when they move to another company or when the company's processes change).9. Have well defined next stepsWhen you see you only have 5 more minutes in your calendar, you should schedule the next meeting step before you finish the call and your prospect has to leave unexpectedly.10. Use this cheat sheet for your first 100 callsSales is not an art. The best sales entrepreneur is the one who studies the company, listens to the customer and is able to leverage his preparation.In my best sales calls, I was fully prepared with this cheat sheet.--------I regularly share insights with fellow redditors on this sub and twitter. Stay tuned and feel free to reach out if you have any questions. Happy to help! see hubwealthy.com/wealthy