Before you’re born you’re exposed to the way conversations work. You’re in the womb listening to Charlie Brown’s teacher speaking to your mum and your mum replying to them. They both stutter, pause, stumble on their words, make mistakes and sometimes get lost for words - all normal conversational stuff. Some months later you arrive in the world and you continue your conversational master class. When you’re a toddler, one of your favourite pastimes is to pretend to speak to someone on a toy phone (or a shoe). But now you shy away from making and taking phone calls - do you have telephonophobia? And what can be done about it?

Asking insincere questions to people you’ve never met doesn’t build rapport.

Asking insincere questions to people you’ve never met doesn’t put the prospect at ease.

Asking insincere questions to people you’ve never met makes you seem untrustworthy.

Don’t worry thought, not all of the sentences in this blog start with the same eight words as we look at five of the many reasons your cold outreach efforts might be failing and what you can do about it.

Let’s face it, good sales people can be expensive. At the time of blogging Total Jobs research shows that the average salary of a Business Development Manager in the UK is around £42,500 and rising to well over £50,000 in some industries and locations. Perhaps it is time to consider outsourcing at least part of the sales process?

Sometimes “no” means something else in sales. And sometimes these “nos” are invisible or difficult to detect. But if we understand them we can minimise the number of times they happen and therefore lower the amount of rejections we get, leaving our precious egos and self esteem strong enough to sell another say. I believe that there are essentially three types of “no” so lets take a look at some of them.