A phone call with a prospective customer has one product: a date in the diary. The goal is not that they understand, or that they are interested, or that you send them an email with the details. The goal is a meeting that has been booked. The phone is good at settling when and where you meet, and it is not built to close a deal.
That sounds narrow, and that narrowness is exactly why it works. A product you can count leaves no room to argue with yourself about whether the call went well. It ended with a date, or it did not.
The phone books meetings, it does not sell
Everything else follows from one short line in the source: “telephones can be used to book meetings. They do not work well for sales conversations.”
This is not a view about phones or a question of style. It is a split of the work between two tools. The phone is excellent at agreeing a time and a place. The meeting is excellent at two other things: finding out what the customer really needs, and closing. Selling on the phone means asking one tool to do another tool's job, a bit like knocking in a nail with a screwdriver.
Suppose a consultant who gives every enquiry a twenty minute call and explains everything in it. His prospects come off the phone pleased and well informed, and then buy from whoever bothered to turn up in person.
Now suppose the same consultant after he cuts those calls down to a few minutes and ends each one by suggesting a meeting. Exactly the same enquiries, and his diary fills up.
Why whatever you give away on the phone is lost
The reasoning has nothing to do with tricks. The source describes a salesman who shaped the call so that he would not tip his hand, meaning give away what he had to offer, in a place where the call could not end in a sale and was never going to.
Look at how that is worded. It is not that tipping your hand is unwise. The channel simply cannot close a deal. So anything you hand over on it gets nothing back in exchange, and it is gone.
Another source tells the same idea as a story. An experienced salesman is asked on the phone what exactly he has in mind, and replies with a laugh that he has no intention of saying so on the phone, least of all to someone who is not even the buyer. They met that same day, and the call did exactly what it was supposed to do.
Suppose an owner who explains on the phone precisely how he would solve the customer's problem. The customer thanks him politely, and then solves it on his own.
The opposite is the same owner telling the customer that the problem has a solution, and that he would like to show it to him. That call ends with a meeting in the diary.
This also corrects a common belief. Handing over knowledge on the phone does not build trust. What you handed over is the very thing you were meant to give in the meeting, in exchange for the meeting.
Then there is the classic call that feels good and fails. Suppose a fitter who takes a call from a customer, answers every question, and finishes by suggesting the customer has a think and gets back to him. The customer never does, and really has no reason to.
A good call is not a result
What makes the whole subject simple is that the call has one product, and it can be counted. A call is a unit you count, not an experience you rate.
That difference sounds small, and it changes how you look at your whole week. Suppose an owner who, at the end of the week, can say how many calls he had and how many of them ended in a meeting. He has a number, and a number is something you can work with.
Now picture the same person when all he knows about the week is that there were a few good calls. He has nothing to improve, because he has nothing to measure.
By this test, even a pleasant, long call full of interest can be a failed call. If it reached a price or a full explanation and no date was set, it spent what it had to give and got nothing for it.
What it changes in your next call
Once you see that what a call produces is a date, you stop trying to persuade on the phone. You do not need the customer to understand everything, and you do not need them to be excited. You need there to be a reason to meet, and the meeting to go into the diary.
What you save is not only time. You also keep your knowledge for the meeting, where it can actually be traded for a deal.
The booklet gives this chapter two exercises, one to measure and one to spot it, followed by a self-check. From there it moves on to why you cannot qualify a customer from a distance, meaning work out over the phone whether they are a real fit, and why the meeting is necessary in the first place.
Next time you put the phone down after a call with a prospect, do not ask yourself whether it went well. Ask whether a date was set.