I want to challenge you to play the seven pennies game.
Here’s what you do: Line up seven pennies on the edge of your desk as you’re prospecting. Each time you get a resistance—a “no”—I want you to move up a penny because you are pushing through with another question.
I’ll give you an example. Let’s say that you are talking to an expired listing and they say, “You know what, I’m not going to sell my house right now.” You could hang up, or instead you could say, “I’m curious…when do you think you’ll try again?” Boom, you get to move a penny.
Then they might say, “You know, I’m not going to try again; we’re going to keep it off the market for now, so I don’t really need any help.” You say, “Okay, no problem. Before I let you go, may I ask, what do you think happened that caused your home not to sell?” Boom, you get to move another penny.
“Oh, I don’t know…I don’t think the agent did what they should have, and the agent said it was too high, so we’re really discouraged.”
“Okay, but if you felt confident that the home could be sold, would you still be open to taking a look at that?” Boom, you get to move another penny.
Each time you are met with that resistance, you ask a question, you continue with your script or you close again. Keep moving that call forward until one of three things have happened:
- Maybe they hung up on you because they really weren’t interested, and they just wanted to get rid of you. Okay, you’ll call the next person.
- They set an appointment. Great! Get that appointment set, you get off the phone and move on.
- You went through all your questions, you covered your entire script and you just discovered there really wasn’t anything there for you to get—and you know, that’s fine. You moved all seven pennies. You finished the script and there wasn’t a lead there, so on to the next call.
Now, here’s the cool thing. I have discovered that when clients play the seven pennies exercise, their results from prospecting instantly triple. However, even with these results, they seldom keep it up for the long haul, and I know why. It’s hard. It’s hard to be that focused; it’s hard to be that diligent. Yet, I want to encourage you to play the seven pennies game, because if you are going to be on that phone prospecting, I want you to be getting the results that you desire and you deserve.
Zig Ziglar has a great quote, “Timid salespeople have skinny kids.” So please, don’t be timid.
To get more of my scripts, you can go to powerpersuasionscripts.com.
Debbie De Grote is the founder and owner of Excelleum Coaching and Consulting.
