Using the phone

Photos: Anna Pou and (insert) Karolina Grabowska, on Pexels

This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should use this page instead.

Should you be spending much time calling?

• Trainer Luke Fitzherbert used to ask the successful fundraisers did they use the phone and nearly all did. With the increasing discomfort of a younger generation in using the phone, the advantages of the phone will only increase, as Millennials try (with limited success) to get emails to do the work of phone calls.
• Why is it appropriate to be calling?
  • It’s often trusts personnel’s jobs to speak to you. (It’s hard to know that for sure, as many trust personnel are poor communicators – but they’re probably being paid to take your call.)
  • You’re enabling them to do their job more effectively, by avoiding sending irrelevant proposals.
  • You’re (hopefully) not asking them for things you could have just learnt by reading. You’re asking them about the gaps in what they’ve said already. That in turn may make the better communicators, because they will understand what they need to say.
• You have it easy – imagine cold calling all day people who really aren’t interested. Telesales people may have to call 100 people a day in this way. In contrast, having to speak to some trusts, whose job is partly to take an interest in you and where you’re just researching, rather than trying to close a deal, is actually pretty easy.
• Major donors trainer and guru Rob Woods says with major donors that the best mindset is to be thinking “How can I help this person?” With trusts the format of calls is you’re very much the applicant, but I think that having that motivation in the background is an excellent idea. As Rob Woods says, the calls are more enjoyable and there are less nerves.
• Two interlinked objections could be raised: 
  • The one I’ve heard most is that a few trusts personnel don’t like calls. In those cases, your job is to get off the call quickly and note that in the records so you don’t pester them again. Some calls trusts get seem a bit pointless to them – getting them to repeat stuff that’s already on their site – so it’s worth phrasing calls in terms that make it clear you’ve read what they said. 
  • Another issue is the Fundraising Code of Practice stipulates not to cold call. However, I’d say that cold calling is robotically calling a tonne of trusts without reference to their interest in actually getting a call. Otherwise, what the FCP say would be silly, given the need of the sector. On the other hand, trusts can choose not to advertise their number – as quite a few do – but instead they give the details so that we can call them. (That’s hardly surprising, as they need us or they can’t do their job of giving away money.) To take Community Foundations as an illustration of this: they are specifically set up to provide good practice, but it’s quite hit and miss whether there’s an explicit invitation to call them with queries or not. We don’t “spam” them with calls, we make carefully targeted calls to find out what they haven’t communicated, so we can send them what we think will be most useful to them

Tips for a good call

Preparation

• There’s a video on the Research Calls page with ideas for how to prepare specifically for a research call

How the call “feels”

• Try and make the calls nice and be very respectful and interested. I’ve never once felt “pressure sales” is what I’m doing – an usually, it’s really research.
• It helps to start a bit flatter and more matter of fact, as you don’t sound as much like a salesperson, then.
• Try and relax and keep them relaxed. Try and find things you like about talking to the person on the other end of the phone and be enthusiastic about the work, itself.  When you can get to the stage that it’s unforced, it sounds less “sales-y”, which is better.
• Throw in the genuinely unexpected about service users, people are genuinely interested to hear those.
• If you’re feeling brave: a good telemarketing tip is to leave yourself a voicemail where you do your spiel, then listen to it back.
• Mirroring: we’re trained to mirror body language in person to build rapport. You can do that on the phone, too. Try and match their volume, tone and pace a little.  Ditto personality types – a lot of the people you’ll speak to are more analytical, so numbers, facts and rationale matter (but still look for your moments to move people).
• There’s a bit of controversy amongst people working in telesales about how important it is to be likeable. However, I think there’s something to what one of the telesales gurus, Jason Bay, says: it helps to sound (1) friendly, (2) professional and (3 – sometimes, for us) a peer. Of those three, the controversial one would be “a peer”. Some people sound like they’re helping supplicants and you know you’re effectively asking a favour of them. With other people you both know it’s their job to be taking the call, there’s some chance they were doing your job once upon a time and you’re another part of the same industry. In that case, a friendly, professional peer is someone they might like to spend a bit of time talking to.
• Most calls aren’t that long. However, within that constraint, it’s good to build rapport. You and the trust are doing things very much at arm’s length, you’ll probably never meet. Yet, they’re trusting you with many thousands of pounds.  Take an interest in people as people – Bill Bruty once did a training presentation with a grants officer from a trust, where they both said that if they didn’t start by discussing the cricket, it would be because there was a problem. Look for moments you can appropriately really share something. If you’re funny, use that. Do a bit more than you’d think, maybe, whilst keeping it appropriate. As when you’re talking to someone in Finance, the chances are that the first time you speak it’s basically business, but as time passes you try and get to know them a bit. It’s the same, if not a bit more interpersonal. I’ve had a lot of chats about cycling and exercise (personal interests) for example.

The content of the call

• Th structure of a research call is on another page.
• The aim is for them to do most of the talking, not you. The main point of what you’re doing is usually not to go into some big pitch, it’s to give you the extra detail about the trust that will make all the difference.
• Even in telesales (never mind in research) you get a lot further asking really penetrative, interesting questions and listening well to the answers. People are often a lot more interested in their own views than in yours. So, I’m not saying: don’t give them specifics when they need them. However, I would say: if you can and when you can, help them bring themselves out – it will be a better call.
• It can be a mistake to ask questions that focus the conversation too much. Asking “Why is that the case?” or “Help me understand better that point” give the trust person free rein to say what they think needs saying.
• You can make it a bit more interactive for them by asking them to “Imagine if…”
• People respond well to stories. If you want to make an impression on the listener, you can drop in one or two short (half minute) highly relevant anecdotes about service users, you’ll leave more behind than if you do everything in the abstract.
• A good telesales technique is to start people off somewhere they’re very comfortable, ask key open (rather than closed) questions, leave an extra second or two pause before taking your turn in the conversation than you normally would (to encourage them to say more) and keep an eye on the “emotionality” in the person you’re talking to as to where the best material might lie. Sales is a bit different, though – you need to spot where people have “pain points” because then they’re more likely to act by buying something, whereas I don’t think trust staff often have relevant pain points, they’re just trying to be helpful. However, there’s something to the method still, I think.
• One thing that does encourage a bit of disclosure (sometimes usefully) is to be a good listener and complementary (people appreciate it) keep them comfortable and happy, be very respectful and positive and then take the conversation into areas where they probably do have things they can’t say. I used to do this a lot with the Helpline for Reaching Communities. You can almost hear people thinking to themselves, “Do I need to  keep this hidden, or not?” as you talk.

Control, gatekeepers, objections, etc

• Controlling the conversation. A good conversation has a certain pace. A useful technique can be:
  • Acknowledge what they’ve said
  • Respond if need be
  • Pivot to another topic
• How to get past a gatekeeper: call early in the day (9am) or late (after 5pm). Your target person won’t have meetings and the person who normally screens calls might not be there. (I use this one particularly with internal contacts, but it’s occasionally worked with Trusts, too.)
• People are a bit sceptical. So there’s nothing wrong with inviting that, later in the call: “From what you’ve heard, where do you think your trustees might have some doubts? What do you think we need to have really addressed?”
• If someone gives you a strong objection to sending the project in, it’s often best not to focus on justifying the work (unless you think they’ve clearly made a mistake) but to focus on really understanding where they are coming from. Then, you can potentially come back with a better idea later in the conversation. This is research not sales – but even in sales, questions rather than arguments often get you further.
• If someone says “Just send it in,” you can still follow up with something like “I’ll be delighted to, but would you be able to tell me what’s most likely to get your trustees excited in the proposal I’m sending?”
• If your gut instinct is that the person might be distracted, do drop in more quick check-ins: “Does that make sense?” “What do you think?” You can hear the difference when someone is genuinely concentrating on what you say. The more engaged people are (whilst letting you get through your material) the better, in our highly distracted world.
• James Borg gives some useful advice to assimilate. He points out that you get one shot at getting advice in many cases and you want to ensure the person at the other end of the phone is ready. So, you need to become good at reading how they are and if there are clearly distractions you could consider proactively suggesting to arrange a better time to talk. You could reasonably put it that you don’t want to impose/be unfair and try and get them to talk when they’re clearly in the middle of something. 

I mentioned this to a colleague who approached a lot of smaller trusts. She had just been given exactly the same advice by a coach. She had quite a few calls where she simply didn’t think the recipient was ready – they were driving, they were in the middle of something and a bit thrown by the call. 

It’s easy to let things just flow Borg says and to end up with a rather frustrating call. However, by being proactive you can come across well and also engineer a better situation for getting information.

To make a really bad Star Trek joke: resistance to Borg is surely futile. (Sorry!)

• Let’s suppose, though, that the person you’re speaking to isn’t very open and you know you have to plough on. A technique you can try at this stage is to say, “You may well be right that this isn’t going to be a useful discussion and I can see you’re very busy. However, would you mind just giving me 30 seconds to put the idea over? Then if it’s a waste, we can call it a day.” This is quite disarming and can get you your time, without being too annoying

Names

• If the person you’re talking to has an unusual name, don’t start talking about it. You wouldn’t comment on their appearance and it’s also fairly  personal.
• If you don’t know how to pronounce a name, go to www.pronouncenames.com.
• If the call goes well, reference it in the cover note.

Talk regularly, by making yourself do so

The following was an interesting idea, from Caroline Danks, which she got from Rob Woods. (Both are great, and thoroughly recommended, btw – Caroline especially has a good focus on trusts).

This is a tip I picked up and adapted from Rob Woods – please look at his blog for more brilliant ideas to help you focus on the actions that will seriously uplevel your fundraising.

• At the end of every day, jot down (onto actual paper) the name of two donors and their phone numbers.

• Any sort of donor, individuals, trusts, community fundraisers, an event participant, a major donor – it doesn’t matter

• Ideally select a donor who is in need of an update from you or who is expecting some information from you (Perhaps you’re meeting them next week and you want to confirm arrangements?  Maybe a donor who has funded a project and you have an informal update for them? Or maybe someone who just raised a ton of sponsorship via one of your sporting events?)

• You can also just phone people to say thank you

• CALL THE TWO (!) as soon as you arrive into the office.

• Do this before you open your laptop (the unleashing of everything which will otherwise distract you)

• Do this every day. Because then you’ve spoken to TEN donors a week.  That’s over 40 a month.

I think it would need some adaptation for our work. You can see the point, though.

Resources

It’s well worth spending a few hours some time going through videos of telesales techniques. We don’t do telesales, but quite a bit of the underlying thinking does apply: understanding what makes a good call, understanding yourself in the call, understanding the importance of great listening and keeping the focus on the person you’re calling, how to use questions as well as possible, techniques for difficult situations; and so on.

The most profound book I’ve read on telesales is Sales EQ, by Jeb Bount (EQ being the emotional equivalent of IQ).  This page doesn’t cover it too well, yet – I need more time on the phone, first.