Cold calling. Just hearing the term causes chest-tightening anxiety for many people.
It may trigger the memory and distaste caused by a telemarketer who, three seconds after you answered the phone, mispronounced your name and robotically read a poorly written script, trying to pitch you something you’d never be a prospect for.
Few people can argue that cold calling is pleasant.
The mere notion of cold calling arouses fear, which is why most people are reluctant to do it. Add that to the fact that many cold callers lack the knowledge and ability to do it well. They think their only option is to rely on the cheesy, sleazy, salesy-sounding techniques that make people instinctively reject them.
There’s also this crazy notion that to sell over the phone, you should love rejection. Tell me how that would be possible in the real world?
Making cold calls is distasteful—and it’s dumb. In fact, after finishing this book, I want you to never use those words again when referring to professional telephone prospecting.
The great news is that soon you will be able to confidently call people you don’t know, who are not expecting your call, engage them in a conversation, and interest them in speaking with you—and ultimately buying from you. Imagine never having to place a cold call again.
But how will you know what never to do again, and what to absolutely do instead? Let’s begin by defining a cold call: It takes place when a salesperson calls someone he does not know, and—with little or no information about the prospect—robotically dials number after number, giving the same pitch to everyone who answers.
Of course, these calls are destined for failure. To illustrate the absurdity of the concept, let’s look at this scenario: An entertainment writer is assigned an interview with Beyoncé.
He begins his conversation with the world-renowned personality by saying: “So Ms. Beyoncé … or is it, um, just Beyoncé … ah, anyway, I’m going to do the same type of interview I’ve done with hundreds of other people. Now, what is it exactly that you do?”
Ridiculous, right? Such a scenario would never take place.
Now imagine this: A sales rep phones a company, gets someone she believes to be a decision maker on the phone, and says, “Hi, I’m Erin Nelson with Able Supply. We sell maintenance supplies. I’d like to tell you about our products and talk about becoming a vendor for you. Now, what is it that your company does?”
Though equally absurd, conversations like these occur every day—I know because I get them regularly. Unprepared salespeople blindly make phone calls, using tired, old-school sales techniques, hoping that because they picked up the phone and made a call that they will find someone who will agree to do what they want.
But hoping is clearly not enough.
Now that we have thoroughly trashed the concept of cold calling, let’s get something else perfectly clear: Telephone prospecting is essential for business sustainability and growth.
That’s right. Prospecting by phone is a necessary part of new business acquisition and growth.
Ideally, it’s not the only way, but it’s a vital component of the model. Businesses that merely react—waiting for the phone to ring, hoping a prospect will reach out because of a brilliant tweet, for web orders to stream in, while relying on business from existing customers—are not nearly as successful as those who employ proactive telephone prospecting as part of the mix.
Think about it: Every business has customers who quit buying for lots of reasons—bankruptcy, downsizing, switching vendors, death, lack of attention from the vendor, and more. Therefore, you need to replace that business just to stay even. If you hope to grow, you need to add even more clients. And telephone prospecting can do that for you—quickly.
Of course, it needs to be done in the right way—the Smart Calling way—as we’ll discuss soon.
Of course, there are detractors out there, people who believe that prospecting is dead. They use the term cold calling in their denouncements, but they usually are referring to phone prospecting in general. Some of these anti-cold-calling gurus have made names for themselves and profited by preying on the fear of cold calling.
Many of them are pushing their own programs on “social selling,” “email marketing,” “content marketing,” or whatever shiny fad makes people who are afraid of the phone feel good about themselves by doing something else instead.
These resources typically suggest either getting people to refer you to decision makers, creating social media and inbound marketing strategies and campaigns, writing lots of online content, or doing old-fashioned direct marketing to generate leads so that people contact you.
All of those activities accomplish certain objectives, and they are preferable to cold calling, given a choice. If you have the time, ability, and money to engage in those types of marketing programs to generate leads, I suggest you take advantage of them. They all work, and smart companies realize that there are many avenues that lead to new business. I use them all myself. In fact, I have personally generated millions of dollars in sales from direct-response advertising, a process wherein people I’ve never spoken to simply placed orders with us over the phone, through the mail, and online.
Here’s where I differ with some of the new-to-the-scene gurus: many of them suggest that their method is the only thing you should be doing, and you should not be using the phone.
I suggest you use a mix of them to complement your calling.
In reality, all these forms of marketing are just that: marketing. And when a sales rep—whose primary job is to sell—spends precious selling time drafting email campaigns, putting out door hangers, posting on social media sites, and completing other administrative busywork, then he is avoiding his most important function: talking to people. I’ve seen many sales reps who thought they were being productive by sending out email. In fact, they were just busy. In many instances, they were afraid to make the calls, so they deluded themselves into believing that they were engaging in sales behavior, which, in actuality, was avoidance behavior.
I love the environment we operate within today. As I’ll discuss later, social intelligence makes it so easy to place a Smart Call. Even easier than 10 years ago when this book first came out. And many forms of social media make it easier to make ourselves favorably visible to our prospects, to connect, and even frame a positive premise in the prospect’s mind before speaking with her. We’ll touch on those later. But despite what the “social selling” crowd wants you to believe, these techniques are not selling. When someone gets too caught up in ancillary activity and makes it their main focus, it is time that is not being devoted to your most high-value activity: talking to another human, in real time, speaking with your voice.
Mike Weinberg, author of the great books New Sales. Simplified., Sales Management. Simplified., and #SalesTruth says it perfectly: “Sales is a verb.” He adds, “Top performers in sales don’t wait for anything or anyone … Top performers act … Waiting is the key for new business failure.”
I couldn’t agree more. When you have identified a prospect you feel would be a great customer—someone you just know would benefit wildly from a business relationship—you may very well grow old and poor waiting forever for that person to respond to a marketing campaign.
In fact, one rep, Brian Switzer, shared how that actually happened to him after buying into one of the cold-calling-is-dead programs.
Signing up clients without prospecting to 10–20 strangers? Hell yeah. I was in.
I traded in my calling methods of business development and put that other fella’s plan into action. And when I say put it into action, I mean followed it to a T; no skipped steps, no doing it my way.
And then, crickets. Upfront I told myself to give it a full year to pay off. After one calendar year, it has been by far the worst year of my career. A total disaster. Sales were running at about an 80 percent decline, and it has been a huge blow to my financial situation.
When I hear someone definitively state that using the phone in prospecting no longer works, they instantly lose credibility with me. I wonder what else they are wrong about. They might as well say, “Electricity is dead. It no longer works.”
The fact—proven by those of us who have made fortunes doing it and those showing success right now—is that prospecting by phone works. And when done the right way—the Smart Calling way—it is wildly profitable.
According to studies by the respected training and consulting firm, the Rain Group:
- 57% of C-level buyers prefer that salespeople call them.
- About half of all directors and managers prefer the call, too.
- 69% of buyers accepted a call from new salespeople in the past 12 months.
- 82% of buyers accept meetings when salespeople reach out to them.
Telephone prospecting is the quickest, cheapest, and most interactive way to make a contact and a sale. Many of you reading this could pick up the phone right now, call someone you don’t know and who never has heard of you, and have an electronic payment transaction minutes later.
Let’s look at some of the other benefits of telephone prospecting:
Before we go any further, I must dispel some prospecting myths that have been perpetuated over the years. Some of these beliefs are still held by sales managers and reps, and in all cases they are just plain wrong. They contribute to all of the negative opinions that surround telephone prospecting and general sales prospecting.
Smart Calling Truth: It’s a quality game. It does not matter how many calls you place; what’s important is the number with which you have success. A baseball player could swing at every pitch, but only the quality attempts have a chance of hitting the ball. Casino games are numbers games; sales and prospecting are a quality game. And with all of that said, quality and quantity are not mutually exclusive. You can place a lot of quality calls by doing the right things, which we will cover.
Smart Calling Truth: You are no closer to a yes unless you are doing the right things to get the yes. Activity solely for the sake of activity does not get you closer to success. In fact, if I am doing the wrong things, I am getting further away from my goal—not to mention generating frustration.
Smart Calling Truth: You want to avoid rejection. It is a state of mind based on how you react to what happens to you. I’m not a psychologist, but I would say it is impossible to love rejection unless you have some type of mental illness. Smart Calling shows you how to get a win on every call—even when you get a no.
Smart Calling Truth: Salespeople are using the telephone to sell every type of product and service. Limiting yourself by getting off a call too early unnecessarily lengthens the sales process. Your sales model might involve a face-to-face visit, but that visit will always be more productive if you take your call further. One of the biggest challenges prospectors face today is actually getting someone on the phone. Why would we want to quickly end the call when we finally get a chance to speak with them?
Smart Calling Truth: The screener may be a decision maker or influencer and needs to be treated like the buyer.
Smart Calling Truth: Actually, they do. Granted, insidious robocalls make many of us leery of picking up a call from a number we don’t recognize. As for the truth about people actually answering, consider these facts from Jeb Blount, author of Fanatical Prospecting:
The myth that the phone no longer works—because people don’t answer—is disproven daily in our Fanatical Prospecting Boot Camps. The myth is disproven by our sales team at Sales Gravy and with thousands of sales teams across the country that survive and thrive on the phone. The statistics don’t lie. We see between a 15 percent and 80 percent contact rate on the phones depending on the industry, product, and role level of the contact. For example, in the business services segment, contact rates are consistently between 25 and 40 percent. This, by the way, is far higher than response rates with email and light-years higher than those of social prospecting.
Smart Calling Inner Circle Coaching member Sean Jones owns a successful merchant services credit card processing company, Revolution Payments.
At one point in his life, through a series of choices and circumstances, he essentially was homeless. He decided to turn his life around, moved to different city, got into reading personal development books, and got a cold calling job in the merchant services business. That led to him starting his own business and selling for himself, which he has now done for over 20 years.
It has made him a millionaire.
“I can attribute almost all of the success I’ve had in business to cold calling,” Sean said.
And, he is not resting on his success, but instead, continues to build on what got him to where he is: “Even though we have salespeople, I still prospect 50–100 new contacts per week.”
(I did a video interview with Sean. Find it in your Smart Calling Companion Course in Chapter 1, SmartCallingBook.com.)
Rob Ponnwitz is the Master Franchise owner of Vanguard Cleaning Systems, a commercial office cleaning business in the Pacific Northwest. Many Vanguard franchises have adopted the Smart Calling methodology with great success. Rob said that within just 30 days of having his rep do Smart Calling to prospect, his average job-quote size doubled, and average closed job, in terms of monthly revenue, tripled!
Okay, you might be thinking, all of this makes sense. Maybe you already knew you needed to pick up the phone to accomplish whatever objective you have to meet. The problems, though—the real reasons you bought this book—might still be gnawing at you: the how part of it.
The subtitle of this book is Eliminate the Fear, Failure, and Rejection from Cold Calling. I’m not being very humble when I say that I’m proud to have come up with such a great title. However, it’s not about me. It’s about you and about how, together, we’re going to do just what the title promises.
Let’s define in three steps exactly what Smart Calling is:
As a result:
Let’s look at two sales calls from the same company.
One is a dumb call, very typical of what many salespeople do every day. The other is a Smart Caller who uses the process, strategy, and tactics we cover in this book.
Here’s a very typical opening: “Hi Mike, I’m Dale Dufus with Insurance Partners. We provide employee benefits, including health insurance. I’d like to take 10 minutes of your time to tell you what we do and show you how we could save you time and money. I’ll be in your area next week. Can we meet either Tuesday or Wednesday morning?”
In this brief, four-sentence opening, the caller made a number of dumb errors that would probably cause him to be rejected:
Now, let’s look at a different sales professional from the same company, selling the same thing.
This approach with Michael is quite different.
“Hi Michael, I’m Pat Stevens with Insurance Partners. Hope you enjoyed your golf vacation. In speaking with your assistant, Suzanne, I understand that you are in the process of evaluating your competitive edge in the employment market and what you can do to attract and keep the top talent in your various locations. We specialize in working with IT companies competing in this tight talent market to lower their recruiting and hiring expenses and increase their retention of managerial staff. I’d like to ask a few questions to see if I could provide you some information.”
Using the Smart Calling strategy, process, and techniques, Pat was able to do a number of positive things:
And all of that took place during the opening of the call—in the first 10 seconds or so. Later in the call, using the Smart Calling process and techniques, Pat also:
As a result of all of this, Michael, of course, viewed Pat not as one of the hundreds of sales reps who call him every year, schlepping insurance and benefits packages and offering quotes. He looked at Pat as someone who understood his business and what he was concerned about right now. Plus, he liked Pat. They connected.
But how did Pat accomplish all of this? How did she know all of these things? How did she speak in such a conversational way at the beginning of the call to capture Michael’s interest? How did she avoid all of the dumb mistakes that typical salespeople commit?
Pat did her research before picking up the phone. She used several online resources to get personal and professional information about Michael, his company, his industry, and very importantly, what Michael was concerned about right now. Then Pat used social engineering, the process of speaking with other people within Michael’s company to gain intelligence about the company’s current situation regarding their recruiting, hiring, and retention issues and their present benefits package. She also learned about Michael personally from his assistant, Suzanne, and a few others in the department.
Pat used a conversational, soft-sell approach in her opening to minimize resistance, create interest, and pique curiosity. This put Michael in a state of mind where he wanted to hear more.
Pat used Smart Calling.
Now, don’t get worried if what you sell might not require as much in-depth research as what Pat did. In some cases, just a little information is sufficient to turn your call into a Smart Call, and you will still benefit tremendously from this book. In summary, I can think of only two reasons why someone would opt not to place a Smart Call instead of a dumb cold call:
If you fall into that first category, I can’t help you. In fact, you shouldn’t even be in sales. However, if you are willing to work, then do not worry. You are about to see exactly how to do it yourself. Hop aboard, my friend; here we go!
18.191.68.18