Mastering the art of the cold call

We share a practical framework for cold calling that puts respect and outcomes first. Confidence, research and a clear next step replace pressure pitches and awkward scripts.

• defining cold calling as value, not interruption
• building confidence without arrogance
• reframing success as a next step, not a sale
• researching avatars and pain points
• crafting short openers that earn time
• leading with outcomes and proof points
• handling not interested, existing vendor and send an email
• tracking calls, conversions and improving your approach

If you think I've earned a like or a subscribe, please do that.

Welcome to the podcast!

Chapters

• 0:13 Setting The Stage: Cold Calling
• 0:24 Why Cold Calling Still Matters
• 2:01 Confidence Without Arrogance
• 3:42 Serve The Client, Solve Problems
• 5:02 Detach From The Outcome
• 6:19 Redefine Success: Next Step Wins
• 8:19 Research Avatars And Pain Points
• 9:59 Four Questions Before You Dial
• 11:37 Openers That Earn Attention
• 13:23 Lead With Outcomes And Proof
• 14:52 Handling Common Objections
• 16:14 Track Metrics And Iterate
• 17:44 Humanity, Curiosity, And Fit

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Hello again and welcome to another podcast. My name is Graeme Elliott, and in this podcast, we're going to talk about cold calling. So if you are listening to a short, you might want to join the uh full podcast. The purpose of this podcast is really to give you some pointers because cold calling may or may not form a key part of how you create leads, but nonetheless, it is a good thing to be able to fall back on. It's something I've certainly done in my career when perhaps I'm not getting the leads that I need from the usual sources, or I might be in an area. I've typically done mine face-to-face, but I might be in an area, and it gives me the opportunity to perhaps come across clients or at least potential clients who I didn't know of before. So it's definitely something that can be very useful to you. So let's dive straight in, as usual. So one of the things to be aware of, and if you are a decision maker, you probably experienced this, that we and I I include myself in this, uh, we get hit up by people, hidden as cold, quite a lot of the time. I hesitate to put a number on it. I've seen a hundred a number of 100 times a week, which I feel is perhaps high, but I don't know. Uh let me know if you're um if you're someone who is a decision maker and you get hit by cold callers. And in fact, if you do get hit by cold callers, it's quite a useful um tool for you to just step back and look at how they went. So are you somebody who tends not to take cold calls? Have you had the occasional cold call where you have stopped and you've given that person some time? So have a think about both your mindset, how you feel when someone hits you out of the blue, and what was different about the times when you did give someone a bit of time and gave them the opportunity to talk to you about what it was they were doing. So the first thing I want to cover is confidence. So in my experience, it's really important to be confident. Uh obviously, as salespeople, we are there as experts. We know what we sell in most cases better than the people we're talking to. And certainly when people come to us, they are regarding us as experts in that area. And these will usually be areas where they're not particularly knowledgeable themselves. So they are genuinely looking for somebody who knows what they are doing, knows what they're talking about. So that's one of the roles as a salesperson that we fill in the eyes of a client, regardless of how we might feel about it ourselves. Um we all have um uh that worry that we're not quite good enough and all of that stuff. So let's not worry about that. So the first thing is to be confident but not arrogant. So remember, whenever we're dealing with clients, be respectful. Uh these are people we want to support. Our role as salespeople is to problem solve, it's to help other people. If you don't regard sales that way, uh you might be doing well, but the chances are you'll struggle because people often people who are not familiar with salespeople expect the salesperson to be someone who is at some level trying to rip them off. So I heard this recently, I was listening to another podcast. I heard this comment made that people who sell are just trying to get the money. They're not really interested in the clients. So the way to really stand out as a salesperson and also to have a much better time doing it is to be genuinely interested in your clients and be there to solve their problems. So when you do interrupt someone, the first thing to remember is that it's not so much an interruption, but you are offering them value. Now, the timing might not be right, and we'll definitely come back to that. But essentially, what you are doing in making contact is creating an opportunity for them to resolve in some form a problem that they can that they currently have. So, one of the most important things you can do as well is detach from the outcome of the call. So I remember years ago now talking to a friend of mine who had his own business and he was cold calling on local stores because that was his client base. And he was having a really hard time of it. He was struggling with it, was absolutely not enjoying it at all. And um, we just had a chat about it, and I asked him what his intention was as an outcome from the call, and he said it was to make a sale, and it's essentially what I said to him, and you may identify with this, is that his chances of making a sale directly from a cold call are probably pretty low. And I would guess, although I don't have any stats to back me up on this one, but it would be less than maybe 5%. It would be very, very low. So if that's the case, how can you change your approach in the cold call so that you make it productive? And my suggestion to him was to just approach these people and rather than ask for an order, just ask if there was a time where he could come back and have more of a conversation with them, maybe when they were less busy, were able to focus, and just discuss a bit more on how he might be able to help them. So if you're experiencing that with cold calls, if you're getting knocked back a lot, my first suggestion is to rethink the outcome that you're going for when you make these cold calls. And for me, it was primarily to get a contact name and number, possibly email address, some way of getting in touch with somebody so that I could have a more set up a more productive opportunity in a more conducive environment, let's call it, where I would be much more likely to make a sale. But that was what I was shooting for. I was not trying to make a sale. Now, I have had that where I've made a sale. It is incredibly rare, I will say that. And it was just an opportunity that came up and I ran with it, which is what we do, and it had a great outcome from that perspective. But do not make that the outcome that you're aiming for with every uh every contact. So, what can you do to increase your chances of having a successful cold call, regardless of what the outcome is? Well, the first thing is to do your research. It's really important that you know who your clients are, and I've spoken about avatars before. So it's really important that you know who your avatars are and how you spot them. So in doing that, you know what their pain points are. Obviously, you know the industry they're in, all that kind of stuff. But the absolute key thing is to know the kind of pain points that they are likely to be having to deal with, and to know that you have a good solid solution, a great way to solve that problem for them. So that is absolutely fundamental. There is no point, in my opinion, uh, of just hitting people totally out of the balloon, knowing nothing about them. And if you're doing this on the phone, I've got to say that for me when I have this, it is and also I've had this with email. It is incredibly irritating when someone contacts me, supposedly to help, and then they asks me the most basic question, which honestly they could have pulled off the website without any effort at all. So that kind of thing, you know, have a look at the website. If it's if it's someone you are going to call, just have a look, do a bit of background, know where the sites are, that kind of thing. Um, but anything that is relevant to you having a conversation with with this person, again, in my in my experience, it's far more productive and complementary to the prospect if you know a little bit about them. You've taken the time to uh read the website. People who even ask basic things like how do I spell my name or that that kind of thing, it's all on the website, really. So don't don't fall into that one. Okay, so in terms of the call plan, or in terms of just your prep before you make the call, there are really four questions to ask. The first one is who am I calling? So who are you calling? This needs to be your avatar, this needs to be perhaps the typically the person within the organization that you would have a conversation with, or if you are a B2C type sales environment, then be aware you really want to find the decision maker and not be wasting time with someone who might enjoy the chat with you but is never going to make a decision. And if that might do a really bad sales job on your behalf. So be clear about who you're calling. The next thing is why? Why should they care? So, again, this is about identifying the pain points, identifying your relevance to their life, however that is. What value can you bring? So, again, this needs to be in terms of outcome, and I'll clarify that in a moment. And then what's the next step? So, by that I mean what is the next step once you've made that contact. So, this is what I've just been talking about, what you want to get from the cold core. So the structure of this will be some kind of an opening, somewhere there will be a value statement which needs to be relevant to their business specifically. Uh, you'll have some sort of engagement going on, and then you'll enclose your close for the next step. So, what happens after you've had this call with them? So, something that is really helpful is to have a good opener. And the one that I think everybody hates is the how are you today. Uh, I gotta say, from my perspective, if someone starts with that, they're pretty much gone, they're toast because I'm usually when you remember when you're contacting someone out of the blue like that, if you're doing it by phone particularly and they've answered, they're probably in the middle of something. And I'm pretty sure it's unlikely that they were just sitting there thinking, I just wish someone would call me up and ask me how I am. So think about it. This is really um it's it's not helpful. Um, it can be quite insulting, and it needs to be, you need something much more personable and respectful. So you could use something like hi, whoever their name is, this is whatever your name is. I know I'm calling you out of the blue, but do you have 30 seconds for me just to tell you why I'm calling? Now that might work, it might not, and with all these things, you have to refine them, you have to work with them. But the basic thing to do is to keep it very short, keep it human, and be very respectful of their time. And that is the key thing. The people who tend to fail, and certainly the ones that the worst ones I've had are people when you answer the phone and they ask, you know, is this Graeme Elliott in this case? And I'll say yes, and then they launch into something. And I and I have sat there looking at the phone as they talk and talk and talk, and it's like they're afraid to draw breath because that's when they're going to lose me. Well, the fact is they've already lost me, and oftentimes I'll just hang up. So that's the first thing. Keep it very short, it's person to person, so keep it human, be respectful of their time. The next thing to do, and this is again, this simply mirrors what I talk about when we're doing sales calls, and that's to keep focused on the outcome. That's where the value lies. That's the value proposition for them. Nobody wants to buy your product, okay? Um, or that's true for most people, uh, for most of us who are selling something. They're not sitting there thinking, I wish I could just buy another course, or um, I just want to get another gym membership. That's not that's not what people want. Most people, anyway. What they want is to either learn how to overcome something, to get some help with an issue, to get a particular outcome. So it might be to get that summer body all ready to go. It might be to reduce their overheads, reduce admin costs, for example. There'll be something there, but that is the outcome. It's what does using your solution give to the end user, give to the client. That's where you focus. So that's definitely what you want to be talking about when you're talking about uh value propositions. What can help is to use proof points. So it could be you could mention a similar company who are likely to have had this similar problems to this company, and just talk about how you help them. Again, keep it very, very brief at this point, but you could say we helped whoever your similar company is, and they achieved whatever. So that demonstrates relevance, it gives some some social proof as well, which is always really important. And you're gonna have to craft this to suit your own approach, but this is the best way to open up. Now, you're likely to get objections, so again, just do a bit of work on how to handle those. So here are some common ones for you. I'm just gonna quickly run through three that you might be able to use. So the first one is I'm not interested. So I'm gonna assume at this point you have done your your research, and this is likely to be someone who is interested. So you can come with something like, Look, that that's totally fair, I understand. Most people aren't interested when I first call, but out of curiosity, could you could you just tell me what you're using right now to handle whatever it might be? Or it might be they already have a vendor, you can respond with something like, Great, that makes sense. What do you like most about them? Now, what's what you're trying to do is create a conversation. Um, you can rephrase these to suit your personality, but you want to get some kind of a conversation going. Or you might get send me an email. And if you get something like that, you can ask with great, very happy to do that. Now, just to make sure I send the right information, what is most relevant to you right now about obviously what the uh the application is. So these are just some tips to help you, and I hope you found them useful, maybe, maybe got you thinking. Um, hopefully you can come up with some of your own. The thing to do here is to make sure you're on top of your numbers, so your your metrics. So what I would suggest you do is keep track of the number of calls you're making, the number of cold calls you're making, and then look at the conversion rate. So, whatever that rate might be, it might be meetings, it might be demonstrations, it might be something else. So, again, this comes back to your sales process, but do give yourself some something trackable because again, it's really important if you're running your own business, and if you've even if you're if you're a salesperson working for somebody else, it's still your business. Or I regard it that way. So you need to know what your numbers are. So do run quick numbers so you've got an idea of your conversion rates. That will allow you to perhaps focus on where things are going well, where things are going wrong, and start working on where they're not going so well, and just look at what you can what you can improve, and then measure. Try a different opening, uh, try different questionings, maybe try and keep the conversation shorter. Does that result in more contacts, whatever the next step is for you? Key things to remember are to keep it human, be incredibly respectful, uh, remember people buy remember the old um um like and trust um models. So if they like you, they trust you, they're they're much more likely to buy from you. So you want to get that across right from the opening of the cold call. Um being yourself is much more important. Now I tend to use humour, uh not all the time, but generally I'll throw something in there to soften the conversation. So if that's you, then use a bit of humour, but make sure it's appropriate. So the key things here are to just to recap, really, make sure you're you come across as confident, but not um aggressive or arrogant. Be very clear, be very curious. That's the most important thing. Be curious about what they're doing and how you can help them. If they say no, that's fine, you're gonna get those, and we've I've spoken about those in other podcasts. Um just takes you close to a yes. Or it can help you to screen out the people who are never gonna buy from you, and this is also really important on cold calls, because as always, we only have a certain amount of time, and we need to be spending that time with people who are the people who are likely to buy from us. So that's really important. So look, they're just a few uh tips for you for cold calling. If you've got suggestions of your own, please let me know. If you've wanna give feedback on this, if you try a few things, let me know what works, what doesn't. Um I'm always open to that. And if there are any other subjects you'd like the like me to be covering in these podcasts, please let me know, and I'll be very happy to do that. So that's it for now. If you think I've earned a like or a subscribe, please do that. And uh I'll speak to you in the next podcast. So bye for now.