cold calling - Better Closer

Cold Calling is Easy if You….

February 7, 2011 By Bill Rice

Simply Relax and Cold Calling Will Become So Much Easier.

A harsh reality for the sales professional is the necessity of cold calling. Having to cold call is like having to eat your vegetables as a kid. In order to grow big and strong in your profession you have to do it. So instead of making it something you dread, like eating your vegetables when you were a kid, put some ketchup on it and make cold calling fun. Yes fun. Once you make it fun you’ll find it one of the easiest parts of the job.

Relax!

Cold calling can be a lot of fun if your approach is relaxed. Forget your quota, forget the numbers, forget that you need to make president’s club to afford that vacation, and just clear your head of all those external pressures. You may not realize it, but all those pressures come through in your voice when you’re on a call. If you’re going door to door on cold calls, it will show in your voice and body language and that’s double trouble. This external stress translates into a more high pressure and anxious call directed at the prospect. The prospect can tell you’re thinking about what their business can mean to you and not necessarily how it can benefit them. This is no basis for a relationship and if you want to earn a prospect’s business, a solid relationship has to be established.

Once you free yourself to relax, you will come to realize that cold calling is a game. It’s a game about numbers and statistics. You will find out that no matter how good you are, there will always be those who will not take a meeting with you or say “yes” – ever. Instead of homing in on these objections, you will start giving yourself permission to quickly move on to the next call. Then it’s a game about who can get to the “yes” first.

Now some sales managers might frown on such an approach and hammer on and on about overcoming objections. However, a natural by-product of relaxing and allowing yourself to get through to the “yes” is that you will think more clearly during calls. You won’t be so anxious. You won’t be forcing yourself to think of what next to say. Instead, you will be free to focus more on your prospect and your listening skills will improve by leaps and bounds. This will lead naturally to an ability to think more clearly during those calls and overcome those objections.

Filed Under: Quick Sales Tips, Social Selling Tagged With: cold calling, cold calls

5 Tips for Sales Improvement This Week

October 19, 2009 By Bill Rice

Often we are looking for silver bullet systems or recipes for success, while ignoring the basics. In my experience 90% of big sales improvement comes from getting back to the basics. These basics will have an immediate, measurable impact on your sales numbers.

Let’s put it to the test. Here are five fundamentals of sales. If you focus on them they will increase your sales this week.

Breakthrough the Fear of Failure

Jeffrey Gitomer, a sales guru and best-selling author, is famous for saying “fail faster.” This is a critical concept for a sales person to grasp early in their career. Like any professional athlete or best-selling author will testify to, you will swing and miss, shoot and miss, write and miss far more often than not. But, that’s okay because it’s the big ones that make them millions.

Sales has the same odds and the same big rewards. You have to kill the fear of rejection. You will hear “no” far more than “yes.” Embrace it. Know that it only means that you are that much closer to a sale.

Stop Getting Ready to Call, and Call

This is the top failure in sales performance–failure to call. Cold calling has become a pariah. However, the truth is that cold calling is the backbone of sales. Fundamentally you have to make contact and get your message out. That usually means calling a few people, setting up some appointments, and introducing yourself.

Sitting back and waiting for someone to find you and discover how you can help them is really making the buying process hard. And that, of course, is not good for your sales numbers.

Stop Picking Leads, Just Grab One

Here is another real sales quota killer–picking leads. Better known as cherry picking.

The thing about trying to constantly find the “best lead”–it doesn’t work and it wastes time. Ultimately, sales leads are often little more than a name, telephone number, and email. What are you going to make your, “this is a killer sale lead” decision based on?

Much like my advice to pick-up the phone and call, just grabbing a lead is about forward motion. Creating momentum has a far greater impact than getting the right lead.

Start Doing a Little Lead Nurturing

Regardless of how effective your sales pitch and charm might be, most buyers don’t immediately pull the trigger. That’s okay. Assuming you have a good lead nurturing program. In fact, studies show that lead nurturing not only keeps that sales lead active and viable, but may also creates a trust relationship that will actually increase the size of the transaction.

Think about it. You can build a strong feeling of reciprocity with lead nurturing. If you have a good system of touch points and you are giving away valuable content you are building buying pressure on that prospect.

Start Measuring Your Sales Process

One big mantra at a high performance sales organization I used to work at was: “What gets measured gets improved.”

If you’re not breaking down your sales process into measurable elements you might as well be “shooting BBs at the moon”–you’re never going to hit your target. Measuring helps you observe and make timely adjustments, before it’s too late. Do you need to make more calls? Is a certain objection eating you up? Are you losing deals in the proposal phase? If you aren’t measuring you won’t know.

Most importantly, do something with those improvement prompts. Work on increasing your leads and call volume. Tweak that sales script. Improve the value in that proposal.

Hopefully you are seeing a theme. So often, whether it is sales, sports, or any other competitive endeavor improvement is often best achieved by getting back to the basics. Try these back to basics tips and tell me how they go.

Effectively Following Up On Sales Leads (bettercloser.com)
“Sales-Ready” Lead…What? (bettercloser.com)

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Filed Under: Sales Training Tagged With: cold calling, Jeffrey Gitomer, Sales lead, Sales process, Salesmanship, Social Selling

Cold Calling, The Real Sales Skill

August 25, 2009 By Bill Rice

: Image via Wikipedia

I, like most sales people, avoid talking about cold calling.

It is the ugly, nasty, important core of our business. We hate it (Or should we? More in a minute) and our prospects hate it (Can we fix that?). And I spend a ton of time writing about a million ways to make every call less of a cold call, like using Facebook and FriendFeed for sales leads.

Loving Cold Calling

But, I ran across this great little article from Sales Machine on BNET–Top Sales Pros Really Love Cold Calling. Guess what? He’s right!

I remember back in the day at Quicken Loans one of the highlights of motivating our sales teams was what we called Live Sales Events. These were simple…Sales Managers hoping on the phone with their teams listening in. Of course, the motivation was the competition to see whose manager performed the best on those cold calls.

One last point before we leave the example. Not only did the teams love it, so did the managers–that’s how they got there!

Why is Cold Calling Important?

Why does everyone avoid the topic of cold calling or act like it is something to be avoided? Because it is hard!

(Secret: And telling people things are hard doesn’t sell books or “Get Rich Quick” eBooks)

The number one failure I see in sales performance is phone anxiety. People are afraid of failure and cold calling (sales in general) is full of it.

Legend has it (I don’t know for sure) that one of Chris Gardner’s (The Pursuit of Happyness) tricks for success was to never cradle the phone. By never putting down the phone he was forced to dial one number after the other–never time for doubt to creep in. He learned to love cold calling. He learned how to pursue “happyness.”

How Do You Learn to Love Cold Calling?

I’m not sure you do. But, it is the key to success.

You can get better at attracting an audience. You can find better ways to target your message towards the right people. You can figure out more efficient ways to hit those right people with that message.

However, until you learn to love picking up the phone and making a connection with someone you will never be great in sales.

Do you love cold calling? Do you love helping people? Can you make people interested in hearing your voice?

Practice it.

Tell me how you do it…leave me a comment.

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Filed Under: Contact Management Tagged With: cold calling, contact, prospects, social selling, telemarketing

Power Dialing Results Attitude Not Technology

July 23, 2009 By Nick Martini

Cold Calling is the most difficult part of sales for most to find master and involves the most discipline to get through. At times, it may feel daunting. On the other hand, when telesales is done right, the experience is most rewarding.

As a sales person, there should be no question that making cold calls is or has been a part of your job. Many people don’t like it very much because it requires hard work, discipline and consistency. Let’s face it, closing the sale is a lot more fun. Here are some tips to make your power dialing experience more effective.

Time is Money, Schedule Cold Calling

Make each moment count after all your time is money. Budget your time out wisely creating a schedule that includes cold calling time to build your prospect list. Great things happen when you manage your time effectively inside and outside of the workplace. We all know that we should do this, but we just plain don’t want to sometimes.

If you are calling head decision makers, you can typically reach these people in the mornings. Make a consistent effort to call for a set number of hours each morning. Once you get this completed, you will have time in the afternoon to visit clients and work on proposals.

Pre-plan your call to increase the likely hood of success. This means that you know what you want to say, and what direction you want the call to go in. The first step although obvious is often missed, “What is the purpose of your call?” Many times, the simple answer is, “I am calling to make sales”.

Do Your Research

Every call should be a unique experience for you and the potential sale. In reality, you need to know in advance details about your lead prior to the sale, so you can set the agenda for the call. By taking a few minutes to pre-plan your calls, you will make better use of time for the prospect and yourself.

Several methods are suitable reasons to call a prospect. For example;

Introduce you & your company – develop a business relationship
Qualify, analysis of the situation – identify prospects challenges
Set appointments
Follow through call – after introduction to move the sale ahead to the next step
Seminar/Workshop – inform leads of upcoming promotional events
Combination call – combination for any of the above includes products, services or information seminars

Customizing effective cold calling scripts is an art. Have you ever had to read from a script that was prepared for you to sell a product or service? Did it feel natural to you? Did you feel in control of the conversation? Were you prepared for all of the questions the prospect asked?

Build Solution-based Call Scripts

When designing your script, consider that decision makers do not necessarily buy products, they buy the solutions. Keys topics to address in designing your call script include;

How can my product/ service help the prospect?
Who am I selling it to?
What objections might the prospect have & how will I answer them?
What makes my product/service different?
Always set a follow up reason to call the lead back.
How will I effectively ask for the sale?

Avoid leaving a voice mail message, but rather tend to make personal contact with the decision maker directly. If you must leave a message make it less than twenty seconds and/or begin building a relationship with a gate keeper such as personal secretaries that may be screening calls. Building regular follow-up conversations with secretaries can give you an edge over the competition.

Power Dial with a Call to Action

When power dialing remember to have a call to action; you want to hook leads into the conversation quickly, get them involved. Find out right away if they’re a good prospect with qualifying questions designed to engage them and determine if they are a good prospect. Don’t be shy go in with your offer or close right away. Don’t keep them too long on the phone. You are rarely going to convince someone to listen to you if they aren’t in the right frame of mind to do so or caught them at a bad time.

Always measure your cold calling efforts and make adjustments by fine tuning your power dialing approach. Avoid burn out, every 3-hours take a break and stick to your consistent power dialing schedule. Make efficient use of your time by diligently executing your long term sales plan.

Filed Under: Social Selling Tagged With: cold calling, Sales process

The Secret to Improving Contact Rates

June 9, 2009 By Nick Martini

The phrase, cold calling, tends to strike fear into the hearts of most business owners, particularly if you are not already trained in this form of marketing. It is an undeniably successful way of promoting a product or service, but it has many pitfalls. Namely, marketers struggle with contact rates, as well as the overall premise of cold calling.

If you are interested in expanding your business through this type of marketing, there are a few things that you need to know ahead of time. If you feel at all uncomfortable or unsure about your campaign, it will show. In many cases, it is best to hire a professional telemarketing center to assist you, particularly if you don’t have the time, resources or simply the drive to get the job done on your own.
Let’s start with some common mistakes and how to overcome them.

Cold Calling Jitters

Even those who have been in marketing for years can shrivel up at the prospect of having to call thousands of leads. It’s easy to get tripped up by this fear, and this in turn leads to failure. Cold calling is powerful, but it should not be abused, or ignored. Here’s how to strike the balance.

1. Offer something of incredible value that you honestly believe in. The secret to cold calling success is having a product or a service that you can really get behind. The enthusiasm will show in your voice, and that in turn will help that consumer warm to your pitch.

2. Practice, Practice, Practice. You need to practice your pitch until it is completely memorized and flawless. Try it out on family and friends first, and see how they react. Take the time to change what isn’t working. The benefit to this extra work is that it won’t sound like you’re “reading” your pitch on the phone, and you’ll have that ingrained confidence that will help you sell your product.

Increase Contact Rates

Next, let’s focus on how to get people to listen to that great pitch that you just spent hours perfecting. Keep in mind that you’re not always going to be able to meet your goals, and there are certain times of the day when you may fall flat on your face. The key is testing and figuring out what time period and what days work best for the product you are selling.

Always follow the FCC rules for telemarketing and never attempt to break them, the consequences are harsh. You’ll improve your contact rates if you stay within the provided time schedule and avoid calling those who are on a do not call list.

One of the realities of telemarketing is that you will get people who will hang up on you. Don’t take it personally. For every ten that do, you’ll have one person that is ready to hear what you have to offer. You’re working for that person – for that sale. The key is perseverance, dedication and above all, believing that you can do it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: cold calling, contact rates, telemarketing

Cold Calling is Easy if You….