Hey guys.
This is Steli Efti with Close.io.
Let’s answer the question, “What is the most effective way for you to improve your
cold calling abilities?”
I was talking to a salesperson earlier today and he told me, “You know what Steli?
I’ve been doing cold calls for a long time.
I’ve read all the books.
I’ve read all the blog posts.
I know a lot of theory about how to do a better job in cold calling people and pitching them
over the phone.
But I find that I’ve reached a plateau and I’m not really improving anymore.
What can I do?
What hack is out there?
What kind of idea, philosophy, tactic do you have that I can use to really bring my cold
calling game to the next level?”
Here’s the simple truth.
There are a bunch of things that you can do to become better at cold calling.
There’s a psychological effect, a psychological factor about putting yourself in the right
state, having the right energy, the right outlook, the right confidence and clarity
when you go into these calls and being able to grow beyond your fears of doing cold calls.
I’ve written about that.
We can link that up in this video.
There is a tactical component of writing really good sales scripts, writing really good objection
management documents.
We’ve written about this before.
We have templates out there.
I will link to those in this video as well.
But if you’ve done all that, what else can you do to really get your sales pitching and
cold calling ability to the really – the next level, to become a pro?
It’s a very simple two-step process.
Number one, you want to make a lot of cold calls, right?
That’s not surprising.
But if you want to master anything, you have to utilize repetition to get to mastery, right?
So you want to do a lot of calls.
You will never master the cold call by doing 10 cold calls a day.
You have to do 100, 200, 400.
You have to do a high volume to really master that game.
Then step number two which is almost more important than step number one is you want
to start recording your calls.
You actually want to start recording your calls and then listening to the recordings
to analyze your strengths and weaknesses and to find the blind spots that you have while
you’re actually conversing with somebody.
It’s much easier to find these blind spots when you listen and analyze the call and spot
opportunities for growth.
Now, I’m not a lawyer.
This is not legal advice.
In some states, in some countries around the world, it may or may not be legal to record
sales calls.
You might have to disclaim it in one way or another.
Sometimes it’s a beep.
Sometimes you just tell people that you’re recording a call.
You have to do the research yourself, right?
I’m not liable for that and I can’t tell you what you can or cannot do.
You will do that research.
But despite that, if you can record your sales calls and listen to them, they’re going
to be the greatest source for your improvement.
They’re going to be the greatest sales training resource that you can ever get.
Nothing will be better or more personalized than your own sales calls, teaching you how
to do a better job at doing cold calls.
At first, you can just listen to these calls yourself.
Then what you want to do is you want to start actually having other people, experts, friends,
colleagues listen to your calls.
You want to share the worst calls.
This is not an ego-boosting activity.
This is not about you looking good to the world and bragging about great sales calls.
Great sales calls, fine.
But the bad ones are the ones that teach you where you can improve and where there are
real opportunities for growth.
So you want to sharing really difficult, really challenging calls with your friends, with
advisers, with your colleagues, with your boss and ask for feedback.
The more relentless you are in analyzing yourself, listening to yourself as you are pitching,
as you are cold calling, the more open you are about inviting feedback and critique and
critical inquiry into your abilities, your skills, and your performance, the more dramatic
the change and the more dramatic your improvement.
So it’s as simple as that.
Start making tons of cold calls if you want to get better at it.
Then start recording those cold calls, listening to them.
Analyze them.
Share it with friends and have them give you feedback and analyze and critique it and give
ideas for improvement.
If you can’t do that, you can’t do that consistently let’s say over the next three
months, your cold calling game is going to get to a totally different level.
You’re going to start crushing more and more in every single call.
I promise it to you.
This is not difficult but it’s a little hard for most people to do – to have that
honesty and that ambition to listen to your own calls and not just once or twice but actually
on a consistent basis.
If you use software like Close.io, hint, there’s a little pitch coming your way.
If you use awesome CRM and sales software like the software we built, Close.io, you
can make calls right out of the CRM and every call can be recorded auto-magically, right?
So you don’t have to do anything.
You just keep doing cold calls as you would always do and all of them are recorded.
You could search them.
You could share them with your team.
Other people can have access to them.
So it makes this process a lot easier.
But even if you don’t use Close.io yet, you could record in a number of ways that
are very easy and very non-technical and use these recordings to improve yourself and to
put yourself through a cold calling academy that’s more personalized than anything out
there, any book, any blog post, anything else that you could do.
I hope this was useful.
If it was, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube link.
There are a lot more videos coming your way and make sure to check out Close.io.
Go on our blog.
Subscribe to our email newsletter and our email startup sales course and shoot me an
email at Steli@close.io if you need more tips, more help or any feedback to get your sales
game to the next level.