Do you make cold calls to prospects
and feel like it's just the equivalent
of banging your head against a cement wall?
Well, that is the experience that most salespeople have
when making cold calls.
But the reality is that cold calling really can work.
Making dials to prospects that you don't know
absolutely can work.
In fact, we're seeing time and time again
that fewer and fewer salespeople are doing it,
which is opening up the opportunities
for those that actually are.
So, in this video,
I'm going to show you how to make a cold call
that actually works.
Check it out.
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Number One- Clarify your overall prospecting strategy.
If you're just making cold calls,
if that is the only part of your prospecting strategy,
then chances are you're going to have a tough time
building a book of business.
Just using the cold call is really difficult
because if every time you're getting someone on the phone,
they have absolutely no idea who you are.
Then, chances are,
you're really like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill
every single day
and then it rolls back at the end of the day.
We've got to clarify our overall prospecting strategy.
What are all the strategies
that we can be using in combination
to make sure that we're really getting that prospect
to understand who we are
even before we get them on the phone.
So, leveraging the other tools you have
in combination with prospecting calls.
This is not 1987 where the only strategy we had
was making calls or going and knocking on doors.
Now, we have so many other tools
that we can leverage with the prospecting calls
to make sure that when we actually get them on the phone,
they have an idea of who we are.
Number Two- Warm up the call with other outreach.
So, I already hinted at this in the first strategy,
but let's get deeper into this.
Now, if you just make a pure, pure cold call to a prospect,
they answer the phone and you start your prospecting call
and they have absolutely no idea who you are.
Chances are it's going to be pretty difficult
to continue that conversation.
Of course, it can work, and it can turn into a sale,
and great things can happen.
But because we have other tools like email,
LinkedIn, other forms of social media,
mail, knocking on doors,
all of these different strategies that we can use
to get the prospect to know who we are
before we actually get them on the phone,
that's going to greatly increase the likelihood
that they're going to give us that first 30 seconds.
So, we want to really try to warm up the call
with other forms of outreach
before we even make that first dial.
That's going to slowly build a little bit of a relationship.
Think of it almost as like a micro-relationship
that gets them to at least be like,
"Oh yeah, I remember you sent me that email.
What's going on?"
Number Three- Know your prospect.
This is really important.
We must know who our prospect is
before we get them on the phone.
If we're going in completely cold,
and we have no idea who they are,
and we just know that they're a prospect on our list,
it's going to be a lot harder to get them to open up.
So, the more you can do some research ahead of time...
And by the way, don't do your research in between each call,
do your research before you make calls altogether.
And so, that way, you can just briefly review your notes,
make the call and get them on,
and be able to demonstrate
that you know who they actually are.
Number Four- Personalize your script.
This, again, builds on the last idea
of knowing your prospect.
Now that we know the prospect,
we want to incorporate some of that research
and insight that we have on them into our script.
Just showing that we know who they are with things like:
What's their title?
What company are they at?
What are some of the things
that might be going on in their world right now
that really demonstrate that we know who they are?
That's going to make the prospect feel a lot more open
to starting a conversation
because we're humanizing ourselves
with just personal details in the actual script.
Number Five- Follow a script.
One of the ideas here that I always get from salespeople is,
"I don't like to follow a script.
It makes me sound scripted."
Well, when I hear that,
what I think is the reason that you sound scripted
when you follow a script
is because you're bad at following your script.
Imagine if every actor or actress said,
"Oh, I don't like using a script
because it makes me sound scripted."
It's like, isn't that your job?
Isn't your whole job as an actor to follow a script
and yet make it seem like you're not following a script?
That's what acting is.
And the same thing is true for making a cold call.
We want to follow a script
because if we don't follow a script,
we're going to go all over the place.
It just happens.
I mean, if you've ever made a cold dial
and you didn't use a script,
you just kind of meander
and you just say whatever comes to your mind.
That's complete madness!
It's just total buffoonery to not have a script
and just say whatever comes to your mind
because you're just going to go all over the place
and then the prospect is going to be like,
"Ah, yeah. Thanks."
And they hang up.
Follow a script, have it really tight, ready to go
with exactly what you're going to say
with those personalization details built in.
So, that way, you are following the absolute best process
and you can continue to improve
and refine that script over time.
Number Six- Have contingencies.
There are things that happen on prospecting calls
where the prospect is pushing back.
Remember, they just answered the phone.
They probably thought that it was their wife,
or their husband, or their kid calling them
and they answered the phone and they're like, "Hello?"
And suddenly they hit you.
Chances are they're going to do things to try to push back
to get off of that call.
But what's great is that human beings behave
in very predictable ways.
So, there are only a few likely outcomes
that are going to happen
as a result of them pushing you off the phone.
And so, by being prepared for those likely outcomes,
those likely responses from the prospect,
you now have contingencies
where you can keep them on the phone
just a little bit longer.
So, when you initially make that call and they're like,
"Yeah, actually, this isn't a good time."
What do you say?
You've got to have that contingency laid out
so that way, you can push through
to get the next 30 seconds on the call.
Having those contingencies is absolutely one of the keys
to having effective cold calls.
Number Seven- Dig, then recommend.
Once you've gotten the prospect talking,
you want to dig, dig, dig
pretty briefly, but you want to dig into what's going on,
you want to ask them the right questions
once you've gotten them going,
and then you want to make a recommendation.
So, once you've determined
that they're at least qualified for your next conversation,
you want to say something along the lines of,
"Can I make a recommendation?"
And, of course, if you've had a decent enough conversation,
they'll say "Yes,"
and that's where you're going to recommend a next step,
whatever that next step is.
It might be part of your call to action.
It might be something that you're going to do for them,
or it could be a meeting.
You want to always recommend that next step
and get that locked in.
Number Eight- Get them to accept the calendar invite
on the phone.
So, this is just really tactical, but so powerful.
And it only exists
because now we've got such amazing technology
that allows us to send a calendar invite right away.
What you want to do is if you're establishing the next step,
don't just say,
"Okay, I'll send you the calendar invite for this time,"
but you want to actually,
while you're on the phone with them,
send them the calendar invite
and then ask them to check their email
or check their calendar to see if the invite came through
and then have them accept the invite on the phone.
So, something along the lines of,
"Would you mind just doing me a quick favor?
Check your email, see if that invite came through."
And then they do and they say, "Yeah, I see it."
And you say, "Okay, great.
Would you mind just accepting that
just so we're on the same page
and that way we have it locked in?"
If they're unwilling to do that,
then you don't have anything in the first place.
So, you'd rather make sure that you know
and now you're in their calendar in a really powerful way.
Number Nine- Power through.
One of the biggest mistakes that I see
with making cold calls is that we make a call,
it goes well or it goes poorly,
and then we either pat ourselves on the back
or we pout for a few minutes,
we drink some water,
we go to the bathroom,
we take a quick walk,
and then we come back and we make the next dial.
And so, that allows us to make maybe 10 dials in an hour.
The problem with that is that it takes so long in between,
we're wasting so much time,
it's deeply inefficient.
So, now there are technologies like power dialers
that allow us to, as soon as that last call is over,
boom, we're onto the next call.
Or a prospect doesn't answer the phone,
boom, onto the next call.
Power dialers are one of the most powerful pieces
of technology that just allow us
to just keep plowing through.
So now, instead of making just a certain number of calls,
we're doing a power dialing session for an hour
and that can allow us to make 60 to 80 dials in an hour
just by powering through every single call.
It keeps you moving forward
and it basically breaks the natural human nature
of slowing things down,
dialing the number, messing around.
Power dialers allow you to truly power through
and make you four or five, six times more efficient
than what you would normally be
if you were just dialing the phone yourself.
So, there is how to make a cold call that actually works.
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