Cold calling is, without doubt, one of the most challenging area of sales for any salesperson.
When the task is approached without appropriate cold call selling skills, the deluge of negative responses from prospects can be soul destroying for even the most hardened salesperson.
If cold calls are to work, then it’s essential that the salesperson takes note of best practice and considers whether their approach is likely to convert business at the end of the day, or, leave them feeling drained, disengaged and fed up!
Let’s look at some top tips for maximising cold calling success:
Be clear about why you’re calling
Before you call, make sure you have a clear understanding of why you are calling and your goals. Understand what you want your prospect to take away from the call and scope any questions that you might need to ask. Bumbling incoherently through a call will not endear you to the prospect and may well result in the call being a waste of everyone’s time.
Don’t try to close a sale on your cold call
Cold calls are a doorway to creating a relationship with someone, which will hopefully facilitate a potential sale at a later date. Invest your efforts into creating a rapport with the individual and capturing their interest in your service or product, through dialogue and questions. If you try to make a sale prematurely, you'll be doing so in the absence of the necessary foundations and appear pushy. This will, no doubt, irritate your prospect and you will leave the call feeling disappointed.
Avoid Scripted Calls
Connecting with your prospect and humanising the call are key to the call going well. Although it’s a good idea to have a broad framework for your call, you should avoid scripts as they remove any chance for personalising the call and creating meaningful discourse. Scripted calls are also immediately obvious, making the prospect feel like collateral in your cold calling mission.
Instead, be more creative about the way you manage your calls. Consider the use of meaningful and relevant stories or case studies, try and find synergy with your prospect and listen carefully to what they say as this will make it possible for you to put your prospect, their company or their needs at the core of your discussion.
Record and unpick your calls!
Practice makes perfect. As such, many novice cold callers find great benefit unpicking recorded calls, once they’ve been made. Although it can be a slightly uncomfortable experience listening to a recording of oneself during a call, there’s huge value in it. By recording the call, the salesperson can listen to it with a view to:
- Understanding call features that went well, so they can be replicated or built upon in future calls
- Understanding what went badly in the call and should, as such, be avoided in the future
- Exploring opportunities that were missed to help attune oneself to potential prospect cues for future calls
- Gaining an awareness of parts of the call which may have been too hurried, have involved too much salesperson talk time, spoken over the prospect or failed to make the necessary impact
- Putting oneself in the shoes of the prospect – how would you feel if you were to be on the receiving end of the call?
Consider a cold calling training course
Attending a cold calling training course with a specialist sales trainer can give great returns on investment. However, if you’re not able to attend a course, then make use of the great resources and information which abound on the internet. There’s plenty there to help give you confidence and that competitive edge!
Training South West work develop the skills of sales staff across the region. Whether you are in Dorset, Cornwall, Devon or Somerset, we have a diverse range of excellent sales related courses to meet the professional development needs of your sales staff. Delivered by our expert sales trainers, we take the hassle out of training by bringing our training courses directly to you! Contact us for more information.