Breaking the Ice - How to Enjoy The First 30 Seconds of Your Cold Calls

To start with an admission; I was terrible at building rapport when I first started out as a Sales Development Rep! Can anyone else relate to finding "ice-breakers" cringey?

The most dangerous thing about my approach was, because cold interactions can be awkward, I was putting my needs as the sales person first to battle through these cumbersome conversations.

Prospects weren't the hero in the story, and it's a long road if you go that way.

There were also some super conversationalists and confident extroverts in the team, and how they approached calls seemed so far ahead of my skill level. This wrongly discouraged me from even really trying.

The reason for highlighting these things is if you are justifying to yourself:

"I'm an introvert"

"I will never be as confident as Don"

"Building rapport is cringey and not my style"

These thoughts are going to cost you, snap out of it, because if small-talk doesn’t come naturally to you, there are other ways of building a connection.

If you do want to up your small talk game, there are 7 lines for ice-breakers you can use in this article that should offer some inspiration.

Final note before we dive into things. If you have been doing Sales Development for a while, this should help refresh on the basics, but you might be looking to polish your already established skill-set so I recommend you take a look at people like Ryan Reisert & Benjamin Dennehy who have documented on video some first class call openers.

Let's do this.

Understand You Are An Interruption

Put yourself in the shoes of the person you are cold calling or emailing. What do you know about them?

1.    They are busy

2.    They are probably being pitched to 10+ times a day

3.    They want to feel special, and often cold callers fail at doing this

4.    They will be more likely to relate to someone who understands their challenges

Build your approach around being empathetic towards what you know about the prospect and the engagement will warm up quickly.

If you are feeling bold, start your call with;

"How have you been?"

It insinuates you have spoken before, which can change the dynamic in your favour, without you explicitly saying you have - which would be a lie!

A label can be a very good way to show you have read a situation. If someone is quite abrupt and continues to be so after about 15 seconds, try saying something like:

"It sounds like I've caught you at a bad time."

This gives the prospect control, and will often disarm them. It's not good to lead with this though, more of a last resort, and will often lead to a scheduled call back rather than a good conversation in the present.

Take Control

Meeting someone new is a daunting experience to a lot of people. It feels good when someone takes control and makes it seem like not such a big deal.

As the instigator being confident will help your prospect to feel safe about this new encounter, and when people feel safe they open up.

If you come across as nervous, you draw attention to the fact the experience could be negative, and then the prospect’s shutters will come down.

Smile, be warm, friendly and articulate your message with confidence.

This all comes down to practice, roleplay and muscle memory. You should have 4 or 5 rehearsed openings to calls that you can flip between depending on how the prospect responds in the first 3-5 seconds of the call.

Every morning before you dial, run a couple of practice pitches to get into a confident groove.

You can also take a look at other ways to get in the zone with the planning ritual in this article.

Research Before Calling

Familiarity is a good way to break the ice, and so finding common ground is important. Luckily for you, social media means that it is now easier than ever to find out about someone before you call. Things to check for on LinkedIn & Twitter include:

• What interests or skills you share
• What Groups they are in
• What Mutual Connections you have
• Cities, Universities, Music, Sports Teams

Remember though that this kind of personalisation can be time consuming, and time is always of the essence in cold outbound.

One way of personalising at scale is selecting an industry and only prospecting into that industry on that day.

This will mean the phone can be ringing and you at least have some way of personalising if you get a quick pick-up. If you don't, bring up their socials as you go to try and get something additional.

Offer Before You Ask

As a general rule when meeting a stranger, you probably wouldn’t ask them for something straight off the bat.

Same applies in cold outbound.

Offer some information about their industry, give some insight into how you've solved their challenges or explain what they will gain from answering one of your questions.

Josh Braun refers to these as Deposits & Withdrawals, and inbound leads work in a very similar way.

By the time you make an ask you should have built enough value through small offers that it is easy for the prospect to say yes.

Richard Smith also talks in a lot of his content about "Small Asks." Put yourself in the shoes of a prospect. If someone cold called you, what would you consider too much and what would be a small request where you would be happy to participate or take the conversation to the next stage?

Use your answers as guidelines to begin with and then start pushing the boundaries to find out where the limits are. This A/B Testing is useful for improving all parts of your sales approach.

Be Authentic

The much maligned advice of being yourself! From personal experience, this just can't be left out.

Prospect’s can smell it a mile off when you are pretending, one of the best ways to build a connection with someone is being yourself. You come across as secure, and people feel safe around you.

If you are a chatty person, chat away. If you are direct, get to the point. If you are a good listener, ask some questions.

Build that into a thought out and practiced opener and it is a lot more likely to be successful.

How important is this stuff?

Moving cold prospects into the funnel is the least rewarding, toughest part of Sales Development, but if you do it well and do it often you have control over your numbers.

You will get out, what you put in. So the question is more; How important are your numbers to you?

I'm always looking for new ideas, so please comment below on how are you approaching the first 30 seconds of your calls when you are outbound prospecting?

Get in touch if you want to level up your outbound sales development or check out more helpful sales development content at:

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