Cold Call With Confidence

We recently ran our first training course; Cold Call With Confidence.

I'm delighted to say it got some great feedback, and then some bright spark suggested we share it with a wider audience.

We were a little undecided as we figured we would be putting a hell of a lot of our IP out there, completely free of charge. But then we thought 'what the heck', so here it is...

The training takes 4 hours to teach and a couple of hours to coach, but this will only take 15 minutes to read...I hope you find it useful.

Now that we have Inbound, isn't the idea of Outbound prospecting a little dated? Particularly if you listen to the social selling brigade who tell us all outbound activities are unwanted interruptions.

My take is that I'd rather be an unwanted interruption than unemployed. Because sooner rather than later, being an 'unwanted interruption' might very well be the only way to save your job.

How so?

Millennial buyers are on the rise and they seem to prefer buying online, as opposed to buying ... from you.

If customers prefer buying online, you can bet your company will find a way (if they haven't already) to sell their products that way. Particularly when they realise that allowing their customers to buy online has the happy bi-product of cutting out the biggest part of their Cost of Customer Acquisition... you (and your commission payments).

Your leads will dry up as your company realises they can make more money by sending them down a self-service, e-commerce, route.

Which leaves you, as a salesperson, with one job; to beat your prospects to their Zero Moment Of Truth (or ZMOT as Google call it).

Do that and you'll have worth to your company. Fail - and you'll find yourself surplus to requirements pretty darn quick.

When I used to tell my clients the Pipeline Doctors prospect primarily using the phone they would often laugh. But that's begun to change and I think there are two major reasons.

The first is that emails don't work nearly as well as they used to. The semi-personalised, sequential nonsense is either treated with disdain, or more often, simply never seen as junk filters improve.

The second is the availability of cell phone numbers. With tools like ZoomInfo, Lusha and Signal Hire it's never been easier to get straight through to a key decision maker. If they're on Linked In (and most are) chances are you can get their direct cell number in a matter of seconds.

I'm a big fan of social but for the love of god, please stop trying to sell on platforms like this. Social is great for research and it's a fantastic way create a personal brand which increases your credibility, but have you ever socially surrounded someone in an attempt to sell to them? It's creepy and takes an eternity. The alternative is connect and pitch... I rest my case.

Cold Calling has a poor reputation. That's because if you're not very good at something, you tend not to like it, and you'll verbalise just how poor an experience you had with it. And let's be honest, there's a hell of a lot of people who aren't real good at cold calling.

They set themselves up to fail by targeting the wrong people. Only 3% of your Total Addressable Market are in buying mode at any one time, so you know the odds are against you before you begin, but when you don't even try to call these people... is it any wonder you come to believe you're not a great cold caller?

But the most common mistake we see is conveying the wrong message. People continually talk about themselves. Their company value proposition - which is all about them, what they do and how wonderful they are at doing it - is the biggest culprit.

These two problems alone are enough to ensure regular rejection. People aren't insane and they know that doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result is. So they stop using the phone because they know what the result will be.

The following structure has been tried and tested on almost every vertical and on every type of prospect.

The steps should be taken in sequence, imagine they're stepping stones, or bases you need to pass to get a home run.

It's surprisingly rare to get through each and every step to the full capacity, but it's important to know what you should be striving for. Having said that, steps one, two and three are non-negotiable.

Without an interrupt you will sound like every other cold caller. While you think your call is going pretty well, your prospect is wondering how quickly they can get rid of you.

The best start to any cold call, and one that is almost guaranteed to get you to the next base, is the Personalised Pattern Interrupt (PPI). The opening line to the call should be something your prospect has said or written because there's not a prospect alive who doesn't like hearing their own words quoted back to them.

It's not always possible to spend the time looking for a quote or comment, and there are times when there's simply no quotes or comments to be found, in which case you have to use an Unexpected Interrupt. I have my favourites and over time you will develop yours (or pinch other people's)!

The Calling With Confidence structure is a fusion of old and new. One of the older parts of the structure is the Up-Front Contract.

For all sorts of reasons (it's polite, it's the first agreement, you give the prospect the illusion of control) Sandler's contract is still the best possible way to get to the next base (mostly because your prospect has agreed to give you time).

This is, by far, the most critical part of any call. Get these assumptions right and you will be well on your way to doing a discovery. Get them wrong - and move on.

Because it's so important, we recommend scripting this part of the call*.

Tibor Shanto taught me why Problems should never come first and exactly why Outcomes are the only things that will get a c-suite executive talking (HINT: C-suites are not going to discuss their problems with a cold caller - they won't tell you what keeps them up at night - but they might be interested in what SHOULD keep them up at night).

Benjamin Dennehy dares prospects to disagree with him and there's a powerful reason why this works so well, particularly with c-suite prospects.

*During the three sessions we've done to date we have written this scripted part out for each participant during the coaching part of the day. The structure of the script never varies, but the Outcomes and Problems are specific to each role you target.

Once a prospect has selected the area that's most important to them, you will need to ask the most important question in sales; to what extent does my prospect understand the problem I help solve?

Which means it's time to unpack some pain and get your prospect, if possible, to quantify it for you.

Before you go down the funnel it's crucial to understand what your goal is for the call. Your answer will determine just how far you need to go. (HINT: C-suites suffer from 'discovery fatigue' so don't push your luck)!

However far that is, you will need to change the conversation from the logical to the emotional before stopping. If there's no emotional involvement - nothing will get done and all you will do is bloat your pipeline with an opportunity that's destined to go no-where.

Story-telling has gone mainstream as we've all now realised they are the best way to communicate information if we want it to be believed and remembered.

The most crucial thing is to pick a story that resonates. It should focus on the issue and outcome NOT how you did it. Your prospect must be able to identify with the hero and be able to visualise themselves taking a similar journey.

If you nail the right story for the right situation you will have made an emotional connection that results in you not even having to be in the room to do your selling - your story will do it for you.

Most salespeople believe that a call that doesn't result in a meeting or sale is a failure. Nothing could be further from the truth. Depending on the maturity of your market, much of your target market will require nurturing.

But at some point you'll have to move the process forward. If you're an SDR, that means getting a meeting. Gong have done a crazy amount of research into phone calls and they've already told us the best closing line so why not go with what works?

Former President Ronald Reagan famously said "Trust, but verify". The same applies to your prospects!

The internet has created information parity between buyers and sellers. It means buyers don't need sales people the way they used to (and they are increasingly happy to avoid us if at all possible).

This means opening has become the new closing.

We have to get the basics right first - that means we must target the right people with the right message.

Then we have to overcome our fears and pick up the phone. But continual rejection will lead to an erosion of confidence and eventually phone fright.

To overcome this we need to use the Call With Confidence structure. It won't guarantee you get to a discovery every time, but it will reduce your rejection rates to almost zero.

If you enjoyed this article could I please ask you to Comment (I promise to respond) as commenting (rather than liking or sharing) is now the best way to circulate it now that the LI algorithm has changed.

We have only delivered this training three times, but the feedback has been amazing on each occasion. So if you're a salesperson who wants to use this structure or a sales manager who wants their team to make more appointments, give me a call and let's talk about how we can go about delivering this to you or your team.

Alternatively if you're a CEO of an SME who has a list of dream prospects in mind, but you and/or your team can't get through their door for love nor money, email me at: [email protected], message me here on Linked In, or call on +61 418 381829.