Cold Calling Is Not?Dead

Early on in my career, I spent the majority of my time calling people that I either knew personally or was referred to. I was always more comfortable with this way of doing business. The thought of having to cold call someone was just inconceivable to me and not the way to do it.

Since then, I’ve helped sales organizations increase their revenue by taking their cold calling culture and improving upon it. Now, this doesn’t mean getting rid of cold calls, in fact I have them double down on their cold calling efforts.

It’s easy to say but I wanted to experience it myself. So I got on the phone and started making calls with them. I booked appointments and my strategy worked. So what is the strategy? It isn’t rocket science, I’ll tell you that…

It’s actually pretty simple and only consists of three main principles:

1. Increase Activity

You can’t expect to get results off making 20, 30 or 50 calls per day, you just can’t. Your activity metrics need to be 100–200 calls per day. I know that seems like a lot of dials, which it is, but how bad do you want it? How bad do you want to help the business grow and earn a great income yourself?

Well if you want it bad enough, you’ll make that happen. Hopefully your company prepares a list of leads for you so it’s easy to make that many dials but if not, you either have to do it yourself or outsource it.

With companies like Fiverr and Freelancer, you can hire people from other countries for pennies on the dollar to go and scrap the contact information of your target market, compiled in an excel document that you can then upload to your CRM system. Simple as that.

So if you want to be better in sales, you have to pick up the phone more.

2. Warm Up Your Cold Lead

In today’s day and age — there’s no reason to actually have to do a “cold” call. a cold call is totally out of the blue, with no one or nothing to reference, whereas a warm call to a referral is a call where you can reference someone that made the intro. So let’s work on taking that same principle and applying it to your cold call…

The use of social media, email marketing, even direct mail can be a great way to warm up that lead. Rather than referencing a person that referred you, you can reference your tough point from one of those mediums.

This allows you to lean on something other than going through your pitch immediately. 

Maybe they saw the email, maybe they didn’t, but at least now you got their attention which was the intention. Now you can go through your language and pitch a meeting, product or service.

3. Don’t Sound Salesy

I know it’s easier said than done, but please, just sound normal. People tend to communicate most through body language and as you know, you don’t have that over the phone. That makes your tone that much more important.

Instead of sitting down, looking sluggish and nervous, put a smile on, walk around with your headset, talk with your hands and your tone will be reflective of your excited body language.

The more normal you sound, the more comfortable they’ll feel and the more likely you will be to engage in a meaningful conversation.

So take these three things, implement them, practice and watch your results grow.

We’re talking about a better, better, better scenario. Increase your activity (better), warm up the lead (better) and improve your tone (better).