The Mindset of a Top Cold Caller
Michael Hanson
Empowering B2B Sales Teams to Have Better Conversations | CEO - Growth Genie, Host - COSMIC Bridge Podcast
I was on an awesome webinar yesterday with James Buckley and Shelly Gupta Correa (Sell Better JB Sales) and Gabby Furlotte (Proposify) and an interesting topic came up:
The mindset for cold calling
Cold calling is scary, as we use our phone in other areas of life less and less, so we are less accustomed to unsolicited calls. BUT they still work.
Here are 4 essential psychological traits I see in top cold callers:
“Detachment from the outcome” is something you may have heard from sales leaders but how exactly can you detach? The best way is to change your goal. Instead of focusing on booking a meeting, focus on learning new information and approach it not as a “cold call” but a “research call”. That’s why I’ve paired curiosity with detachment.
Of course, you need meetings to reach targets, but only book meetings when you’ve learned something about a customer, which you know you can help with
2. Authenticity
A lot of salespeople I coach have strange corporate alter egos, which they use for cold calls. They change their tone of voice and use words like “streamline” and terms like “best of breed.”
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Be yourself and talk to CEOs, CFOs and CTOs with the same tone you’d use if you were speaking to someone you know well. An analogy I like to give is to speak to them like you just met at a networking event in person and you’re trying to get to know more about each other’s businesses.
3. Consistency
The only way to learn is to practice a lot. The more conversations you have with your ideal customers, the more you will understand market trends and buyer challenges. If you’re new to your industry or role, your first conversations can be awkward but the more you do it, the easier it gets.
Set yourself daily and weekly activity metrics and never miss them.
4. Resilience
Even the best cold caller is not going to convert over 50% of his conversations into meetings. There are simply not enough buyers with a need for that to happen. That means you are going to “fail” more than you win.
They key is not to see these calls as “failures” but as lessons learned that can help you in the future.
So those are my 4 psychological traits. Anything else to add?
Scaling vCISO and Security Consulting services @ Cynomi | Director of Strategic Partnerships Development | Coffee aficionado ??
2 年Great tips Michael. I always love to say that the R in SDR stands for resilience ;) big part of the role.
Helping people to have COSMIC conversations
2 年Michael Hanson well said. I was taught to just do it! Repetition is the mother of learning and that will lead to removing any feelings that can cause you to have a degree of call reluctance. Too many of the salespeople today are analizing until they paralize themselves and let their fear of failure get the best of them.
CEO | General Partner | GTM Advisory | AI Infrastructure | DeepTech
2 年Michael Krisztal, Obed H. - Relevant to what we talked about this morning :)
Does your business struggle with a consistent flow of leads? Well, that’s what we help with. We work with sales people by calling prospects on their behalf in order to book appointments, increase brand awareness!
2 年well said and in terms of personality, I would add: 1. straight up people who know how to communicate clearly and are quick to "get" people 2. talkers with a good voice and demeaner 3. flexible, adaptable - almost like actors, they can play a role and perform and gauge their audience's response - perhaps more like improv., than acting. 4. patient, perservering and staying the course because they know slow and steady wins the race.
Leader, Change Agent, Consultant | Content about leadership POVs, frameworks, & lessons.
2 年If someone called me and said they wanted to "streamline my workflows with their best in class technology" I would probably laugh out loud.