My First Ever Cold Call ((Warning - Disaster))

When I started at VanillaSoft , it was important to me that I understood what both our clients and our Sales team actually do and how they feel when they make a cold call. That's a big part of what any good Sales Engagement tool helps you do, and if you're gonna be any good at marketing it there's a fair shout for trying it out yourself.

So I did, as part of my first 2 weeks on the job and to ad-hoc learn how the product worked on the backend for myself.

I got a list of prospects in a different market, which our Sales team had never touched before. My cadence, script and emails were all ready and I waited for 2pm UK time to start calling into the East coast for roughly 9am local time.

The Call

"Hey, am I speaking to Suzanne? Hopefully I'm the only British cold caller you speak to today..."

"what?"

"Hey, did I get the right number, I was hoping to talk to Suzanne"

"dude wtf it's 5:55am and I'm Anthony"

Not a good start ?? Wrong person, wrong time zone and I'm pretty sure I woke them up by the sound of their voice.

Error #1

Check your damn list.

If you're calling at 9am ET, make sure you're only calling folks on the East coast. It's not funny to call someone on the stroke of 6am on the West coast by accident, which I did on my first ever call.

Error #2

I did not consider that this might happen and was totally unprepared for what I should do and say if it did. That's partly because I have never had any Sales training at all, purely self taught by content and plain old trial & error.

But I also didn't prepare enough to have some kind of plan for this.

Error #3

Sharing the recording of that call with our Sales team so they could have a laugh at my pain ????

Drawing a line

Bad calls happen but that was NOT a good first one, and I didn't wanna go into another cold call and come out of it feeling that dumb again??. Since then, I've privately spoken to tons of folks to teach me and to help me build my skill up for this. Sometimes it's been done on a podcast or webinar too, mostly just a 1:1 zoom though.

I'm doing another one of these sessions but this time it's a webinar, and I think you'll find what my guests have to say incredibly useful.

They're really teaching me where I go wrong, but sharing the experiences of over a million cold calls made between them.

Come chat with Marcus Chan - Callum Beecroft - Kevin Hopp and I about cold calling later this month. Promise it'll be a good time ??

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