What Bill Clinton taught me about cold calling

Several years ago I meet former President of the United States, Mr. Bill Clinton. During the round table discussion Bill’s key take away was when you give someone five minutes of your undivided attention both of you will gain a deeper understanding of each other.

Following this advice, when I make my cold calls short and ensure that my attention is 100% on the person I’m communicating with.

While cold calling might be a great way to increase business I try to ensure that I've already dealt with all the easy conversations and low hanging fruit such as the inbound leads and the referral network first. Once I know that I need to start warming up frost bitten leads, I fire off a quick email (that is a whole other topic on effective emails) and now that I'm ready to cold call.

My goal for the call is to get to one of two end points;

1. Qualify the prospect and book a demo for the next call, or
2. Disqualify the prospect and learn something.

Before the call

Prior to the call I do my research on both the company and the target.

For the company, I review the website. Check out the about page, look at the some of the most recent blog articles, and press releases. Some key points of information I look out for is what differentiates them from the competition, what markets they target, what are they touting today, and what are they most proud of.

My research goal is to pull information that will tell them I did my research.

When I review the person within the company, I review their job title, role, responsibilities, compare with my developed personas. I of course check out their LinkedIn profile. One key in reviewing their profile is what they did at their last job. Why is that important? I might want to know why they left (what opportunity does the new gig offer) and people will very easily divulge information from areas that they are not currently involved in. Bonus, if that company is a target, I might get a soft referral if I play my cards right.

I try to limit the amount of time preparing and reviewing to a maximum of ten or fifteen minutes since there is always a good chance that there was an error in the website (not updated), the person I believe I’m looking for is in fact not the right person, or I get to someone else in the organization who has the information I need prior to heading to the decision maker.

Mentally Preparing for the Call

Have fun. Cold calling is hard, so if you aren't enjoying the ride it will come through on the call and failure will become common. On that note, keeping the conversation lighthearted is critical.

To include some whimsy in the call, sometimes I have my analogue stopwatch on hand and when I say I will take 15 seconds I make sure they can hear the audible *click*. I also tend to drop a couple of relevant jokes. If the joke bombs, I own it with, “well that joke bombed” which usually gets me back on track, and possibly the chuckle I was looking for.

The First 15 seconds

In the first 15 seconds my goal is to qualify in or out the person I’m talking with. I may have done all that research ahead of time, but that is never 100%. So I ask;

“Hi {person}, are you the best person to talk to about {ABC}?”

Simple yes or no response required.

Indeed they might say no to get you off the phone, however I consider that a win, I don’t have time to deal with curmudgeons.

If it is a no, I ask who in the organization has that responsibility. If the person I am talking with seems to not be totally annoyed, I pump them for information (see below) before I move on.

Ask for Permission

Two universal truths; everybody is super busy, everybody hates tele-prospectors. I get around this by being SUPER nice.

“Great! If you can give me 30 seconds, then you can decide if what I have to offer would be valuable for you or your organization”.

The typical response is go ahead.

Everybody has 30 seconds to listen to a tele-prospector then tell them to leave (or worse in more colorful metaphors). They think they are being given the upper hand.

If they are too busy for a 30 second conversation, I lightly call their shenanigans since they did pick up the phone (let’s face, 30 seconds is not that long) and I book the next 5 minute meeting on the spot and get their email address (even if I had it before) and send them information with a follow-up time.

The Pitch

Once permission is asked and granted, it is go time, this is where the research pays off.

Start by saying something that shows I did my research and why I am calling that person at that company and end the pitch with, “does this sound like something that would interest you and your company?”

Again, only a simple yes or no response is required.

If it is a yes, I ask for what the top 3 things they want to learn about during the demo and I book the next call. Everything after that is gravy.

Pump for Information

Once they’ve said no or I’ve booked the next meeting I try to gather information. Depending on how the conversation goes or information I find most relevant I will mix and match what information I gather.

Here are some of the questions and follow-up questions I might ask.

Completely not interested?

• Why are they not interested?
• Are they using a competitor?
• How are they solving the problem today?
• Budget concerns?

 Are they using a competitor?

• Why did they decide to go with that product?
• Who decided to go with that product.
• What do they like about it?
• What don’t they like about it?
• What could they do better?
• When is the contract up?

They are not in a buying mode?

• How much are they spending on their current solution(s) now?
• When is their next budget?
• What is the budget?

 That’s pretty much it.

Epilogue

I will never say there is a secret to having every call work.

There are a lot of voicemails (leaving effective voice mails is a whole other can of potatoes, granted I have a colleague who has a phenomenal call back rate because one of his tactics is that he SINGS his messages), some people just don’t want to engage, however having a definitive game plan, being explicit on what that game plane is, asking permission, and being respectful gives me a better chance of having that call go well.

To close here is a short clip from “Boiler Room”, I love this piece since it shows that a bad pitch will never close a deal and a fully tuned pitch might not work either.