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Develop Your Cold Calling Techniques

Guest post by: Terri Levine

Article Overview: If your job requires you to make cold calls and you don't enjoy a high success rate, here are some tips to help you get your foot in the door.

Develop Your Cold Calling Techniques

Is cold calling dead? Well, if it were, somebody forgot to tell the people who ring me from time to time enquiring after my insurance needs or my stationery needs and so on. Unless you are on the "do not call" register, chances are you will receive these calls, and maybe you are one of the people who makes them, in which case, you have your job cut out for you, don't you!

Where most people go wrong in cold calling is in feeling they have to tell their contact everything that their given product or service does, while they're on the phone. Nobody plans a slot in their day to receive cold calls and most business people are very busy. So, the first thing to do is remember what the person on the other end of the line is thinking. More than likely, he or she is going through a series of questions similar to the following:

1. Who is this person? How did they get my name/number?

2. Why are they calling me? What does this person want?

3. Is it important?

4. What does it have to do with getting my job done?

While their objective is to get rid of you, your objective is to get the appointment. Nothing else.

Your first step is to get the person's attention and to identify yourself and your company. (Answering the question, "Who is this person?")

Second, give a reason for the call and identify features and benefits of your product or service. (Answering the question, "What does this person want?")

Third, ask a question that will attract their interest and lock them into a conversation. (Answering the question, "Is it important?")

The fourth step reinforces the second, emphasizes the benefits and reacts to the objection.

The fifth step concludes the call by asking for an appointment.

Sometimes a "cold call" will lead to discussing the reason for your call in more detail, but fear of rejection prevents many salespeople from making the first move. Try this practical advice for confident, successful cold calling.

* Learn as much as you can about the prospect's needs before the call. Ask yourself, "Why should this prospect listen to me?" This will help you to identify problems and focus your sales call to fit the situation.

* Potential customers will listen when they realize that you understand what they want and offer a product or service of real value. Lead off with the prospect's needs and interests.

Address current issues and new developments in the prospect's field.

* When appropriate, ask permission to tour the prospect's facilities. This will help you to learn about the company's problems and demonstrate your interest in helping them.

* If you have made contact but have not yet been able to set up an appointment, send a letter every few days with a useful suggestion or an article from a trade magazine. Do not, however, send a product brochure, as this will allow the prospect to make up his or her mind without talking to you.

* Remember that you are offering to share information gained from your experience helping other customers, you're not just trying to sell a product.

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Article Tags: cold call, cold calling, sales, selling



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Re: Cold Calling - As long as people are out of jobs, you'll probably have a lot of people who say they want to work for straight commission, but if they don't get paid fairly quickly, they usually move on. We've run into that and went through about 500 people (whose resumes looked really good) until we found about 3 good resellers. People just don't want to work for anything. Or they do a good job getting the business but don't do the follow up necessary to make the sale......so they move on thinking they need money NOW. Our business requires all cold calling as well. It's really tough for people to perfect that but there are a lot of good books out there. On is Cold Calling Techniques, by Stephan Schiffman
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Re: How to develop sales contacts? - Everyone has the right idea here. Depending on your business, there are different techniques that you could use. For consultants and sales heavy businesses, there are three tactics that I have found especially useful in my business: 1. Attend Networking Events 2. Cold Calling 3. Referral Program 4. Affiliate Program (most successful) The affiliate program was successful for me, as I hooked up with a franchise consultant, and he gave multiple unit businesses that needed my credit card processing services. I highly suggest you hook up with a sales partner, and give him a cut of the monthly revenue.
Re: Direct Mail Postcards - Post cards would be really expensive to send from Japan...but one way to advertise that is not expensive from overseas is by Cold Calling using cheap VoIP equipment. I know Japan has a really good internet connection, so as long as you are willing to stay up late, it might be an option. I cold call from Thailand far, far away from any city using a CDMA wireless internet connection and have had pretty good results. I find tho, that cold calling works best for business 2 business (b2b), rather than b2c products. --matt
Re: Bad SEO techniques? - There are few more techniques which also known as the Bad SEO Techniques or Black Hat SEO Techniques. Such as: - Relying on keyword metatags - Purchase Links (From Spamming or blacklisted sites or doing purchase links on high level for site marketing) - Horde Page Rank: This is one of my favorites, because it's one that most webmasters don't understand yet. This is because it changed over the past year or two. The concept people have in their mind is that page rank is a key part of site rankings and linking to other sites "leaks page rank" from your site. However, the world has changed. - Swap Links: Another oldie, but not goodie. Search engines want links to represent endorsements. Swapped links represent barter, and they are trivial to detect. Don't swap links for the purpose of building page rank. It's a waste of your time - Implement duplicate content - Use Session IDs on your URLs - Use lots of Javascript - Implement your site in Flash


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