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Cold Calling Perfection: Are You Hearing This?

Guest post by: Kendra Lee

Article Overview: In email prospecting strategies, one of the first things I advise is that you send yourself a draft before hitting the final send. That way, you get a sense of what it's like for your prospects to receive your emails. You can quickly see where you need to make adjustments to grab your prospect’s attention and get a reply. This same checkup strategy works well for your cold calls, too.

Cold Calling Perfection: Are You Hearing This?

In email prospecting strategies, one of the first things I advise is that you send yourself a draft before hitting the final send. That way, you get a sense of what it's like for your prospects to receive your emails. You can quickly see where you need to make adjustments to grab your prospect’s attention and get a reply.

This same checkup strategy works well for your cold calls, too.

Many of your best and worst phone habits are the ones you probably aren’t even aware of until you hear them. They’re the same habits that may be keeping you from closing more first appointments.

So, how do you assess your cold call effectiveness? Record them.

It used to be that only the largest companies had access to telephone recording equipment. These days, however, numerous recording options exist. Recording functionality may already be built into your company phone system. If not, at the very least, you can use one of the free conference calling options that record calls.

Depending on where you live, there could be legal issues that require you to notify your prospect that you're recording the call, so do confirm that first. And if recording cold calls makes you uneasy or isn’t possible, ask a peer to listen in while you make calls instead.

Here’s a quick checklist of 10 things you should listen for in your cold call reviews.

1. Are you opening the call with a compelling value proposition? The better you get at grabbing a prospect's attention during the first few moments of a cold call, the easier time you'll have of advancing the sale.
2. Are you talking about products, or business needs? Prospects care most about solutions to their problems, so be sure to frame your call in those terms.
3. Do you sound like an expert? It's important to be authoritative if you want prospects to trust you with their time, much less their investment.
4. Are the suggestions you make, or situations you talk about, accurate? For your discussion to have any weight, it has to focus on a need the prospect considers to be valid and important.
5. How are your listening skills? No cold call should be a one-way conversation. Ask questions that engage your prospects and learn to listen closely to the feedback you're receiving from prospects.
6. How does your telephone voice sound? Is your voice clear and relaxed, or full of "um's" and "ah's?" Cultivating a strong, clear phone voice is important for making prospects comfortable with you.
7. How skilled are you at dealing with objections? Cold calling is full of objections. Practice dealing with them over the phone and your appointment closing ratio will improve drastically.
8. Are you building enough interest before you ask for an appointment? Asking for an appointment too early is a common sales mistake. Make sure the prospect is interested enough in what you're talking about before you propose the next step.
9. Do you look for referrals if your contact turns out not to be the decision maker? Sometimes our research lets us down, but finding the wrong contact doesn't have to halt the sales opportunity. Ask for a referral to the correct decision maker and reference your initial call as an introduction.
10. Is the voicemail you leave one that you would return? If you're going to make cold calls, you're going to leave voicemails. Learning to leave the prospect with a compelling message – and clearly spoken return phone number – are great ways to make your telephone prospecting more effective.

If you can refine your cold calling, you’ll get past gatekeepers more effectively, leave more compelling messages, gather more relevant information, and close more first appointments.

And who doesn’t want to do all those things?

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Article Tags: cold calling, cold calls, how to cold call, phone cold calling, sales cold calls



Related Forum Posts
Re: What to avoid when cold calling? - At the time of Cold Calling we should avoid price increases for products and unavailability.
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: 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
Re: what makes you smile ???? - Hearing about a miraculous healing or a huge feat of overcoming obstacles always makes me smile!


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