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Cold Calling Tip - How to prepare for a successful cold call

Guest post by: Peter O'Donoghue

Article Overview: A large part of the success you will have in cold calling will come from your practiced ability to prepare for every call.In today's busy, hectic, information led society, people don't have time for time wasters. If you cannot clearly demonstrate that you understand a little about the others persons businesses then you are clearly wasting their time. You do not have to demonstrate with certainty that you can add value. This article shows how to prepare like a professional.

Cold Calling Tip - How to prepare for a successful cold call

A large part of the success you will have in cold calling will come from your practiced ability to prepare for every call.

In today's busy, hectic, information led society, people don't have time for time wasters. If you cannot clearly demonstrate that you understand a little about the others persons businesses then you are clearly wasting their time. You do not have to demonstrate with certainty that you can add value. It is great if you can, but often the ability to potentially help is enough - after all, you don't know enough about their business yet. What you do have to demonstrate though is that you have done your research.

Picture this cold calling experience:

Steve works for a large global IT organisation. He has recently joined their ‘internal' sales department where he has been given a list of 300 clients in his postcode area. Steve's targeted to produce over £10 million in sales from those 300 prospective clients in the next 12 months and the hardest part of all is many of them have never done business with the company before.

Steve picks up the phone and gets through to the Senior IT Director of a large diversified business. Confidently Steve asks a sales opening line that he has picked up from a book or some previous sales training:



"Mr Smith, would you be interested if I could show you how we could reduce your IT infrastructure costs next year by 27%?"

Mr Smith replied:





"Steve, I sure would. Please tell me everything you know about my group of companies and how you think this could happen?"





Now you can debate that this is a fantastic opening to ask for a meeting and in many circumstances would work. Steve could have said something like:

"Mr Smith, that's fantastic and I would love to check my understanding of your company with you and to find out exactly how we may be able to help. How are you fixed for no more than 20 minutes next Tuesday?"





But this was not really how the call panned out as Mr Smith was testing Steve.

He was a senior decision maker and he had heard the old "If I could show you...." line a thousand times before. He was testing Steve and quite rightly.

Steve knew very little other than the details printed off on his contact sheet. Soon Mr Smith knew that too and declined to be contacted again. This was a wasted opportunity with a company that typically could spend around £1 million per annum with Steve and his company. How long would it have taken to do a bit of research to demonstrate credibility to Mr Smith?

Probably no more than 10 minutes and in this case that would have been a priceless ten minutes.

One of the Questions asked regularly in my workshops and trainings is:

"Just how long do you recommend we prepare for each call?"

To which I often reply (which must infuriate the delegates):

"About as long as a piece of string!"

The amount you need to know and research depends upon your approach, the importance of the potential client to you, the level of knowledge you already have of the industry and your comfort level in making the call. It's equally important that you don't spend too long preparing for each call too. It is possible for you to develop an approach that works on calling companies in a similar Industry, with a similar purchasing characteristic or a similar problem. When you structure this approach correctly all your research and preparation should be made upfront with very little or no need to research between the calls. This is what's know as a ‘phone down - phone up' calling session.

Find out hundreds of ways to prepare for your cold calling and sales prospecting by subscribing to our free sales newsletter available ia the link my bio....

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Article Tags: 10 million, 12 months, circumstances, diversified business, infrastructure costs, mr smith, nbsp, postcode area, previous sales, prospective clients, time wasters



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