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8 Strategies to Guarantee Success in Cold Calling

Guest post by: Wendy Weiss

Article Overview: No one will buy from you if they do not know of you, your company/products/services. Every sale has its own cycle. Depending on what you are selling, it could be a short cycle of a day or two, or it could be a long cycle of a year or two.

8 Strategies to Guarantee Success in Cold Calling

1. Make telephone calls
No one will buy from you if they do not know of you, your company/products/services. Every sale has its own cycle. Depending on what you are selling, it could be a short cycle of a day or two, or it could be a long cycle of a year or two. Your call is your introduction and the start of your entire sales process. Without that initial prospecting call, you will not close any sales.

2. Make a lot of telephone calls
If you have only one prospect to pursue, that prospect becomes overwhelmingly important. If you have hundreds of leads, no one prospect can make or break you. The more calls you make, the more success you will have. Schedule time in your calendar, every day, to prospect. Successful prospecting is not about having one perfect conversation with one prospect, it is about having many conversations with many prospects and filling your sales funnel so that you never want for opportunities.

3. Target your market
Out of every one in the entire world who might possibly buy what you are selling, who is most likely to buy? Start by profiling your best customers. By 'best' I mean who buys the most and the most often? You are looking for prospects who match that profile. They are more likely to need and want what you are selling. Those are the prospects you should call first. The more targeted your calling list, the more successful your calls will be and the better it will be for your bottom line. Spend your time calling prospects who will potentially give you the most return for your investment of time.

4. Understand why customers buy from you
Every prospect is thinking: 'What's in it for me? Why should I be interested in speaking with you? What are you offering that will help me, my business, my bottom line, my employees...?' Ask yourself: What is the value that you offer? What is the benefit that your customers receive from doing business with you? When making your prospecting calls, make sure to lead with the benefit and/or value. This will answer your prospects' 'What's in it for me?' question. It will certainly set you apart from the crowd, as most prospectors don't do this. It will also catch your prospects' attention and give you the opportunity to have real conversations.

5. Call high
Always call the highest-level person that you believe is the decision-maker. That person will either be the decision-maker or they will know who is and they can point you in the right direction. Too many prospectors make the mistake of going in too low (the low-hanging fruit syndrome). They call managers rather than directors, administrators rather than owners, believing that the call will be easier. It won't. What will actually happen is that your sales cycle will lengthen and/or implode because you will not be speaking with someone who can make a decision. You will spend months courting someone who will then turn around and say, 'I need to ask my boss.' If they come back with the answer, 'My boss didn't like it,' you are dead in the water. Bottom line: If you are not speaking with the decision-maker, you are not speaking with a qualified prospect.

6. Know the goal of your conversation
The questions you want to ask yourself are: When I hang up the telephone what do I want to have accomplished? What agreement do I want from my prospect today? For example: If you are making calls to set an appointment, then the goal of your call is the appointment. It is not to close the sale. That, of course, is your ultimate goal, but it comes much later in the process. Very few sales are accomplished in one phone call. Make your call with your goal in mind. Say enough to accomplish that goal and save everything else for later conversations. Then repeat the process.

7. Ask for what you want
The biggest mistake that I see time and time again is that prospectors do not ask for what they want. Once you know the goal of your conversation, (see #5 above) decide exactly how you are going to ask for that goal. Create a script so that you can clearly and succinctly ask. Your prospect will not read your mind, guess or offer. You must ask. I have seen clients double and triple their results simply from starting to consistently, in every single phone call, ask for what they want.

8. Have fun
This is not life or death-it's only a cold call. The fate of the world does not rest on you and your telephone. You will not destroy your company or ruin your life if a prospect says 'no.' Loosen up, be creative, have some fun!

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Article Tags: conversation, conversation, conversations, conversations, conversations, qualified prospect, sales process



Related Forum Posts
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
Show the Benefits - Offer a free test drive of the Product or Service with a Money Back Guarantee - Take the Risk out. This will help them make the decision but you have to work with them to realize it by explicitly state the benefits they are receiving.
Success Strategies - How to get the results you want now? Success Strategies and Action Steps I have used are: The Power of Choice Where you are at this present moment, is exactly perfect from the choices you have made. If you want to be somewhere else, you have to decide clearly what that is (your goal/outcome) and create action steps to achieve this. The Power of Focus The book "The Power of Focus" by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Les Hewitt, is one of my treasures in my Entrepreneur Library. If you focus on what you want versus what you do not want, your conscious and sub-conscious mind will direct attention to this. The movie, What the Bleep, Down the Rabbit Hole, explains this in detail about quantum physics and what we create in our lives. The Power of Commitment This is not about commitment to others. The first step is the commitment, your word, you make to yourself. Accountability and responsibility are additional success strategies and ingredients to creating the success, defined by you, that you want. The commitment to others reflects your integrity, your word and the team you work with. Co-workers, clients, yoru family, friends and community. My Success Acronyn in Success Breakthroughs(c) is: S pecific & self-directed U nlimited opportunities & possibilities C reate powerful outcomes C onsistent measureable results E xperience pwoerful transformation S olution and action-oriented S uccessful habits and outcomes Break Through to Powerful LIfestyle & Performance Choices Moira


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