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How to Cold Calling Without a "Pitch"

Written by: Ari Galper

Article Overview: Make your cold calling about them, not about you!

How to Cold Calling Without a "Pitch"

In the old way of making cold calls, we offer a sales pitch to a perfect stranger, cross our fingers, and hope for the best....isn’t that right?

This really doesn’t work very well in building a business relationship (or any other relationship, for that matter). This is done best by stepping into the world of the other person and finding a problem we can solve for him or her.

That’s how we begin a conversation with another person – talking about them rather than talking about ourselves. It’s just a very common dynamic that occurs in any human interaction. When you’re dating somebody, for instance, if you just talk about yourself, they’re not going to like you very much, right?

It’s the same in cold calling. Don’t talk about your solution for a while. Talk instead about their problems for a bit.

It’s a movement of dialogue. This dialogue is around talking about their world and not about your product. That’s the shift. All you have to do is identify three or four major problems that your product solves, and use those problems as phrases to begin the dialogue of your cold call.

You see, this new cold calling approach has to be tied to a specific, real problem that the person experiences in their world. This is needed in order for them to feel comfortable having a conversation with you. When you’re relevant to them and their world, they trust you. They sense that you’re there to help them solve a problem – not sell a product.

So remove yourself for a moment from what you have to sell, and think about what problem your solution solves for somebody.

For example, if you’re in the coaching industry, think about what problem you’re solving for your clients. You might say, “I’m just calling to see if your company’s open to the idea of using coaches to improve management performance.”

When you use the word “open,” people respond positively. Who would say “no” to being open? You’re not challenging them. You’re not forcing a solution. You’re not even saying what you’re offering to sell. You’re simply asking a question around whether they have a particular problem.

This also invites a question back to you. Potential clients will often ask at this point who you are and what you do. They might say that they already have a service, but they may need some more help. So it opens up even more conversation.

Here’s an example of how salespeople focus their cold calling around something that appears to be a need, but they haven’t tied it to a specific problem.

Let’s look at financial services. In this case, people who sell financial services start cold calls with a focus on the future of the person’s situation. They might say, “I’m just calling to see if you’d be open to some new ideas to help you increase your income.”

The better approach here would be to problem solve. For example, “I’m just calling to see if you’d be open to identifying any gaps in your portfolio that might be holding you back in some way.”

It’s about problem solving and closing gaps, as opposed to promoting a beautiful future. “Hire me and I’ll make you a lot of money!” Everyone does that. That’s the problem. It gets old and very stale

You see, there’s no push here. There’s no sales pitch. There’s no presentation. The conversation is focused on really seeing if the person has a problem, and if they want to solve it.

After the first few phrases, you have a natural conversation back and forth. They may say, “What’s your service?” “How much does it cost?” And that’s the time to begin to really tell about your service -- but not before that.

If you don’t talk about your solution for a while and instead talk about their problems, you’ll find yourself having better and deeper dialogue, with more trust.

So be careful not to immediately go into a presentation and spend the conversation talking about your service. In this new way of cold calling, you’re asking in a very conversational tone whether the other person has a problem that you can solve.

You won’t believe how this simple technique can make such a difference in the way potential clients receive your cold calls. Tension and resistance are vastly reduced, and results are greatly improved.

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Article Tags: business relationship, cold call, cold calling, cold calls, dialogue, fingers, human interaction, management performance, perfect stranger, person experiences, phrases, sales pitch



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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: 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
Pitch Like A Girl: How a Woman Can Be Herself and Still Succ - Pitch Like A Girl: How a Woman Can Be Herself and Still Succeed Ronna Lichtenberg 2005 From the inside cover: "As a woman, you probably feel uncomfortable when it comes to promoting yourself and asking for what you want." WHAT IN THE HECK IS THIS, I asked myself when I read that. Women are the fastest growing business owners in the US and Canada, there are t housands of women executives and CEOs - though not as many as might be expected, admittedly, yet the book opens with this surely out of date stereotype. However, as she continued to give examples of women who had high paying jobs but were routinely not paid as much as men because it hadn't occurred to them to ask for raises, etc., I decided it was probably true for a majority of businesswomen... Anyway, more of the info from the jacket: "Other books have told you how to get what you want by being more like a guy. Pitch Like A Girl tells you why its an advantage to be who you are and how to do better by bringing more of yourself to work." The TOC: 1. Pink and Blue 2. The Quck-dry Chapter 3. What's In your head that's not in his 4. The Me, Inc Mindset 5. Visioning: Discover What You Really Want 6. Identifying Prospects 7. Pre-pitch homework and heartwork 8. Crafting the pitch 9. Pricing the pitch 10. Packaging the pitch 11. Delivering the pitch 12. Closing Conclusion A Word to the guys The Empathy Quotient The Systemizing Quotient Bibliography And on a side note - non-fiction books without indexes - of which this is one, annoy me.
Why women don't charge more - I just read a chapter in Pitch Like A Girl: How a Woman Can Be Herself and Still Succeed, by Ronna Lichtenberg that deals with this. THe chapter is called Pricing the Pitch. "In a WAll Street Journal article about what might be holding women back from corporate success, Terry Dal, a former vice president at Wells Fargo bank, said, "Good girls don't advertise; only prostitutes advertise. We feel dirty promoting ourselves." The author's advice: The first step in getting the money you desserve is to understand the market rate for your offering. Not what you think you need, not what they're willing to pay, but the going rate for similar goods and services offered in your area by someone with your skills and experience. Then, seek expert advice. "Men routinely consult lawyers, financial advisers, exxecutive recruiters and any other paid counselors to help them assess what constitutes a fair fee." Your research into going rates should not lead you to a single price for your pitch but rather a range of prices - both a market range and a personal range, which should overlap but won't necessarily be identical. In pricing, one size does not fit all. The final step in determining your price is to consider what you think you'd be paid for the same job if you were a man. The author also discusses why women usually discount their prices (must'n't appear too over-confident), the difference between discounting and "giving a discount", and other issues. I'd advise every woman wondering about what to charge to read at least this chapter of the book.


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