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End The Cold Calling Nightmare -- Turn the Nightmare into a Sales Success

Written by: Alan Boyer

Article Overview: How to Turn the fear of cold calling into your sales success. How to find how much of what activity will deliver over and over.

End The Cold Calling Nightmare -- Turn the Nightmare into a Sales Success

Do you know that some of the greatest salesmen do it on the phone?

Yet, I keep hearing how cold calling is a nightmare, how they hate it, and how even some sales gurus say "cold calling is dead." Here are some of the reasons I’ve heard from my own sales trainees, at least in the beginning:

1) Rejection—All I got was No’s and the phone slammed in my ear.

2) All I got was voice mail jail and no one ever returns my calls.

And there are others, but most come back to the same thing: the obstacle you are facing isn’t out there in the cold cruel world. It LIVES right between your own two ears. Your own beliefs are the obstacle. It isn’t anywhere else.

For this article we’re going to deal with the “all” syndrome and rejection.

A client and I once developed a cold calling campaign plan. He was to make 200 cold calls in the next week. We developed the general idea of what he was going to say, who he was going to call, and how he was going to say it. Then we practiced it until he sounded natural.

When we got together the following week, I asked,

So, how’d it go?

“Horrible, all I got was phones slammed in my ear, P.O.’d people and No’s galore. It just didn’t work at all.”

How many calls did you make?

“30, and after all those No’s, I gave up.”

How many appointments did you get?”

“Only one.”

So, what was your success ratio? How many appointments for how many calls?

“Let’s see, I think that is….1 in 30, or 3%.”

And what was our original estimate. Wasn’t it 1 in 25? So, how can you say that it was a failure? You weren’t far off.

“…….but….but…all of those No’s, 29 out of 30. That was mostly failure!”

Let’s see, at 1-2 minutes per call for No’s, and maybe 5+ for the yes, how many minutes did you spend to get just one appointment? Isn’t that around 60 minutes to get an appointment? Not bad if you ask me. What would have happened if you had made all 200 calls?

“Maybe 6-7 appointments….Wait a minute, didn’t we target 8 appointments for the 200 calls?!?!”

How many calls should you have made to achieve your goal of 8 appointments a week? In other words, let's adjust the number of calls to deliver the results based on a KNOWN success ratio. (This is probably THE MOST important question since it tells you clearly what you have to do to get the needed RESULTS).

Another thing would have happened if he had made the 200 calls: He’d have gotten better and better, gotten over his fear, and probably would have seen his call success improving toward the 1 in 25 calls, or even better.

I tell most of my clients that they need to make about 500 calls to get good at it. The trouble is that most never reach 500 calls, or if you do it takes them 2 years to do it, and by that time either the boss has eliminated you, or if you are a business owner your overhead costs have eliminated you.

Of course, it is important, VERY important, to have developed the understanding of what will work, and then tweak it as you go through those calls. You will start recognizing why something you said didn't work, or why something did. Without having the basic groundrules and understanding it becomes harder, or, sometimes impossible to progress any further than you have so far.

It all started with the “all” syndrome. In other words our belief that

o ALL we got was no’s,

o ALL we got were Voice Mails,

o And that NO ONE ever returned a call.

Those are all beliefs or perceptions that weren't real, just between the ears that kept us from succeeding.

It’s the glass half full or half empty issue. That is a belief that in this case isn’t valid.

Use the Plan – Do – Improve/Optimize scenario.

Plan what you are going to do, Do it (make sure to measure the results so you know what works and what doesn’t), make changes (new plans), and Go back through that loop over and over.

Let’s apply that to the scenario above.

Develop what you are going to say, how you are going to say it and to who. Find the reasons why someone would even want to talk to you and develop it. Measure your success, measure how many successes you had out of how many calls. In most cases, it really isn’t as bad as everyone makes out. Now that you have the key measurements—fix them. That means, change what you say, how you say it, or who you say it to, and watch the numbers. Do they go up, or down? Capture what works, and learn from what doesn’t. You’ll see those numbers constantly moving up.

If you discover that you don't know what the next step is in fixing it, then get help, learn the best way from the experts, get every book you can, hire an expert, take some training, hire a sales coach. Do you believe that your success is in the hands of all of those people giving you No's or is it in yours to go fix.

You are always in control. Don't be at the mercy of anything, someone else, the environment, the market place.

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