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Sales: Tips for Cold Calling

Written by: Charly Leetham

Article Overview: Wwhen you Cold Call - whilst your goal is to create life-long customers, the purpose of a Cold Call is to take Suspects to Qualified Prospects. What I mean, is that when you Cold Call on someone, you SUSPECT they could use what you're selling, but you're not certain. After you've called on them and discussed what your product can do, you will know if the Suspect is really a fit for your product or not. Once you have a qualified prospect, you then focus on converting them to a customer, and then to a life long customer. How do you qualify a Suspect to a Prospect? You need to know who your target customer is - I discuss this in Finding Your Niche Part 1: Listen To Your Potential Clients - only when you know the clients who will best suit your business.

Sales: Tips for Cold Calling

I was recently asked by a reader of my newsletter about what they should consider when Cold Calling on businesses. I thought I would share my answer here. The one thing that I would like you to consider, is that when you Cold Call - whilst your goal is to create life-long customers, the purpose of a Cold Call is to take Suspects to Qualified Prospects. What I mean, is that when you Cold Call on someone, you SUSPECT they could use what you're selling, but you're not certain. After you've called on them and discussed what your product can do, you will know if the Suspect is really a fit for your product or not. Once you have a qualified prospect, you then focus on converting them to a customer, and then to a life long customer.

How do you qualify a Suspect to a Prospect? You need to know who your target customer is - I discuss this in Finding Your Niche Part 1: Listen To Your Potential Clients - only when you know the clients who will best suit your business.

When I Cold Call, I have several objectives:

1. Find out the Owners name, if it's a small business; or the Branch Managers / Local Area managers name, if it's a large company. Of course, I want to get their contact details

2. Find out who the decision maker is - it's not necessarily the owner as they may have someone they trust who has more experience than them. In this case, it's really important to try to get a ‘picture' of the decision making process. In the case of a large company, it could also be that decisions for purchasing are not made at the local level - which will change your sales strategy.

3. Understand how the Owners / Local Area Manager's assistant works. Are they really a Gatekeeper? If so, you will need to ensure that you have the assistant onboard as well.

4. Find out when the Manager is in the store / office - this helps in planning when you will drop in to see them / call them. If you are going to try and phone them, I strongly suggest that you also find out when their busy times are, so you don't call them then - you really won't get the focus you are looking for.

One thing I found with cold calling, is that the receptionists et al are very protective of their bosses - they don't like giving out too much information because they know that it will invite a number of unsolicited sales call.

I have often found it beneficial to use wording like "I have something that may be of benefit to your organization. I would like to organize 15 minutes with your boss to see if it's a fit or not." Or something similar. This immediately shows that you are respectful of their time, by asking for a shorter, qualifying meeting time and that you aren't the "foot in the door - you just have to buy this product" sales person.

Remember, the idea of Cold Calling is to qualify Suspects to Prospects - I don't necessarily go to a Cold Call meeting with the intent that I will sell something straight from that meeting. Just something to bear in mind!

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Article Tags: business sales, cold call, lifelong customers
Referred by: http://www.outrageouslyhealthy.com



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
Business Tips - How about: Tips for managers to handle employees more effectively? Tips on how to deal with difficult customers? Tips on how to deal more effectively with suppliers? The only three I have in mind right now, but will try to come up with something else. Chris
Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional - Hi Evan, I am noticing that many of the posts in the Sales/Marketing section deal with online marketing, SEM and and SEO and Affiliates. I was wondering if it might be a good idea to separate that section into two; 1) Online Sales and Marketing; 2) Traditional Sales and Marketing


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