Cold Calling

There are only a few ways to increase your revenue.

You can put your prices up, but doubling your prices overnight is unrealistic and there’ll always be a cheaper alternative waiting to pick up your lost clients.

You can sell more to your existing customers - brand extensions are everywhere and done well make great sense. Have a look at our section on customer share for tips on how to do this.

But the best way by far of increasing revenue is to WIN NEW CUSTOMERS, and that means it’s time to speak to someone new.

So what’s the problem?

Learning something new can be tough, so it’s no surprise that when people first get into a sales role their training normally involves some kind of script, or mnemonic memory aids such as AIDA or DIPADA.

New salespeople have the enthusiasm to hit the phone and make cold calls, but often lack the experience and confidence to deviate from a standard pitch or script.

If something is new then it’s unlikely you’ll succeed first time, so it makes sense for first jobbers to be focussed on the numbers, making a high volume of calls to get their confidence and hit all the stumbling blocks they need to get over.

So from the beginning of our careers we’re told that sales is a number’s game, a contact sport. New recruits accept this and find it a lot easier to pick up the phone and fail. Prospects will frequently say no, so the best route to yes is to throw more at the wall and hope it sticks. This is old school thinking.

Experienced salespeople often hate cold calling even more than new recruits. They know what rejection feels like - however good they are they’ve had years of being told no and that can take it’s toll.

With experience often comes a better client list – this makes cold calling even less attractive when the alternative is to call a client you’ve probably met a few times, has booked before and is likely to give you a much easier ride. The risk of this however is that experienced salespeople often “go native” with their existing clients who end up paying lower rates than new advertisers would.

Sticking to accounts that you know and feel comfortable dealing with leaves easy pickings for the competition

Experienced salespeople often get a lot less access to training than new recruits, again reducing the senior salesperson’s desire to go out and hunt for new business.

Without practise you can get even more out of the cold calling habit, building up resistance to prospecting for new business. And then you train your sales team the same way you were trained and – let’s be honest – as this was quite a few years ago your technique is probably fairly out of date!

The End of the Script

It’s probably true that if you make enough calls you will eventually sell something, but you could be selling a hell of a lot more for the same volume of calls if you rethink your cold calling approach.

Cold calling is seen as a necessary evil and before you’ve begun you’re expecting to meet resistance and rejection. But why does this happen?

A lot of it is down to pressure. You feel the pressure of having to persuade someone of your worth and you transmit this to your prospect, who hearing the same lines, the same artificial enthusiasm and the same features and benefits as a hundred other cold callers becomes immediately aware that this is another sales call, and the pressure of the impending close or meeting request begins to grow…

Traditional scripted cold calls are one-way, usually based on just the salesperson’s objectives and even despite this are rarely well-planned.

If you were asked to set your objectives for a cold call they would probably vary depending on the perceived value of the account, the price of a specific product you’re selling, how your weekend has been... The over-riding objective would probably be to progress the sale in some way – either through arranging a meeting or sending a proposal.

We think that’s wrong.

New objectives

Modern selling is about understanding your prospect’s situation so you can deliver a solution that works for both buyer and seller. So how can you set detailed objectives for a call when you have no idea what their situation is?

Your initial contact with a prospect should be as open as possible, and have 2 objectives:

1. To initiate a 2-way dialogue
2. To qualify prospects

Don’t put the pressure on either yourself or your prospect by trying to advance the sale – simply position yourself and your company as a solution to a very specific problem, and ask if that’s something that they’d be interested in looking at.

You can sound different to the hundred other sales calls they received that week by:

- Diffusing the pressure
- Being honest and open
- Empowering your prospect to decide how they would like to progress

Unlock The Game®

Ari Galper, the creator of Unlock The Game® has put together a no-pressure based cold calling approach that doesn’t sacrifice your integrity for the sale. It’s transformational in that it allows you to be your natural self and not the “salesperson” that no one likes to hear from.

Click here for Cold Calling According to Ari…

Other tips for cold calling

Planning
Most articles on the subject will emphasise the importance of planning, but instead of crunching activity targets and call rates why not get the team involved and work out the best route together?

How about planning half an hour at the end of each day to brainstorm problems that your team has encountered and share what worked? Make sure you always think about what it is you are planning and why.

Research
In the information age, asking your prospect questions that could have been answered with a quick visit to their website is lazy. This doesn’t mean you need to read every article and find out their CEO’s shoe size before picking up the phone – this is more dangerous as it leads to over-assumption that they are or aren’t a fit based on potentially inaccurate information.

Research vs Selling
If you have no idea who to speak to, it’s a good idea to keep your research and your selling separate. No one in a business get thanked for putting cold calls through to their colleagues and asking for the name of the MD then immediately asking if you can be put through starts alarm bells ringing before you’ve begun.

If you need to make a call to get some more detailed info call just for that, and diarise your sales call for a couple of days later.

Gatekeepers
It’s common for the person that generally answers the phone in a company has a lot of inside information that can help you…IF you can enlist their support.

The easiest way to get into their bad books is to try and drive straight through them, instead be honest, clear, compelling and ask for their help – you should find they’ll normally give you a fair hearing.

Timing & Focus
Work out what the optimum time to reach decision-makers in your market is and maximise your sales activity during those hours.

Follow Up
Keep good records and make sure you follow up with your prospect as and when agreed. It’s easy to put the phone down and forget to make your notes or diarise a call back – make this an instinctive habit or you’ll be pushing water up a hill.

Share
Talk to your colleagues about what’s working and what doesn’t, and commit to coming up with solutions together. You won’t be spoon-fed working in media sales and it’s those that will use their initiative and take accountability that make the most money and move up the career ladder the fastest.