I had a long car ride yesterday, so I listened to a few podcasts. One of them was John Barrows’ “Make It Happen” episode with Jeremy Chen about cold calling.
Here are some of my key takeaways. Some were good reminders, and others are things I’ve never considered before.
- Cold Calling is Effective
- Cold calling is still fast and cost-effective. Especially considering how few salespeople do it anymore, there is less competition!
- Office lines are more effective than cell phones since COVID. I believe Jeremy Chen said that only 24% of his successful calls are to cell phones.
- Call Strategy
- Focus on relevance over heavy personalization. It doesn’t make sense to research before dialing, because there’s a good chance they won’t pick up.
- Each part of the call earns you the right to continue to the next part. The first 5-10 seconds earn you 30 seconds. What you say in 30 seconds earns you 2 minutes. Those 2 minutes earn you a discovery call.
- Handling Objections and Rejections
- Don’t waste your time. Try to quickly disqualify non-interested prospects, so you can get back to calling.
- Don’t be afraid to communicate that you don’t want to talk to them if they’re not a good fit – it shows that you aren’t desperate. Tell them that your goal is to see if that’s the case as fast as possible so neither of your time is wasted.
- Who To Call
- Call people in specific roles and in specific industries so you can be relevant, but don’t worry about doing a ton of research beforehand. For example, Jeremy calls CEO’s or Presidents and only at companies whose business is fairly well established.
- Permission Based Intros
- Permission based introductions are better than just throwing everything out there right out of the gate. Jeremy’s approach is to say “Hey listen, This is a cold call. I know you want to hang up on me. If you’re not a good fit, I don’t want to talk either. Can I have 30 seconds to see if I might be able to provide value to you?”
- Rejection
- You need to view rejection as a rejection of the offer, not the person. It doesn’t matter what they say. They don’t know you. As long as you aren’t doing anything sleazy, where they might actually contact your company to complain, it really doesn’t matter if they hang up on you.
- Set Appointments, Don’t Sell
- This is dependent on where you work, but selling in the initial call rarely works. It’s much better to set an appointment. Very few people will be willing to buy in that first call.
- If you’ve done your job right, they should be prepared to buy on the discover call, because you’ve already pre-qualified them and established a level of interest.