Luke Brown Marketing Blog

With rare exceptions, most businesses need to make cold calls over the phone. With proper planning, preparation and practice, cold calling can be much easier than you might think.

The key to fast, sustainable revenue creation lies in creating or reengineering sales processes and systems. System inefficiencies, including prospecting and cold-calling methods, need to be examined, upgraded, and optimized to achieve revenue goals.

There are five areas which most sales organizations need to master in order to achieve goals and results from cold-calling.

1.  Manage Objections With Excellence

Research has shown that most sales reps and teams cannot properly answer basic objections, let alone complex objections. Most sales people have not been trained in the basic principles of refutation and/or persuasion nor have they been exposed to the concept of managing all objections head-on.

Most sellers, especially rookies, don’t understand that buyers, when confronted with a cold-call, offer objections that should not be interpreted literally. These common objections include, “I don’t have time right now…”  “Can you email me some literature?…”   “We  don’t have budget for anything like that…” and others.

These objections  are usually tactful ways of saying, “You have yet to prove that there is value in me spending time with you on the telephone.”  By identifying all objections and creating rebuttals for each objection, the confidence of the sales reps increases.

Jay Conrad Levinson, the creator of Guerrilla Marketing, surveyed buyers and found the top reason from buying from a sales rep was the seller’s confidence.  Extensive and structured role playing ensures that sellers demonstrate techniques to overcome challenges, whether from prospects or gatekeepers.

2.  Become Competent at Leaving Voice Mails That Produce Callbacks

It is rare that a sales rep or team will achieve more than a 3% callback rate from voice mail messages.  The average callback rate is less than 0.5%.  By using proven techniques, sales teams can convert up to 33% of these callbacks into meetings. See the article, Winner Take All Voice Mail Strategies.

3.  Eliminate Product-Benefit and Value-Proposition Statements

In cold-calling, product-benefit statements simply do not work.  Because sales resistance is deeply embedded in our culture, incorporating product-benefit and/or value-proposition statements into introductory messaging is the kiss of death.

This approach shows lack of creativity, lack of effort, and lack of concern for your prospect.  If your sales team incorporates product-benefit or value-proposition language into your cold-call presentations then there is likely a large gap between the results you are currently achieving and what can be achieved through best practices.

4.  Stop Inviting Prospects to Attend a Sales Call

The fastest way to ensure that your prospects will not meet with you is to invite them to attend a sales call.  What executive wakes up and hops in the shower imagining how great their day will be if they get a cold call from a sales rep with an aggressive invitation to attend a sales meeting about a product for which they have no prior knowledge?

Replace the initial sales calls with Analyst Briefings. Your prospects are far more inclined to accept a meeting where the purpose is to deliver research that is relevant to their professional life.  When structured properly, the Analyst Briefing becomes the perfect venue for deeply qualifying the target, and converting the target to a sales cycle if qualified.

5.  Get Rid of the Easy-Outs

Most sellers make it easy for their targets to say “no” by including easy-out statements in their first sentence.

• Is this a good time?
• Do you have a minute?
• Are you free to talk now?
• How does that sound?

The use of these statements when cold calling is for losers!  Getting targets on the phone is difficult enough. Don’t give them an easy escape!

Comments are closed.