February 25th, 2009 by Barry Caponi
We at Coldcalling101 recommend that cold calls be done in a planned manner. Today’s blog explains why.
We’ve said before that we should schedule time on our calendars to make calls each week before we put any other controllable dates on our calendars. Here’s why
1. If we try to ‘fit them in’ between other things, they never get done, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we know it.
2. Once into a Call Block, we get smoother and smoother with every call. Once on a roll, our effectiveness goes up. So schedule a long enough Call Block to allow that to happen. We suggest 45 minutes to an hour. If we call longer than an hour (that’s good too if we have to) take a break so we don’t start sounding rote.
3. If we’re having success in a Call Block, do keep calling. It’s fun and exciting when that happens, so take advantage of it.
4. If we’re taking the ‘Collar’ as they say in baseball (zero for all attempts), take a break for a few minutes. Get away from the phone and do something else for a few minutes. BUT, we’ve still got to make the calls. It’s all about the law of averages. Some Call Blocks are better than others and I have no idea why!
Comments: Leave a comment
February 18th, 2009 by Barry Caponi
Do we offer anything that a Gatekeeper would benefit from personally if their boss were to buy?
We have a client that offers employee benefits. One of their advantages is that they can help stem the tide of decreasing benefits in the employee benefit programs caused by the rising costs facing the employer. (I know that was wordy, sorry.)
We helped them develop a Gatekeeper strategy that appeals to their individual (selfish) concerns in addition to their professional concerns. Instead of appealing to the bosses’ issues from the business perspective only, they now subtly talk about how this would impact the Gatekeeper’s own employee benefits from a personal perspective. When we couple that with the value to the business (the bosses’ concern), we’re getting pretty good traction with the Gatekeeper.
Think about it. If you can play both cards, do it!
Comments: Leave a comment
February 11th, 2009 by Barry Caponi
Many times acquired lists have little in terms of the information that would be helpful for us on a cold call. So where do we go to get this information prior to placing the first call to our target name?
I was reading a Blog this week by a cold caller lamenting that targets she’s calling today don’t seem to be willing to take a moment and talk with us cold callers to learn from us before determining whether we’ve got something to offer or not.
I answered her Blog with four thoughts on the topic:
- It’s going to get worse. The economy is forcing lay-offs in many companies which will force people to take on even more responsibilities. That means they’ll have even less desire to speak with us when we call, so we better have a compelling Bridge Question to get them to stop thinking about how to get us off the phone and into that open-minded conversation we want. (Search blog for more on Bridge Questions.)
- More and more people are using voicemail to screen incoming calls so our voicemails better be very compelling. Don’t wing it.
- Call first into the sales department and get a sales person to help you with a little background information such as who might be the correct person to talk with, etc. Just don’t abuse the fact that most of us sales people are likely to be willing to help a fellow sales person. They’re busy as well.
- As a Best Practice, when we start dialing the phone to make appointment making calls, we’ll be more effective if we keep our Call Blocks dedicated to setting appointments. Do that information gathering at a different time. We are more effective when we get rolling, repeating our script, etc. Interrupting that flow with information gathering calls loses that benefit.
Comments: 1
February 4th, 2009 by Barry Caponi
We get this question all the time in our workshops. The full version of this question is, “We sell a lot of different things. Should my opening ‘reason for the call’ cover everything we sell to make sure that the Target knows everything we do? After all, how do we know which of our solutions they might be interested in when we begin a cold call.”
The answer is actually counter intuitive. We recommend crafting our ‘reason for the call’ with just one very specific offering, not all of them or by being purposely broad. The reason is that people are looking for reasons to say ‘no’ to us anyway, so why not make it easy for them? By getting specific, we give them what seems to be an easy way out of the call and to do it in such a way as to let us down easily. “Oh, we don’t have a need for green widgets right now, but thanks for calling.”
Silly them. They’ve now let their guard down a little thinking we’ll say, “OK. Perhaps another time.” What we should do is ‘Counter’ their reaction with one of our ‘Bridge Questions’ (see November 19, 2008 supplemental Blog for more on Bridge Questions) which gets us into a conversation about the other things that we offer (which is what we really wanted to begin with). Once we’re into a conversation, we can talk about the multitude of other things we can help them with (including what they originally said no to, by the way).
This works because of the dynamics of a cold call. Since less than five percent of the people we call think they’re in the market for what we’re selling when we call anyway, they don’t think they need to speak to us. We’re also interrupting them, so they don’t want to talk to us. Therefore, they will do anything, including lie, to get us off the phone. The ‘Counter’ and ‘Bridge Question’ techniques we teach as a part of The Appointment Making Formula™ are designed to get past that knee jerk reaction designed to get us off the phone and into a conversation, regardless of what they originally say to us. So why make sure we cover everything we sell to begin with? It just takes longer to get to the conversation we really want. Our techniques will let you get to it in a more conversational, less forced manner anyway. (By the way, it is not uncommon for the topic of conversation to return to one they originally said ‘no’ to. Why? Because they either lied to us to open the conversation, or didn’t realize the true value of what we sell until we got them into a conversation!)
The conclusion is this. When we’ve got a choice, get specific in the reason for the call and let them say no. Then use a Bridge Question to shift the direction of the conversation where you want it to go.
Comments: Leave a comment
