Cold Calling 101

The impact of lying to get through on a cold call.

Barry Caponi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:09:12 +0000

People buy from people they trust, so don’t use techniques designed to ‘trick’ a gatekeepers. It is only a short term gain.

I saw a cold calling technique on YouTube the other day designed to get a gatekeeper to put us sales professionals through to the decision maker. It went something like this.

GATEKEEPER: “May I tell him what this is about?”

SALES ‘PROFESSIONAL’: “It’s personal.”

So let’s say we get put through and convince the decision maker we’ve got a great widget that he/she should look at, so we get an appointment. Later in passing, the decision maker asks his administrative assistant why she happened to put this particular sales call through. She tells him and our sales ‘professional’ is now dead on arrival.

This technique may work when the gatekeeper is physically detached from the decision maker or doesn’t report directly to that person, but that still begs an even bigger question. Does the means justify the end? Are we honest in our approach or not? If we tell a little ‘white lie’ here, do we stretch the truth somewhere else as well?

Gatekeepers can truly be our friend. They are not charged with keeping ALL sales professionals out. They are a filter for their bosses. It is beneficial to engage them in our selling process.

To learn more about gatekeeper strategies, see blogs dated 1/2/08, 1/9/08, 1/16/08 and 2/17/09.

Caponi Performance Group and Contact Science jointly market the telephone prospecting and cold calling solution called The Prospector’s Academy™ under the brand name Coldcalling101. It is the only comprehensive solution to solving the biggest barrier to success in most selling organizations – the inability to secure enough Initial Appointments to begin the selling process. We accomplish that through simultaneously addressing both the efficiency and effectiveness of the process. We can be reached at 214 483-5800 or at barry@coldcalling101.com.

Four questions to ask ourselves to determine whether to apply Sales 2.0 techniques to the appointment setting process.

Barry Caponi — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:01:39 +0000

I just read a very good eBook by Nigel Edelshain, originator of Sales 2.0 Methodology. In it he talks about all of the excellent tools or processes that are now available to us to find information on our Targets, or use to get an introduction to the person we wish to speak with: Linkedin, triggers of events, Jigsaw, ZoomInfo, etc. All good ideas, but here’s the operative question we must ask ourselves prior to engaging the Sales 2.0 approach. Is it worth it to do all of this work prior to picking up the phone and asking for an appointment?

Shame on us if we set an appointment and don’t do this research prior to attending that meeting. And I am a big proponent of the Sales 2.0 thinking prior to trying to set the appointment, but it is not applicable in every selling environment and to every step in the process. To spend an hour, or even 30 minutes researching every thing possible about a Target in my territory when my average sized sale is small (i.e. I must close a lot of deals), my territory is large and my typical Target looks like every other business in that territory.

So here are four questions we should ask ourselves before deciding to do a lot of research or not prior to attempting to set an appointment.

What is my average sized sale or what is the lifetime value of this potential customer?
What do I sell (how complex a sale is it)?
How big is my universe of targets?
What level of management am I calling into?

If my average sale is small, I sell a simple commodity like product or service and/or my solution is sold into a ‘horizontal’ market, I may eat most of my profit in a lot of up front investigative time. On the other hand, let’s say my average sized sale is more than $50,000 and I only have 100 possible targets in my territory, then I can’t afford to miss one. I’m therefore going to be doing all of the networking, research, social media, etc. to make sure I don’t blow it when I actually try to get the person on the phone to set the appointment.

Also, if I’m calling into first line management or into purchasing and my sale will be quick, I’m not sure I would spend a lot of up front time doing research either.

In those ‘not-worth it’ situations, I’d prefer to invest my time in building a solid approach, voicemails and emails that tell my story of how we helped someone else, and work on how I handle the ‘nos’ I invariably still get. At the end of the day, when I place that call, I’m still trying to set an appointment with someone I don’t know, or just barely met. And just because I did a lot of research and got a strong referral, let’s say, I’m still going to hear exactly the types of ‘no’. They’ll just be nicer about it. I’ve still got to have the skills to counter that ‘no’.

The long term value of prospecting our territories.

Barry Caponi — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:26:35 +0000

We believe that we are most effective over time if we adopt a long term view of prospecting our territory. Effective target selection provides us with a list equal to the number of targets we can reach out to in a year based on the adoption of well thought out Best Practice which includes the number of attempts and intervals between those attempts used to set an appointment with a given target. That number very seldom exceeds 1,000. For instance, here is an example of the use of our Activity Calculator² determining the optimal size of a territory.

How Many Targets?
How Many Targets can you pursue in a year?
Minutes per day on the phone	60
Average number of steps taken in your Best Practice before a pursuit ends	3.5
Average Time Per Step (CRMs are typically 6 minutes; Klpz is less	3.0
Number of steps you can make a day	20
Number of days per year you will telephone prospects	220
Number of times a target will be ‘pursued’ a year until you reach them	2.0
Replacement targets, as a pct. of total, that are needed to keep your calling list the right size	25%
You need a list with this many names	786

I will use email to actually double the number of times I reach out and touch someone (sorry Hallmark) as each dial includes an automatically generated email that matches my voicemail message. That works like targeted advertising as my Best Practice messaging (voice and email) should be what we feel this audience will best react positively to.

A sales professional trying to sell to more than the number our Best Practice prescribes is a waste of selling time and represents what most sales non-professionals use, and that’s the ‘drive by shooting’ approach. One must make multiple attempts to be successful.

As a manager, we should be paying attention to not only who our charges are calling, but also what is the process they are using. Time is a precious commodity. Let’s not waste it.

²If you would like a copy of this Activity Calculator, send me an email at barry@coldcalling101.com. It’s free.

When and how can email support cold calling campaigns?

Barry Caponi — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:05:33 +0000

Email is effective in a support role in the appointment setting process. Here’s how.

Email is good for the following things:

Increasing the number of ‘touch points’ ¹ in which the target sees and hears our key themes and messages
Long term territory building (this assumes we continue to pursue this target over time)
Reinforcement of a verbal message
Finalizing (once a game of phone tag has begun regarding the time and place for an appointment, or to confirm an appointment
Delivering attachments that support the messaging
Delivering web links that support the messaging
Provide a way for target to communicate back (even if they say no thanks)
A few of our targets actually prefer to communicate that way

Bad uses for email in appointment setting:

Sending without a voicemail first as the only vehicle to deliver our message
When a conversation would be better (like when trying to set an appointment)
Closing a sale – appointment or P.O.

We believe that the biggest advantages email can supply is being a quick and inexpensive, yet personal and reinforcing communication. So use it to support develop a warmer list to call for an appointment.

It should go without saying therefore that using email as our primary vehicle for setting appointments is ineffective.

¹The advertising industry rule of thumb is that it takes approximately 7 touches or touch points for a target to just recognize our name. So assuming we make 8 dials per year (4 per Cycle x 2 Cycles) including a voicemail and an email on each, we’ve touched this target 16 times with multiple messages (assuming each attempt in a Cycle has a different advantage to our solution/message).

Does email work in cold calling campaigns to actually set appointments?

Barry Caponi — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:59:37 +0000

I was talking with a manager of one of our customers the other day and he told me he noticed on some of his team’s Klpz reports that one of his reps was making very few phone calls but was still hitting her activity goals of reaching out to her targets each week. I asked him if she was setting as many appointments as she needed and he said no, her Initial Appointments had dropped.

Without boring you with his travails, let me cut to the chase. I’m sure there are markets somewhere where email trumps the phone for setting appointments, but I have yet to find it. If it’s yours, I’d love to talk to you. In the meantime, here’s what I think about email in the appointment making process.

My experience is that when sales professionals begin making more attempts to set appointments via email than the phone, it’s generally an indication of them avoiding making the calls and fooling themselves into thinking they’re still working at it. My advice? Nip it in the bud immediately and get them back on the phone. (It’s particularly seductive to do this in Klpz because sending the already created email templates requires only the click of a mouse to send.)

Surveys show that less than 5% of our universe of targets is ‘in the market for what we’re selling when we contact them’ – and realistically I believe it is closer to 1%. Historically, good direct mail (and email) campaigns show a 2% response rate, and that is not measured in appointments. So what makes our intrepid sales professionals think they can better what marketing experts can do?

Only in a conversation can we convince the 99% that don’t think they are ‘in the market’ to see us by asking the right question based on their response. We can’t do that in an email.

So use email where it is effective, but use the phone when trying to set appointments. (Next week, we’ll talk about where and how to use email.)

You can also check on my Blog dated 1/31/08 entitled, When the email left along with our ‘Cold Call’ is returned with a ‘Not Interested’. It discusses some of the challenges of using email to set appointments.

Is your sales team just going through the motions when making Cold Calls, or are all of those calls resulting in new business?

Barry Caponi — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 05:32:26 +0000

I received a call from one of our customers this week. He was very excited because for the first time he could see exactly what his teams were doing in terms of cold calling. He’s a regional sales manager with several sales teams that were trained before the first of the year through one of our appointment setting Prospectors Academies™.

He told us that his reps had been truly pounding the phones now for a couple of months since the training which fixed his lack of activity problem. He also said that the activity was very consistent across his districts. He was also pleased with the fact he was now able to start deep drilling on the process and results a bit more instead of just focusing on the activity levels as he had to do in the past.

Reading his weekly Klpz reports had gotten him to ask why some of his guys were setting appointments like crazy and some were not. As a matter of fact, he was able to see that the ones that were being successful were all in the same districts. He told us that when he role-played with the different districts, they sounded pretty much the same. He told us that the teams that were not setting the appointments were getting discouraged and so are their managers.

Here’s a synopsis of what we found:

· We ran a report that found that his districts that were not performing differed in one key area from those that were having success. To put it frankly, their lists were awful. The successful districts were seeing about a 35% removal rate of names and the unsuccessful ones were seeing a more than 80% removal of names.

What this means is that after following the four steps in the process of contact we set up (we call them Cycles), the rep has three choices of what to do with the target: Recycle them for 120 days and try again; declare Success (they met with them and began a Buying Cycle); or Remove them from the list. After speaking with the District Managers, it became clear that the managers that had taken the time to put some effort into defining the lists their charges would call into (call it a semi-qualified list of suspects if you wish) were experiencing the most success. The ones that did not were filled with targets that were not good fits (for a variety of reasons). The targets were too small, the reps were not getting through to decision makers because a quick conversation with the gatekeeper determined the company was not a good match for their products, or once talking with the decision maker they determined the same thing.

There are two morals to the story. First is that by adding what we call ‘Science’ (Klpz (www.contactscience.com), to the challenge of prospecting for new customers, managers gain access to valuable information none of us have ever had before to help improve our prospecting processes for the first time. Second, we’ve talked about the value of investing time in refining lists and building territories over time in this Blog before (see January 20, 2010, November 4, 2009, March 26, 2009, March 19, 2009, March 11, 2009, and April 23, 2008), so we know the importance of this.

And by the way, just imagine the potential consequences of what might have happened if he hadn’t been able to define the problem. Would have some of his reps quit because of the frustration? Would he have incorrectly assumed he had a closing problem or a rep problem instead of a management problem?

Cold calling is even tougher when we’re calling someone who is not a fit. So how can we ‘clone’ our best customers to call only on companies that look like those great fits we’ve already sold to?

Barry Caponi — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:07:49 +0000

I’ve said it before, but let me say it again. The better our list is, the more often we’ll get through to the right person and the more often we’ll be able to convince that target that we’ve been able to help others like him/her solve like challenges.

In our ColdCalling101 Academies, we invest time determining the top challenges our participants solve for their customers and also the top benefits their customers tell them they derive from investing in their solution. To accomplish that, we suggest they start with their best customers.

When trying to build a territory list to call from, we suggest exactly the same thing. How do we describe what our best customers look like and then go find others the same. Well, here are three resources we’ve come across that provide tools for you to enter those best customers and then ‘clone’ them. In other words, find other companies that look just like them. They are:

Manta.com
InfoUSA
Bizjournals.com (only works where the Business Journals publish

If you’ve got any more, let us know and we’ll share the knowledge.

“Make more dials!” goes the typical sales manager mantra. But is that the best way to set more cold calling appointments?

Barry Caponi — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:01:40 +0000

Many customers we’ve worked with originally only had their sales teams reporting to management each week the number of dials they were making to set appointments. A few more would also track the number of appointments set. But even in those situations that track them both, it’s not enough to effectively manage the process.

We believe that both must be tracked along with one other interim result; conversations with decision makers. Why? Because in order to help a sales professional improve at appointment setting we need to track three metrics, not just one or two. They are:

The number of dials being made.
The number of conversations that occurred with decision makers. From the first two numbers, we can then determine the ratio between the number of dials and the number of conversations. We call it the Conversation Ratio.
The number of appointments actually set with those decision makers. From this and the number of conversations, we can determine the ratio between the number of conversations and the number of appointments set. We call this the Appointment Ratio.

Here’s why we want those three metrics.

The number of dials being made is an indicator of effort. Are they making the dials we believe they should be making or not?
If the Conversation Ratio is too low there are only three reasons for it:
1. The list they’re calling off of is bad.
2. They are not leaving voicemails and (where possible) emails that get returned enough.
3. They are struggling with Gatekeepers.
If the Appointment Ratio is too low, there are only two reasons for that:
1. Again the list is bad and the targets are not qualified.
2. They’re not able to effectively handle the initial ‘no’ they’ll almost invariably hear.

If our selling process truly necessitates finding new customers through telephone prospecting, accurately tracking these metrics is critical to our success. If we don’t, our turnover will unnecessarily be too high (lack of early success) and our sales will be too low. Both of these negatives can be addressed if know how to appropriately focus our effort to help our charges improve.

Lastly, the metrics must be accurate and timely. There is still only one product we’re aware of that will provide that information automatically and accurately. That product is called Klpz.

What are we going to do different in 2010? A New Year’s Resolution idea.

Barry Caponi — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:29:15 +0000

Quota going up? Of course it is. Does every year, right? So what are we going to change in the new year to reduce the need to just work harder to accomplish more in the new year?

For most of the country (and world for that matter) will still find targets reluctant to spend money and take risks. Therefore traditional lead generation activities will still be struggling to supply us with enough easier targets to call in 2010. Networking and/or referrals in most B2B environments don’t supply us with enough either. The only other choice is to cold call. But even that’s not the point I want to make.

We are believers in addressing both the efficiency and effectiveness of the appointment making process. I work hard, but I’m not interested in working any harder than I have to. I brag all the time on our customers making twice the number of prospecting calls in the same amount of time as they did before implementing our solution. But we also have customers that are pleased to make the same number of calls in half the time they used to. So regardless of which camp we fall, January is a great time to address how we’re going to get more efficient and effective in the new year.

Our typical customer will pay for the investment in our Prospector’s Academy™ in less than one buying cycle. Give us a call. We don’t bite!

There’s a huge difference between a cold call and a warm (referral call). (No there’s not.)

Barry Caponi — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 08:42:15 +0000

In our Prospector’s Academies, we hear all the time that, “I don’t cold call. I network and follow up on marketing generated leads.” So what’s the difference between a cold call and a ‘warm’ call?

There are 4 components to an appointment making call regardless of whether it is cold or warm.

The Approach
The target’s Response (No)
Our Counter
Asking for the Appointment again

The Approach will vary slightly as we want to invoke either the name of the person who suggested we call, or the fact that they had asked us to contact them through a marketing program of some kind. The processes of how we get through a gatekeeper, leave a message, send an email, gain their attention, introduce ourselves, etc., is the same.

If we really think about it, the target’s Response is generally the same as on a cold call. They’re just nicer about it. Ever run into a referral target that said, “Hey, I appreciate Barry suggesting you call, but we’re all set in that area”. Of course we have. That’s because in very few instances does the referrer know the target’s business in enough detail to know they need us.

Even in the case of an inbound request for information from a lead generation program, we sometimes are surprised by a response of “No”, to a request for an appointment. It’s not uncommon for an inbound request to be a tire kicker or information gatherer and not someone ‘In the Market’ right now for what we sell. Maybe they just want us to ‘send something’. Perhaps not often, but it happens more than we think.

There’s also many times a different challenge that occurs on these calls; the temptation to ‘sell’ on the appointment making call because of their interest. So how do we keep from falling prey to this? Easy, we use the same process we do on a cold call to provide enough value to get the appointment.

My point is this. The reason our curriculum is called The Appointment Making Formula™, even though we talk a lot about cold calling, is that process or ‘formula’ that we apply in a warm call also applies in a cold call. It’s all appointment setting. We must be prepared in order to be successful.