Mistake #1 – There are only two ground rules our Targets play by when they receive a Cold Call. Ignore them at your peril.

When we place a Cold Call, we must understand that the person we’re calling really doesn’t think they need to talk to us. As a matter of fact, surveys show that less than 5% of Targets in any sales person’s universe of potential customers believes they are in the market for what we’re selling when we call them.

We must also understand that we are interrupting our Target from doing something when we call, so they don’t want to talk to us.

The result of those two rules is that they will do anything, including lie to us, to get us off the phone. Most Cold Calling methodologies teach us to counter their statement using a logical argument (or power benefit) to convince them that they should meet with us. But if they’re lying to us, why would we think logic would work against a statement that is not true?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have enough time to make calls until I find that 1 – 5% that is in the market. And heck, half of them seem to be too busy right then anyway. That means we must employ a different approach to get them past this ‘knee jerk’ reaction (we call them Conditioned Responses) designed to get us off the phone before we can apply any kind of logic to their response.

The Formula (our methodology) employs a technique we call the Bridge Question to get them to stop thinking about how to get us off the phone for a moment and gets them to open their minds to our logical argument (or power benefit).

As this technique is too long to describe in this Blog, I’ve published a supplemental Blog which follows directly.