A few years ago I wrote a little book called “Cold Calling for Chickens” it still sells very well and frequently features among the top-selling business books on amazon*. (Thank you fans!) *(By the way, reader comments range from the extremes: “Disgraceful” on one side to “Brilliant” on the other with “OK” to “Very Good” to “Excellent” broadly spread across the middle. But whatever their ratings [zero stars to five stars], nobody denies its effectiveness).
However, there are still quite a few people (10 years on) who tell me they still fear this potentially lucrative, cost-effective, way to find new clients. So here is another softer ‘modern’ way you can open up a telephone-sales call with a possible new customer without fear and without pressure. I use both methods; my old one and this new one. They both work well…. you can choose which of the two suits you.
PROBLEM AND CAUSE OF ‘Call-Reluctance’
Potential customers (That includes you and me) will lie and say anything to get rid of cold callers for two reasons (apart from the fact that they weren’t either expecting or waiting for your call):
1) Because they don’t know the caller
2) Because they don’t know the caller they don’t trust the caller
And because they don’t know them and don’t trust them, potential customers invent any excuse to get rid of the cold caller (both honest and dishonest). We ALL do it.
Old Style Cold Calling
Now, cold calling is a really useful selling skill. It is estimated that 80% of the available new business in most markets still goes to 5% of all sellers brave enough to make a cold-call. So you can make a lot of money by becoming a fairly good cold caller.
But classic cold calling is still mired in the selling skills founded in the 1960s e.g. : “Focus on getting the appointment !” “Overcome and rebut their objections with smart replies !” “Concentrate on closing the sale !” “A.B.C: Always Be Closing !”
So the focus of most cold calls is wrong at the outset: i.e. Trying to get the ‘face-to-face Appointment’ or even close a sale on-line.
Example: You are a potential customer. You are sitting at your desk one morning and the phone rings you pick it up:
“Hello?” “Hello is that Mr. Prospect? “Yes” “Oh good. How are you today?” “I’m OK…Who’s this?” “Mr. Prospect my name is Tony Seller of Top Personnel Services. Do you have a moment?”
QUESTION: The seller above has spoken just five sentences. At what point have you (the customer) stopped listening and started thinking: ‘ This sounds like a sales call….How can I get rid of him?’ I will venture a guess it is at the words: “How are you today?” or, if you are unusually tolerant, “Mr. Prospect my name is………of…………”
This is because that is how 95% of all cold calls begin; it is a routine opening. Like Pavlov’s Dogs, we (customers) then go into the knee-jerk mode and endeavour to reject them. If we are foolish enough to be polite “I don’t really have the time” or “Our staff turnover is very low….I doubt we lose more than one staff member per year” we are likely to be met with pressurising, cornering, rebuttals like: “Of course I understand you don’t have time for something you don’t know anything about. I’ll tell you what… if we can meet briefly next week then if you’re not convinced we can help you within 10 minutes … I will leave. How’s that?!” OR “A staff turnover of one person per year? As many as that!”
If the call continues along those lines both seller and prospect feel highly pressurised and a sale is very unlikely. This is where most sales managers start to demand, “Make more calls!”, “Work harder” on the basis of the ancient sales folklore that: “Selling is a numbers game: If you throw enough mud at the wall some of it may stick” THIS IS ALL COMPLETELY UNTRUE….especially in the internet age. The problem is then that sellers become afraid of cold calling and find every excuse not to do it.
The New (unpressured) way to Cold Call
STOP making your key objectives “Getting the appointment” or “Getting the sale”
Replace it with a twin objective of: “Getting the prospect to trust you” and “Getting the prospect to level with you”.
Here’s how: (Prospect answering the phone)
“Hello”
“Good morning is that Mr. Prospect?”
“Yes”
“Oh good morning Mr. Prospect. I’m sorry to call you on a morning…I wonder if you can help me?”
“Well it depends…I’ll try”
“Mr. Prospect I’m trying to find the person in your company who has to struggle with the problem of finding permanent senior staff capable of managing and motivating employees. Would that be you?”
“Well, I’m not immediately looking?”
“But would you be open to hearing about some new ways we have of helping you achieve your senior management recruitment goals when the time is right?”
“I might be but …first of all who are you?”
“My name is John Seller of Top Personnel Services. We have developed an award-winning process which eliminates the common and costly problem of high staff turnover in the first year of employment”
“How do you do that?”
“By using and adapting some of the military officer-selection techniques we helped develop for the Norwegian Army.”
“Can you send me something?”
“Yes sure…that’s fine. Would you prefer a letter or an email?”
“An email will do”
“What would you like to do after you’ve read it?”
“I will call you if we’re interested in going further”
“Yes, that’s fine. We usually find that there are several questions after people have read this outline of our methods. Do you think it would be a good idea for us both to reserve a place in our diaries in a couple of weeks to do this?”
“I can’t at the moment…I’ll know more once I’ve read your document”
“I understand of course. At this stage, neither of us knows whether there might be a good fit between our two companies. Would it be OK with you if I rang anyway in a couple of weeks so that we can exchange our thoughts about whether there might be a fit?”
…and so on. A two-way unpressurised, dialogue allowing the prospect to set the pace. You are developing a trusting environment in which the customer feels that can level with you. And it is only from this that sales spring in this information age.
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NOTES:-
Notice in the whole of the above there is no classic sales ‘pitch’. Instead, it is a two-way dialogue.
We open the call by apologising for interrupting his/her morning We use emotive language: e.g “struggle” to illustrate the type of problem we solve; emotions are more effective persuaders than facts. Too many ‘facts’ will dilute your persuasive power because a weak argument always dilutes a strong one.
We always talk instead about the problems we solve and not the ‘technology’ behind the solution.
We ask at the start if the prospect is, “..open..” to learn more about our capabilities. You will usually get agreement to this because nobody wants to be seen as ‘closed’ to new ideas.
In preparing for each cold call we will have written out in front of us the THREE main problems we can solve for clients in case the prospect asks us what else we offer after hearing about one.
We try only to cold- call those prospects who are typical of the types of prospects who already use our services. Who wants to do ‘missionary’ work?
We never tell the prospect anything about our product or service unless they’ve told us they would like to hear about it first.
There are NO smart-arse rebuttals if they want to ‘go-slow’ or not see us at all at this stage. “Yes that’s fine” is our standard reply when they ask us for something.
We tell them the truth which is that we are trying to see whether there is a mutually precise ‘fit’ between what we can offer and they want to fix. If there isn’t then there is no point in trying to force the issue.
There are no hard ‘closes’. Instead, we ask: “What would you like to do next?” which is our standard ending even when we would like a further conversation. We might suggest the next step but we ask the customer whether they too think this is a good idea. If not we say “That’s not a problem”. Whatever they say, we will call them again in 8 weeks or so and start again from scratch.
We persist in this gentle way every 8 weeks or so even if a customer has said ‘no’ on this occasion. Situations always change. Each time we start as if we have never spoken before. It generally takes 5-6 calls before the business is done; that’s just the way it is. Nothing beats persistence, yet most sellers give up after the second call.
Bob Etherington
“Europe’s Best Sales Trainer” : [Voted by ‘Sales Innovation Expo’ 2015 and 2016, Excel London.]
bob@bobetheringtongroup.com
