Cold calling is a classic way to generate leads for your company. Usually, cold calling is defined as calling a prospect that doesn’t know who you are or the purpose of your call. Warm calling is making calls when there is some sort of existing relationship or knowledge of you. Cold calling can be a challenge for lead generation, so you need to build a relationship fast to turn calls into leads. When you get it right, cold calling is a useful tool for your business to turn potential customers into strong leads and to increase your sales. With these tips, you can turn cold calls into warm calls, and then into hot leads.
Turn Cold Calls Into Warm Calls
Name Dropping
When a cold call is answered by either a gatekeeper, like a receptionist or a secretary, or a target prospect themselves, they’re usually going to try and work out quickly if you’re someone they want to speak to. Someone they want to deal with will be someone who has an existing or past relationship with them, that they know has something to offer. They don’t want to speak to someone that they have no relationship with, especially someone trying to sell them something that they don’t want. If they feel they don’t know you, they’re less likely to let you get your foot in the door.
Name dropping is a useful way to warm call and make the prospect feel that you are someone worth speaking to instead of hanging up. If you’re calling a company, mention someone there that you have worked with or spoken to in the past. If you’re cold calling, you won’t have an existing relationship with them. Instead, drop names of the people you want to work with.
Mentioning An Initiative
Another tactic that you can use is to mention an initiative that the prospect has going on. This shows that there is some knowledge or relationship already existing between you and the target company.
If you don’t know of any initiatives, this could be a challenge for you. Try to uncover one by doing some research on your prospect, or by gathering some information from other cold calls.
Ask Qualifying Questions
Salespeople make a lot of cold calls that will revolve around the salesperson giving information while also trying to build interest. Shift from giving information to collecting instead, and you can move away from cold calling to warm calling.
Add two or three qualifying questions into your cold calling script to help you with this. This helps to create a much warmer environment when you do move to sales or trying to gather information. These qualifying questions can also help you to learn more about the prospect you’re approaching and make sure that they’re a good fit for whatever you’re offering.
Turn Cold Calls Into Hot Sales
Analyze Your Fears
Fear is the anticipation of negative results. When you understand this, you can turn the adrenaline produced by your fear into a positive form of motivation. Instead of thinking about the possible experience of rejection when you call a stranger, think about the potential business that you could gain by making the phone call.
Develop A Target Market
The key to making effective cold calls is to identify the right prospects before making any calls. Instead of randomly selecting names from the phone book, target individuals who you know will have an interest in your product or service, as well as the money to buy it. To make this easier, you can use a service like Call Cowboy Auto Dialer to make the calls go faster.
A good way to find prospects is to ask your existing clients for referrals. You could also make calls to people that you meet at networking events or at business meetings. Take the names of people you meet at trade shows and conferences and call them later on.
Know What The Prospect Wants
A prospect is not going to be interested in what your service or product is. All they want to know is what it will do for them. It is critical that you talk about the benefits. Will your service or product help the prospect to make a profit, reduce their costs, save time, boost their productivity, or attract new customers?
Use A Script
Once you have secured the attention of the prospect, you can ask specific questions in order to learn more about what your prospect wants and how you can help with their expectations. Ask your prospects about their concerns, and use this to introduce the solutions that you can offer. Speak from a list of prepared questions. This gives you confidence, and helps you to concentrate on what the person is saying instead of worrying about what you are going to say next. It also helps you to direct the conversation in a more organised manner.
Be A Good Listener
Make sure that you listen more than you talk. This way, you can find out what the prospect actually needs, rather than you just telling them about your offering and how great it is. If you’re listening carefully, this also helps you to impress a prospect, as you’re not interrupting and show you’re taking an interest in what they’re saying by asking relevant follow-up questions that clarify or acknowledge what they’re saying.
Accept No And Move On
Not everyone will want or need what you and your company are offering. Try not to take rejection personally, and instead just move on to the next call on your list. If you can do this, you can boost your success rate as you make more calls. If you find handling rejection difficult, consider out-sourcing your cold calling to someone else who is better equipped to manage the task.
Focus Your Questions On Your Prospect, Not Yourself
When you make the first contact with the prospect, make sure that you focus your attention and the questions you’re asking on the prospect. Don’t waste time talking about you are and what you do, or about your company and any other companies.
Remember that the call is about them, after all, not you. A client-centred selling angle is professional selling. You’re only selling professionally when you are talking to client about they want and need.
Don’t Try To Sell On The First Call
On your first call, you shouldn’t attempt to sell. Instead, you should concentrate on information gathering. If you are selling something inexpensive that doesn’t require much thought, then you can sell, but otherwise, you should be interviewing the prospect by asking questions. Take notes during the call, and tell them you will call back. Go away and use what they told you to tailor a sales pitch that addresses their needs.
Concentrate on building the relationship between you and the prospect, and work to come across as friendly, and non-threatening.
Keep Your Prospect Relaxed
The longer you are able to keep a prospect relaxed, and the more they open up to you, the more likely it is that you will be able to make the sale.
If you’re making cold calls on the phone, try to be relaxed yourself in order to encourage your prospect to be relaxed too. You can also try these techniques to stay relaxed and relax others. If you’re personable during a call, this helps too.
Find Out What Benefits Will Make Your Prospect Buy From You
With every potential customer, there is a key benefit that will trigger the desire to buy and cause the customer to make a purchase of your service or product.
As well as this benefit, there is also a key doubt or fear that will hold the customer back from making the decision to buy. Your first job when making a cold call to a prospect is to find out exactly what this key benefit and fear is.
Bonus Cold Calling Tip: Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For More
Don’t be afraid to ask. Ask is a magic work in successful sales. You could even ask outright with a question like, “We have found that there is always a major reason that a person would purchase our product or service. What might that reason be for you?”
If you’re open, genuine, and honest with your prospects, and ask out of obvious curiosity, you might be surprised by the answers that you will get. A prospect might be perfectly willing to offer up the information for you to make a sale. The important thing is that you just ask.
Cold calling can be a very useful way to turn cold leads into warm ones, make sales, and build connections with potential customers. Spend some time developing a cold calling strategy that will help you to connect with your prospects, find out what they want and need from you, and clearly showcase how successful your product or service would be at solving their problems, meeting their needs, and helping them to improve their business in some way.
