"I just can't get no respect" Cold Calling

Well with the day off I decided it was time to catch up on some reading of my subscriptions when I came across this article at RainToday.com by Sandy O'Dell, Restoring Respect To Cold Callers, The Black Sheep Of Business Growth

To coin a phrase by Rodney Dangerfield, "I just can't get no respect".

It was refreshing to read an article that talked about what many of us have known for years. Cold Calling is the core to any sales and marketing department when it comes to increasing your market share. In fact my believe is that once you get it right in cold calling, everything else in the sales process becomes easier. Something like lifting a 100 pound weight after you have learned to lift 300 pounds.

Well enjoy the article as I did. It kind of starts off dry, but gets juicy a couple of photographs in. Ideal reading for those of us that Cold Call and for business that are looking to grow.

"Hi. My name is Sandy O'Dell, and I am a Cold Caller."

"Hi Sandy!" I imagine a group of other underground B-to-B Cold Callers bellow, in sympathetic welcome and spirited validation of who I am and what I do.

While "closeted" cold callers do not belong to the serious fraternities of Anonymous Associations that help its members deal with and recover from grievous and often life-threatening addictions, at least one clear parallel exists:

As a group, many suffer like shame over what they do. Members of this group commonly lie about their occupation to friends and family, or at least embellish their livelihood to the point where it resembles something other, something ostensibly "better," than what it is.

But there is no reason to prevaricate, because B-to-B cold calling is business development of the highest order. It is, simply, the linchpin strategy for growth.

Most professional service businesses rely much too heavily on their network of current clients, referrals, and colleagues. In order to jumpstart and sustain vigorous growth, they must take an absolutely essential step. They must move outside of their familiar and finite circle and build a pipeline of cold leads to nurture over time and ultimately develop into new clients.

Businesses can do this in the fastest and most effective way by compiling a list of strong prospects that they don't know but suspect would benefit from their services. And then call them – cold.

Cold calling may be part of an integrated sales and marketing strategy that includes, for example, white papers, mailings, and presentations at key events, but it is a pivotal piece if you want to leverage the enormous opportunity that these would-be prospects represent.

Yet very few people reach out to new prospects on the phone, and even fewer do it well. The reason for this has far less to do with talent and everything to do with practice (which, of course, develops the necessary skills). For most professionals, it feels awkward, uncomfortable, and let's face it - wrong. It no doubt conjures up smarmy images of intrusive, script-reading telemarketers interrupting your Sunday dinner.

The fact is B-to-B cold calling bears no resemblance to this unseemly image. And for those of you mired in the notion that cold-calling is at its heart an ignoble profession, here is a true story that is characteristic of cold calling done right and a story that should help to shake loose its ill-deserved reputation.

While working for a Fortune 100 technology firm seeking to grow by developing products and services to attract small to mid size firms, I called on the CIO of a financial services company. Aware of our firm's large corporate customer focus, he proceeded to tell me that he was not only completely uninterested in talking to me, but that our firm had no concept of the needs of smaller businesses and therefore he would never consider us as a service or product provider.

I countered by telling him that that was exactly why we wanted to meet with him, to prove that we did indeed understand his business and his industry. To help convince him of that fact, our objective was not to sell, but to share intelligence gleaned from years of research around the top seven challenges that CIOs in small-to-mid sized financial services face, and the emerging best practices on how to manage them. That was it.

After offering up some possible days and times to get together, he agreed to the meeting. I suspect it had more to do with curiosity than addressing an actual need, but the purpose was to secure an appointment so that we could begin to build trust by sharing something of value to him. After 13 months of careful nurturing, we signed a six figure agreement with this CIO.

Professional service firms rely on relationships. Relationships cannot develop without meeting your prospect face-to-face. And face-to-face meetings can not happen without talking to your prospect. There is no way around this: If you want to grow your practice beyond the limits of your current network, you will need to talk to and engage prospects who don't know you.

This is uncomfortable, it does feel awkward, but it is hardly dishonorable. On the contrary, cold calling fuels sales momentum, ushering in a pipeline loaded with possibility.

Cold callers are change agents, the architects of growth, relationship builders, and the bellwethers of market direction.

So to all business-to-business cold callers or would-be cold callers, I say to you: Back straight, head up, and stand proud. Ours is not only a noble profession, but the keystone of new and often breakthrough opportunities.


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Sandy O'Dell works with The Wellesley Hills Group as a senior consultant for service and technology companies seeking to increase their face time in front of prospects through seminar marketing and meeting generation. Contact Sandy at sodell@whillsgroup.com.

Am I My Worst Enemy

You're probably sitting there thinking, "Why would I want to be my own worst enemy?" And the answer, of course, is that you certainly don't want to be. But it happens, and it could happen to you.

I've seen salespeople with the potential to be top performers fall short because they either didn't know what it took to be a top performer or they knew and were just too lazy to do what was required.

If you take a group of ten salespeople, you're likely to find two really top performers, a pack of five to six who are OK, and two to three who should probably be doing something else for a living.

A lot of people are quite comfortable being a member of the "pack." There's a certain comfort in not standing out. There are fewer expectations made of you and you're generally on safe ground when times are tough and the layoffs occur. Sometimes people just get so deep into their personal comfort zone that changing is simply too much of an effort. As I've often said, the problem with the world is apathy, but then again, who cares!

Not everyone is content to stay in the pack. Some are there due to circumstances beyond their control, while others are just getting their act together and are getting ready to break out.

It's this last group of people that this article is intended for — those who don't want to be the pack any longer and who aspire to move out and up in the sales food chain.

Getting out of the pack is both simple and hard. The simple part is realizing that there are only three things you need to have to break free of the pack and they are the Desire, the Drive, and the Discipline to do what is required to get out.

The hard part is finding sufficient quantities of those three elements.
The "desire" part is the easiest of the three. Drumming up the desire is no more difficult that drumming up the desire to win a lottery. Who among us hasn't purchased a lottery ticket and then spent quality time daydreaming about what we would do with the winnings. It's fun to think of whom we would share some of the winnings with (and whom we wouldn't!), what we would buy, and what we would do after we got our hands on the money.

So what would you do if you became even more successful in sales? How would your income improve? What would you do with the extra money? How would the extra income impact your family? Would you make more trips, take better vacations, buy a new home or perhaps the car of your dreams or a boat, what? What happens to your desire when you let your mind and imagination go there? It probably goes up, as it should.

The drive and discipline are the more challenging parts of the success equation. Just like you can't win a lottery without disciplining yourself to buy a ticket each week, you can't become a sales superstar without disciplining yourself to do what it takes to get there.

So what does it take to be a superstar in your particular field? What sales target do you need to set for yourself? How many sales do you have to close in order to exceed that target? How many sales opportunities are you going to have to start in order to close enough to make your target. How many calls will you have to make? Find out what the activity levels are for your specific business. You get the idea.

If you're not sure where to begin, talk with some of the top performers in your company. What are their activity levels? Notice I didn't say what are their performance levels; I said activity levels. Superior performance is the result of doing the right things (activities).

Sales superstars have the discipline to do what non-performers won't do — work their numbers.

Last on our list is finding the drive to do all this. To a great extent, drive is a function of attitude. If you develop a can-do, will-do attitude, the basics of drive are there. Feed your drive with a bit of desire from time to time and you'll stay in high gear. Remind yourself from time to time how your life, and your family's life will improve when you reach your goal. It works.

Happy Calling

"How are you doing today, Sir"

I just love it when I get a telemarketing call at home. This time it was Citibank MasterCard offering me a pre approved credit card.

She ask if I was available and of course I was. Then she did what all good telemarketers do and ask me “so how are you today”. My answer, with an up beat tone in my voice and smile on my face, “lousy, thanks for asking” and with out skipping a beat her response was “that’s great sir” which she then proceeded to go straight into her script.

Now I am neither for or against asking your prospect “how they are doing” or even if they have a moment that I can speak to them, but and this is the big one. Never ask those question if one you really don’t mean it and if you are not listening. Lot of times I will use both questions in my opening, but I do it for a reason.

First and most importantly, I really want to know what is happening at that moment for the prospect. To me there is not much sense continuing with them if they are not up to talking to me. If it is a bad time for them, then it is much easier to arrange for a call back time. Benefit for you here is this still allows you getting to the next step with out the rejection, it lets you get to more calls, hopefully to people that want to speak to you and I just find it a lot easier to pull a prospect than try and push them along.

Secondly, with the opportunity to move to the next step. It begins the flow of the call and takes away the idea of being intrusive allowing me to begin building rapport with which I can say if you have no rapport you have no prospect period.
My believe it is with the first words out of your mouth that are going to set the pace of the call, so choose them carefully and be genuine when you say them and keep a smile on your face. I find it hard to sound boring when you are smiling.

Remember, you can sell anything to anyone over the phone as long as you know to communicate with your prospect.

Till next time Keep on dialling.
Have a awesome day.
John

Sales Predator or Professional Sales Person?

IF THE CUSTOMER VIEWS YOU AS THE PREDATOR,HE PROBABLY SEES THEMSELVES AS THE PREY

As a professional using the phone as your main method of communication, you perform a function that very few people in the world could do well, or would even want to try.

That's persuading someone to take action and make a decision, based almost solely on the words and ideas that come from your mouth. It's quite an awesome feat when you think about it. Question is, do you think about it. It takes a talented individual to be able to do that well.

If you're not listening carefully, you're probably not asking good questions. Some salespeople have all the answers before they ask the questions. Avoid the trap of talking too much, especially during the first call. Try to get the customer talking for at least 75% of the time you spend together. Don't talk about your products before your customer talks about his desires.

Communicate value
Consider this. If you're not communicating value, you must be communicating something else. (Probably the wrong stuff.)

Daaaaaa! The best way to communicate value is to take a genuine interest in the customer and his business.

If your potential customer sees you as a predator, it's because you're missing the qualities that professionals rely on. Haste not only makes waste, it creates the wrong image for you. If you're prepared, personable, punctual, and professional, you'll never be mistaken for a predator.

Your potential customers don't want to be preyed upon, they want to be helped, and will be if you offer the professional touch on every sales call Feel proud of what you do, and always strive to get better!

And of course we are forcasting another wonderfull day to be communicating
Have a great one
John

Part 2 - Cold Calling - An Effective Sales Tool - when done right

Part 2 of a 2 part series

5) Prepare questions to move to the discussion step for your call.
Don't use a "benefit list" to present from. Instead, use it to create questions to determine if those "benefits" truly are of value to your prospects and customers.

Some "benefits" could actually be liabilities. After asking, be quiet. Resist the urge to jump in if they don't answer immediately. Don't be intimidated by silence. They're likely thinking about what they're going to say.

The key to this Step is two fold. First to ask the right questions and then listen, listen, listen. After they've finished, count to two (silently, of course). This insures they're done, plus they might continue with even better information. Be confident in your questioning. One reason agents ramble with questions is that they're not prepared or confident. Prepare your questions. Role play them with yourself if necessary. Always know where you'll go with answers. Regardless of the answer. Active listening creates reflective questioning and the quality of the question is measure by the results. Without a script, it's too easy to leave something out or go off on a tangent. Once again, it's not that you'll be reading your script word for word when you call, but that you've prepared the framework of the cold call in advance.

6) Resist the tendency to present.
Sometimes we get so excited when we hear the slightest hint of an opportunity, that we turn on the spigot of benefits. Learn to hold off, ask a few more questions, get better information, and you're able to craft an even harder-hitting description of benefits, tailored precisely to what they're interested in.

7) Ask for an appointment at a specific time when cold calling.
Say, "Would Wednesday at 11 a.m. be a good time to meet?" instead of saying, "Can I meet with you to discuss this next week?"

8) Remember that gatekeepers are your allies not your foes.
Be pleasant to whoever picks up the phone or is guarding the inner sanctum when cold calling. Develop strategies to get the gatekeeper on your side. Sometimes asking, "I wonder if you could help me?" will help you get the information you need, such as the name of the right person to talk to or when the best time to contact the prospect is. Learning the names of gatekeepers and being friendly when cold calling helps, too.

9) Smooth the way for your cold call by using emails, web sites and even faxes.
This helps break the ice and makes your business stand out from the crowd. When we call, they say, "Oh yeah....you were the one that sent me that..."

10) Getting Commitment (Closing)
This is not the major event in a sales call. It's the natural, logical, validation of the professional sales process up to this point. But you still must ask. Commitment must be gained on every contact in order to move the process forward. If there is to be a follow-up contact, and information is to be sent or faxed, there must be commitment on behalf of the prospect regarding that material.

11) Be persistent when cold calling.
"Eighty percent of new sales are made after the fifth contact, yet the majority of sales people give up after the second call". And above all, practice, practice, practice. While cold calling may never be much fun for you, you can get better at it, and the more you practice cold calling, the more effective a sales tactic it will be. So get your script and your call list together and reach for the phone. The people who want to do business with you are out there - but you have to let them know about you first.

As a sales professional using the phone as your main method of communication, you perform a function that very few people in the world could do well, or would even want to try. And that's persuading someone to take action and make a decision, based almost solely on the words and ideas that come from your mouth. It's quite an awesome feat when you think about it. And do think about it. It takes a talented individual to be able to do that well. You are that person. Feel proud of what you do, and always strive to get better!

Happy Dialing
John

Part 1 - Cold Calling - An Effective Sales Tool - when done right

Part 1 of 2
The obituary for cold calling is premature. While in the perfect world, your phone would be ringing off the hook all day with clients offering you business, the reality is that if you want business, you need to go after it, and cold calling is an effective sales tactic if it's done properly.

Except many small business people would rather spend an entire day in a dentist's chair than go cold calling. Does the thought of cold calling makes your stomach drop to your toes? These cold calling tips won't eliminate your fear, but they will help you make cold calling a more successful experience.

1) Focus on the goals when cold calling.
Beginners tend to think that cold calling is about making the sale. It's not.
It's about getting the chance to make the sale. Have a primary objective for every call defined and an understanding of all the steps needed, one by one to reach that point.

2) Research and understand your markets and prospects.
You need to target your cold calling to the right audience. Use market research to focus on your target market. Then find out as much as you possibly can about the company or individual you're going to cold call in advance. This gives you the huge advantage of being able to talk about them and their needs when you call.

3) Prepare an opening statement for your cold call.
The objective of your opening should be focused on helping you to understand the Awareness and Interest of your prospect and to stimulate that Awareness and Interest so they will voluntarily and enthusiastically move to the discussion. You must answer, "What's in it for me?" for the listener, or they will immediately begin the getting-rid-of-you process.
This lets you organize your thoughts before cold calling, and helps you avoid common mistakes in the cold call opening that would give the person you're calling the chance to terminate the conversation. Don't read your opening statement into the phone, but use it as a framework to get the conversation off to a good start.

Remember the “K.I.S.S rule - Keep It Short and Sweet.

Get to the point and don’t go into a presentation mode. I advise cold callers to write out their “opening” and then keep rewriting it until it achieves the results desired. What should be in the opening statement of your cold call?

"Include a greeting and an introduction and a reference point that answers the prospects question. “What’s In It For Me”.

For example, “Good morning, Ms. Marshall. This is John Thomas with ABC. If I caught you at a good time today, I was hoping to have a couple of moments to speak with you“. When cold calling my belief is that because of the nature of the call being interruptive, it is best to get the prospect on your side as quickly as possible. We don’t know what is happening when we call them, so if it is not good timing then we can arrange to call back. Once you have the approval to speak with them, this would be where you would answer their questions with your “commercial”.

4) To ask or not to ask, that is the question
Your in the middle of doing a task that is important to you. The phone rings, “Hello”. You have no idea who that is on the other end, but they introduce themselves and ask politely to speak to me for a couple of moments. At that point I am going to make a decision based on the information I have thus far and answer Yes or No. I decide that I don’t have the time now and promptly the person on the other end ask if today at 3:00pm would be better or tomorrow morning at 9:00am suits. The thing to notice here is the prospect is engaged in the conversation already what ever the outcome verses going straight into your Commercial for why you are calling. Your goal for this step is to begin to interact with the prospect asking permission then to me is only common sense.

Check back for Part Two

The Keys To Buying Motivation

The Keys To Buying Motivation
By Mark Dembo

Focusing On The Prospect

Your job in selling services is to understand what it is that people do, and then to help them do it better. For only by understanding what people do; how they do it, why they do it that way, when they do it, and who they do it with, can you be in a position to really help them and show them what will make sense to them.

Notice that the emphasis here is on the prospect: what makes sense to them. It's not about what makes sense to you, or what you would like to sell them. Notice also that we're not talking about asking prospects about their “needs,” “problems,” or “pain.”

As D.E.I. Management Group President and author, Steve Schiffman, says in his book The 250 Sales Questions to Close the Deal:

What if I ask the person to describe pressing business problems that he or she will face in the future? What if I build my proposal around those business issues? I might get a decent picture of what is going on in that person's world, but I will not get the whole picture.

Even if you discover everything about the person's pains, needs, and problems, you will have only learned about certain parts of their situation – the parts that are currently causing pain and problems. You won't be getting the whole picture.

What about the rest of your contact's situation – the things that don't fit in the categories of pain, needs, or problems? What's going on there? If I only ask about “needs,” I don't know – and if you've only been asking the types of questions mentioned above, neither do you.

Let's explore this a bit more deeply. People will only make a decision to do something if it makes sense to them. I think that's something we can all agree on. So how do we know what will make sense to someone we meet for the first time, or whom we don't know all that well? That comes through asking questions and in taking a genuine interest in the people we meet with.

Many of us in professional services were taught, at one time or another, that we need to be good listeners, and that we need to show we care by asking questions. Yet how many of us really do a good job at that?

We are excited about our services – we want to jump right in and show our prospect that we have the fix for whatever ails them. We need to learn to fight that urge to “throw-up” on the prospect with our solution to their problem – for if we do this too soon in the process we're really just guessing at what makes the most sense to them.

Understanding Decision-Making Motivation

An understanding of basic human motivation will help you ask better questions to arrive at the ultimate plan that will make sense to your prospect. As human beings, we are all driven by two primary motivating factors; the desire to avoid pain, or the desire to gain something. Or, to put it another way – we either want to fix something that isn't working, or we want to create a better future.

Consultant and author Mahan Khalsa, in his book, Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play says it well:

People who are trying to “move away from pain” will interpret issues as pain and may give us a list a problems, frustrations, and dissatisfaction. They may even use physical or emotional pain phrases like: “It's killing us…,” “We're bleeding…,” “It's a pain in the neck…,” It's a real headache…,” It's a nightmare…,” “It's like pulling teeth….”

People who are “moving toward gain” will interpret issues as results (i.e., objectives, goals, and outcomes). They may use phrases like” “What we'd like to see…,” “What we think is possible…,” “Our vision is…,” “What we're excited about is…,” “Our end in mind is…,” “We'd like to create…,” etc. Their language will give us some hints about where they would like to start. We'll just need to be aware of the language.

Our job in asking questions, then, is to listen to what our prospect says and determine which mode they are operating in – listen to their language, and then ask more questions to find out more about their unique situation. In doing this, you will want to ask questions that relate to the past, the present, and the future.

Asking about the past will help you determine what problems they may be dealing with that they want to fix. Asking about the present will focus in their present situation and the current “status quo”. Future-based questions will give you a sense of what goals and outcomes they hope to accomplish. All of these areas are important to gain a full sense of what will make sense to the person and of what will lead them to buy.

Every conversation is unique. You need to focus on what your contact is telling you and then follow-up with a logical question to dig deeper. Each question you ask should follow from the question and answer before it.

For example, suppose you are speaking with someone and she tells you that her company plans to open 5 new locations in the next year. What will your next question be? Here are some possibilities:

That's great. I'm just curious, why five?
That's great. I'm just curious, where will they be? How did you decide on those locations?
That's great. What are your first year projections for those locations?
That's great. What kinds of challenges do you typically face when you open new locations?
You could probably come up with several other questions you could use here, but the point is that the question is squarely focused on them – and may not even have anything directly to do with your offering.

Remember, your goal is to understand as much as you can about them. Through question like this you are developing a real conversation. A conversation in which your contact's comfort and trust level will increase, and one in which you will gain real insight into what they “do” – what they hope to accomplish as well as the problems they need to solve.

Taking The Last Step

Only once you've gained a better sense of their past, present, and future – along with problems (pain) and goals (gain) – are you in a position to make a real recommendation or proposal.

Moving quickly through this step can jeopardize your opportunities to build a real relationship and to add real value to the selling situation. Take the time to truly understand what your prospect does, and you will see your sales increase!



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Mark Dembo is President of Lexien Management Consultants. Mark has over 20 years of sales, sale management, and business development experience, focused on improving the performance of individuals and organizations. Contact Mark at 914-682-2069 or mdembo@lexien.com