Increase Your Close Rate and Become a Cold Call Master with These Exclusive Tips
In today’s post, we’ll be discussing how to master cold calling. Along the way, we’ll cover eleven points that can turn good salespeople into great salespeople. After all, it doesn’t pay to become great at cold calling if you can’t close the deal.
So settle in, maybe grab a snack, and let’s get started.
11 Steps Toward Sales Mastery
These eleven points can take you from average to stellar. Read them more than once if you need to. Internalize them.
#1 People don’t purchase products, they purchase benefits.
Sure, someone buying a sexy sports car covets the car, but what are they really looking forward to? What benefits do they imagine will come from owning the car? Are they thinking about impressing their friends? Are they thinking about attracting the opposite sex?
Always focus on benefits.
Remember this: people aren’t out to buy products. Not really. They’re out to buy results.
#2 There’s no getting around it: you’ll have to make cold calls.
Being told “no” over and over isn’t fun. We get it. But if you’re going to make it on commissions, you have to develop a thick skin.
When you know it’s time to start making calls, ask yourself: “What’s the worst that can actually happen here?”
Are you putting your life on the line? Not really. So what’s the problem?
Remember: the brain is geared toward keeping you safe and alive. When you think about something you don’t want to do, your brain interprets this as a threat, releasing cortisol and other stress hormones into your bloodstream.
This stress response makes you want to seek fun activities so you can experience pleasure and lower your stress levels.
But this is how procrastination starts, and if you aren’t careful, it becomes a habit.
We’ll go into how to overcome the fear of cold calling in the next section, but for now, just know that you can do it.
#3 Define your customer.
You need to know your customer. You need to know their wants and their needs. You need to know their hopes and their dreams.
Who is the person or business that would most likely purchase your product? Build up an image in your mind—called an avatar, or buyer persona—of this customer, and start by asking yourself specific questions:
1) How old is your ideal customer?
2) Is your ideal customer male or female?
3) Are they married? If so, do they have children?
4) How much do they earn per year?
5) How educated are they?
Once you have these fundamentals, go on to deeper questions:
6) What benefits do your product or service provide for your ideal customer?
7) What, specifically, does your product or service accomplish for them?
8) Where is your ideal customer located?
9) What is your ideal customer’s buying strategy?
10) What are their goals and values?
#4 Identify and hone your competitive advantage.
Again, this isn’t about a shiny product, exactly. You want to think in terms of the benefits that you can provide to your customer. What makes you different? How do you stand apart?
Your competitive advantage is the reason your customers choose you over your competition. Before you go any further, you need to identify this.
This requires identifying the problem your customer has and how you solve it. That’s it. If you have built a solid customer persona, this should be obvious.
The important takeaway here is that if your ideal customer doesn’t have a problem that you can solve, then you don’t have a sale.
Once you have identified the customer’s problem, ask yourself, “How can I/do I solve this better than anyone else?”
#5 Price carefully.
The perfect price is the highest price your customers are willing to pay, right? Maybe. Maybe, not.
The first thing you should do is look at the market. What are your competitors charging? How successful are they? Next, look at your own costs. If your costs are lower, you may be able to undercut the existing competition and suck up market share.
If you go in the opposite direction, pricing higher than existing competition, be prepared to over-deliver. This can be a valid strategy if your goal is to establish yourself as the premiere offering, but you do have to go above and beyond to justify the bump in price.
#6 Learn to negotiate.
Solid negotiation skills means the difference between winning and losing. A skillful negotiator is concerned with just that: win-win scenarios. This means, of course, that both parties leave the negotiation table with a compromise they can live with.
Strong negotiation skills can be the difference between a beneficial compromise and a loss.
Strong negotiation ability requires the following:
• Confidence. Most people are adept at sensing when you’re not willing to stand your ground, and they will take advantage of it.
• Knowing when to walk away. Some battles are just not worth fighting. An uphill battle is one thing, a lost cause is another. If the other party is unwilling to compromise at all, walk away. There are greener pastures elsewhere.
• Be fair. On the other hand, you don’t want to be the guy who is only out for themselves. This will earn you, as they say, a reputation. Know which concessions you’re willing to make beforehand, but don’t give this information away freely, either.
#7 Learn how to make effective presentations.
In selling, you will need to present data in a compelling, digestible manner. Use all the tools available to you. Don’t skimp here. People, on the whole, are somewhat shallow. They will judge you based on your presentation.
#8 Once a customer, always a customer.
Which sounds more profitable? Always working to get new customers, or servicing the same customers over and over? The latter is generally more profitable, and it can be more rewarding, too.
Once the customer has purchased your product or service, don’t let this be the end of the relationship. You may be able to do more for them, or they may be willing to refer you to their friends and associates once you’ve built some trust.
#9 Over-deliver.
We’ll explore what it means to under promise and over deliver in our next post, but for now, know that this can be a powerful strategy. Always over deliver.
All things being equal, customers will remember—and return to—the service that provides the most value.
Ask yourself: What can you do right now to give your customers more value? What low cost action can you take to improve your customer’s day?
Can you produce a valuable piece of content and give it to them for free?
Can you give them a free, time-limited demo of your upcoming product or service?
Going that extra step sets you apart from your competition and shows your customers that you care.
#10 Keep customers in the loop.
Customers like to be reminded that the companies they do business with are driven by real people. Sometimes, in our quest to close deals and make sales, we tend to go into a sort of robotic mode. This is a turn off.
After all, our customers are not little piggy banks that we raid when we need to. They’re real people.
Keep this in mind: The best salespeople are the best people people.
So when you announce sales, new products or what have you, make sure to give your announcement a human voice. Sign up for social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram, and use them consistently.
Note that social media has provided a powerful platform from which you can make sales. The key is to engage honestly. Share content that people will find valuable.
For instance, if you’re going to use Twitter, for every 10 tweets, 9 should be links to resources that you don’t own, and 1 should be a tweet that promotes your product or service.
Provide value, consistently, and you will build a following of targeted potential customers.
Here are just a few of the benefits of content marketing:
• Access qualified leads
• Access and build channels that allow you to—tactfully—sell your product
• Lower overall costs to acquire new customers.
#11 Refine your sales message.
As stated, your sales materials should be focused on benefits. This is what separates good salespeople from great salespeople. Look at your sales material. Are your headlines focused on a single, solid benefit?
Does your sales headline make it clear exactly what your customers stand to gain by investing in your product or service?
Is your sales material specific or generic?
If the latter, it can be an indication that you don’t know how your product will help your client. That’s a problem.
If your product or service appeals to multiple people—if it offers multiple benefits—create different marketing materials for each customer profile.
The 100 Calls Method
This method, pioneered by Brian Tracy, can help you get over your fear of cold calling. And, as you know, cold calling is one of the key sales skills. So let’s get into it.
If you’re procrastinating when you should be cold calling, the likely culprit is a fear of a failure. You imagine hearing “no” over and over again, and naturally, you want to avoid the embarrassment and rejection that goes along with that.
Get over it.
If you’re going to be in sales, you’ll have to develop a thick skin.
Again, ask yourself, “What’s the worst that can happen here?”
With this method, you can take charge of the situation and force yourself to make progress towards consistent sales. This is powerful.
The method involves a simple, tried-and-true formula: whenever you take on a new product, make 100 cold calls right away. That’s it. You don’t care how many people end up making a purchase, you just make the calls. All 100.
Why?
Because, as we hinted at before, your brain can trip you up if it senses a threat to your well being. If you tremble with trepidation every time you think about making cold calls, your brain will pick up on this. It will redirect your attention elsewhere.
So, by forcing yourself to make those 100 calls, you teach yourself to react to cold calms with calm, confidence and cold calculation—instead of fear.
This, in turn, keeps your stress levels low, and you’ll find that you procrastinate less often.
Another benefit of this method is that you will quickly come across common objections. This is invaluable data.
In case you haven’t guessed by now, the magic stems from the fact that as soon you stop caring whether you actually make sales, your fear disappears. This allows you to relax, which your prospects will pick up on.
If you feel more comfortable, they feel more comfortable. So it’s a bit of a paradox. As soon as you stop caring whether you make the sale or not, your sales rate is likely to increase.
7 Tips to Help You Along
It’s no secret that cold calling can be hard. No one’s denying that. It can be frustrating, too. But part of sales is reaching out, because whether we like it or not, prospects don’t usually come to us.
So how do you warm your prospects and do so efficiently? Check out these six tips:
• Ask about your client; don’t talk about yourself
• Decide on your questions in advance
• Don’t rely on a script
• Don’t be too eager
• Don’t try to close a sale on your first call
• Stay relaxed
Let’s look at all of these one by one.
Ask Questions
In your first conversation, focus all of your questions on the client. Don’t talk about yourself beyond initial introductions. This is a mistake a lot of novice salespeople make. The prospect doesn’t care who you are.
People don’t care about you until they have a reason to.
Don’t talk about who you are. Don’t talk about what you do.
It’s not about you. It’s about them and how you can help them.
Strive at all times to focus on client-centered selling.
Plan Your Questions in Advance
When cold calling, one of your jobs is get the prospect to open up to you so you can determine how best you can help them. To that end, you should come up with a list of questions to ask them in advance.
When ordering your questions, go from most general to most specific.
The first question you ask is known as the ‘opening question,’ and it’s the most important. Your opening question should elicit a response that indicates whether your customer would benefit from your product or service.
Be Wary of Scripts
Once you have a positive response from your opening question, subsequent questions should branch from that. Ask about his business, his industry and budget. Qualified prospects are often happy to give this information since they’re intrigued by your product or service at this point.
If they weren’t, they likely wouldn’t be on the phone at this point.
The problem with cold calling scripts is they’ll make you sound robotic. So while you want to go into the call with questions to ask in advance, it’s not a great idea to try to script out the entire call in advance.
Below are a few sample questions you can ask after getting a positive response to your opening question, but customize them to fit your personality and style.
1) If you could wave a wand and remove the three biggest issues facing your industry or market, what would they be?
2) If you could somehow create ideal conditions for your business, industry or market, what would they be?
3) I would love to schedule a meeting with you in person to discuss how my service could benefit you. When would be a good time for you?
Don't Be Overeager During the First Meeting
Appearing over-eager is a sure-fire way to turn your prospect off. You don’t want to start the meeting by making your potential customer think, ‘Man, this guy really wants my money.’
You do want the sale, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But you should still consider the psychological side of things.
When selling, you want to position yourself as a helpful person who can help the prospect improve their life or business. This way, you’re in a position to make recommendations that will help them make concrete gains.
You’re a friend.
So take it easy on the first meeting.
Don't Try to Close the Deal on the First Sales Call
In the same vein, don’t be over eager to close the deal. The prospect always picks up on this, and it doesn’t make a good impression.
Unless your prospect desperately needs your solution right then and has high confidence in it, asking for the sale then and there is likely to leave you with a hard no.
Instead, consider taking a threefold approach that involves cold call, meeting and then asking for the sale. The more expensive your product or service, the more important this is.
Put another way, the more desperate you seem for the sale, the less likely you are to get it. It comes down to basic human psychology: people pick up on desperation and it sends up all sorts of red flags.
Just Relax, Man
This all leads us to the final point: stay relaxed.
The most successful salespeople have an ability to appear relaxed even if they don’t feel relaxed.
Tip: study body language. Think of a film in which the main character is extremely confident. The Wolf Of Wall Street comes to mind.
Study the actor’s body language.
How do they use their hands? Do they cross their arms or keep them open? Do they stand at an angle when talking to someone or do they stand directly in front of them?
Learn the confidence cues. We’ll go into this in more detail in a future post, but for now, watching actors displaying confidence is a great strategy to start with.
We hope this concise guide has helped you in your journey toward being a more confident, successful cold caller. Stay tuned for our next article, in which we will be discussing the concept of under promising and over delivering.
Gus Torres
Executive VP of Sales - Team Unified
t: (866)668-6529 x 121 m: (786)525-8263
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