Cold calling

Cold calling:

How many do you need to call to book a meeting?

If you want the Ceo / president or the head of sales or someone on the board then this could take hours of call time stretched out over some days (and sometime even weeks) to get hold of but if you get to them somewhere between 1 in 10 if your good and none if you are not :-).

So what can you do to improve your standing hit rate or success rate in this field.

Start with looking at the phone and write down how you feel.

If you were to get a cold call how would you like that person to make you feel.

Write that down and see if the 2 matched.

Usually we as humans respond better to a happy or cheerful person in real life as well as on the phone if you are not such a person then you will have to start acting at the very least smile.

A smile when talking on the phone will give the other person a better “image” of you and will make them respond in a different manner than they would have otherwise.

Try and cut to the chase (time is money).

Articulate so they can hear you. The human ear can hear at double the rate that the fastest talking person can speak that means as long as you articulate you can speak in fluid way and fast if you want to. Your not running a 100 meter dash however so you need to make it flow good to. Intonation on the words that you want the customer to hear.

So write down five to ten words that you think will be the best ones for your business and that will make the customer really interested in your product / service.

Now add some positive sounding words around these so it will be an understandable and preferably strong short catch phrase.

let me give an example on an opening:

We are working on upgrading sales / technical consultants.
Our specialty is to train sales staff on site at your customers in real life situations.
Do you have any sellers that you want to increase profitability on?

Here i would intone the words upgrading, real life situations and increase profitability. I would also make sure i said it with a smile and picturing a real customer before me (not on the phone). This is short and to the point if the person you call has zero interest in this subject then you will try to find out why and then end the call. (you will call back anyway in 3-6 months 🙂 ).

If yes its time to present the good and sound reasons why you should meet up so you can get better opportunity at presenting yourself and your product / service.

Here you should use the same principle as in the opening make it short and powerful articulate and intone the words you want to paint the picture with.

So mainly you should give a speech just as before an assembly but now with only one in the salon instead of 100.

And as you all know the shorter the speech the more prepared you need to be.

This call will be ended within 20 seconds if no and go on for as long as 120 seconds if yes.

Make sure you get the email and suggest that the customer answers it with their contact information. Oh and remember to ask them for visiting address since that can differ from the adress you are calling them on.

Call me! booking with the phone

The Phone is a great instrument to reach many fast regardless of distance.

There are different phone bookings you could make:

1. Cold call / cold calling
2. Lukewarm calling
3. Hot calling / Leads / Tip
4. Incoming

Number 4 would be the call that all are waiting for but seldom get. You could wait a year for the phone to ring and someone on the other side wanting to meet you to buy something from you and maybe it will happen once or twice but rarely more than that. (But it’s always a very welcome surprise when someone does). Mostly this would increase if you are a very social / business networker.

Number 3 predominantly the result of advertising campaigns or active networking. These are very easy to use for booking meetings since the customer at the other end of the phone wants to meet you and discuss what you can do for them.

Number 2 Leads or tips that are secondhand or have been left to long without attention. Or the bulk of these could also be customers that you have sold to in the past and have lost contact with. If they are this could turn out to be a major income boost for you since customers that have bought from you before are much more inclined to do so again. (for some good seller the figure is about or up to 70%).

Number 1 Siberia 🙂 This is hard work but could be the newly started business only source of meetings especially if you have a tight budget to start out with. You either get the numbers from the phonebook or net based phonebook. Buying numbers that are selected from your search criteria could also spare you a couple of hundred/Thousand calls in vain. We will address Cold calling technic in the next post.