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Warm Up a Cold Call
Featured Author:
Shane Gibson
Shane Gibson is a Vancouver-based International Speaker, author and Global Entrepreneur who has addressed several thousand people over the past thirteen years on stages in North America, Southern Africa and South America. He is quickly becoming known as one of Canada’s foremost speakers on the topic of sales performance. As a trainer, coach and motivational speaker he combines a diverse background in sales force leadership, new entrepreneur development and extensive sales and leadership coaching.
Shane is the author of Closing Bigger the Field Guide to Closing Bigger Deals and President of Knowledge Brokers International Systems Ltd. a leading sales performance and leadership development organization. Shane divides his time between his entrepreneurial projects, speaking at major conferences and mentoring salespeople and entrepreneurs.
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Shane Gibson
I have seen many articles, blogs, and books professing to help sales people never cold call again. I like the idea myself. In fact, I wish people would give me business without ever writing a proposal or having another meeting again. Unfortunately as the old cliché goes: “Sales is a contact sport.”
Networking, publicity, great websites etc. are all great tools for generating warm leads. What happens if you need to double the size of your sales pipeline in 30 days? Unless you have a huge database already or a considerable advertising and marketing budget the cold still is an invaluable tool. With that said here are many variables that need to be addressed before this prehistoric version of SPAM becomes a useful sales tool.
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The cold call isn’t dead; it’s just grown up and has become more sophisticated. Today’s executive is busier than ever. Their e-mail inbox is overflowing with mission critical messages and topped off with an extra helping of SPAM. They’re overbooked, and getting pitched on the phone, fax, PDA, PC and every other communications tool imaginable.
We need to get above the noise, and enter the prospects world with a different positioning than “another pitch artist telemarketer.” At the end of the day it’s an art. Everything from tonality, and time of day to pre-call research and how you handle their first question is critical. Most cold call strategies focus on volume almost exclusively; focus on value and people instead. Here are a couple of things to do to warm up your call:
1) Talk to the right person
This seems like its so common sense that I shouldn’t even mention it. Instead of saying “talk to the right person,” maybe I should say “stop kidding yourself.” It feels good to make a whole bunch of calls sometimes; but if they’re to non-decision makers just realize you’re just doing it for your own entertainment and self delusional reasons. It looks good on our call sheet in month one.
We might even put these prospects in our funnel. In a couple of months it will become obvious to us and those were accountable to that our funnel is full of fluff. Spend the time researching and finding real decision makers. Spend the time networking with people that connect you with or at least inform you about decision makers. Spend it servicing existing clients. Go a read a book even. Non decisions makers drain our energy, and time. Stop calling non-decision makers.
