Perfect Cold Calls

Just as in everything else, practice makes perfect in cold calls and a practice regiment should be included in any successful sales plan.

In Sun Tzu’s The Art of War he says, “What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease.”

What does the expertise of Sun Tzu mean to us? Well we think that it means in order to considered a top sales person you need to be able to make your cold calls with ease. No, we don’t necessarily mean that it is easy or you are flippant in how you approach your cold calls. We mean that you are comfortable making sales calls and are able to move through them without a lot of scripts or stress.

The question is how to you get to the point where you are winning with ease?

The tried and true method is to make cold calls, lots and lots of cold calls. You start that process by building a cold call script and planning out what you think the likely sales objections might be.

Once you have determined what your company, product or service’s strengths are you can create a cold call script outlining what you do and how you do it. Of course, we feel that it is always best develop a cold call script in a group setting with other sales people within your company at the very least.

You might also want to include people from operations, manufacturing, customer service or perhaps even accounting to make sure you fully understand what your company’s strengths and weakness are as you develop your cold call script as part of your overall sales strategy.

Next, you would develop you potential sales objections you might face. You should design these around what your company actually does or produces.

Generic sales objections would be things like:

“You product costs too much.”
“I don’t want to make a change right now.”
“I have had bad luck with your company before.”
“I don’t have time to talk right now.”
“I don’t see why I need your service.”

There can be lots more sales objections and we go through them in a couple of our articles if you want to check them out. You certainly need to include any generic sales objections we all get but it is also very important that you include those specific to your company.

Once you identify the likely sales objections, the next step is to work on your answers to them.

Once you have your cold call script and sales objections notes you are technically ready to start cold calling.

In truth, this is where many companies will ‘throw you to the wolves’ and say start making sales.

If this happens to you, don’t worry too much about it. You are where most of your peers are and over time you will get to the point where you can make cold calls with ease but we think there is a better way and hope you use it as part of your overall sales strategy.

What is the better way?

We have touched on it in a number of our articles and went into more detail on our article about how to create a sales strategy, but we don’t mind telling you about it again.

Basically, we love role playing as a way to trading sales people to effectively make cold calls. This is always beneficial, even if you have a veteran sales staff because it lets your veterans help train newer sales people and lets all your sales people compare best practices.

Role playing is also critical if you are changing a product, service or changing your overall sales strategy.

We like to have smaller groups. Role playing if you have 100 sales people in a room is not as effective. To get the most out of your cold call role playing you should probably keep groups to about 10 people or less.

You want each person to take turns playing the customer and the sales person. Ideally, you want the person playing the customer to have sales objections. They can be the ones you have already planned for or perhaps they will come up with a new one you need to add to you sales objection list.

You don’t necessarily want the person playing the customer to completely reject the sales person playing the cold caller but they need to make it difficult.

To get the most benefit from the role playing we would also suggest you video the entire process. This will be something you can give to your sales people to study and review along with any cold call scripts, sales objections lists and your written sales strategy.

If you don’t want to video it, an audio recording works great also.

However, one big benefit to the video is it tends to up the stress level of the sales person to better emulate what an actual cold call will be like. Having to perform in front of a group also helps with this, even if you are using the smaller groups we recommend around ten or less people.

You could demonstrate the process in front of larger group before you have a large group break off into smaller groups.

Read Next: Why do you Need a Sales Strategy Plan?