As a sales professional you likely have been asked to prospect by cold calling. Most of you cringe at the thought. I have been in sales all my life. That’s 30 plus years selling, managing and training sales professionals. I learned how to cold call over the phone, I even knocked on doors early in my career. Now I spend my time helping people who love selling and could use a little help prospecting. I found two articles I believe you would be interested in on the subject of cold calling. I will give you the highlights and make things plain and simple.
The first is a wonderful article I found on Hubspot written by Dan Tyre that should really help with cold calling. It is a departure from the past when all salespeople were told “smile and dial”. There is a pretty thorough discussion on creating the perfect script with templates you can use and pre-call work that makes a whole lot of sense. You can find the article by following this link. Hubspot
The other article from Sales Hacker explains why you should embrace cold calling with several tips on how to be savvy when calling. The article is titled “Why everybody hates cold calling” written by Rex Biberston. Bottom line is there are still great opportunities for cold calling when done the right way. This article goes into more detail when it comes to application of scripts and dives into how to script voicemails. This makes a lot of sense when you look at their claim that 90% of your calls are going to voicemail.
I think that cold calling is very necessary when you are starting out. Both of these articles will help you immensely to make these calls and be effective. You need to have the right mindset when making these calls if you want to survive in today’s markets. I have three suggestions to supercharge your career before and after your calling campaign:
- Differentiate yourself, make sure you love your product and company. Pair your product and company value with your own unique value and focus on prospects who resonate with your unique self.
- Provide such great service to those who buy from you that they wouldn’t even think of buying from anyone else.
- Leverage the law of reciprocity. Once you have clients that know you are someone who can deliver, is reliable and knows how to take and give great feedback, train them to be your customer evangelists. Your source of testimonials and one of your referral partners in your growing business.
Don’t be fooled or psyched out when you hear negativity associated with cold calling; it is a necessary evil for many sales professionals. Done correctly cold calling can set you up for a very lucrative career in sales. Call enthusiastically and sort through your list and build the foundation for your future! Once you are established you can use higher yielding business development activities leveraging your successful cold calling.
Visit SalesSocrates.com to learn more about attracting clients and referral marketing. Salessocrates.com is where you learn additional business development strategies and tactics. It pays to have more than one arrow in your quiver. SalesSocrates.com focuses on marketing education for sales people, specifically formal referral marketing programs, and how to create customer evangelists who act as your own voluntary salesforce. Becoming a hybrid sales and marketing professional gives your career leverage to create more free time, money and leisure.
Valdez Lasartemay is a career sales professional with the mission of being the guy he wished he knew when he was developing his selling career providing tremendous insight born from both personal experience and research.
Next blog title: How Sales Professionals Benefit From Personal Branding. Over 52 weeks this blog will cover issues impacting developing sales professionals including but not limited to 1. Email marketing 2. Content marketing 3.Referral marketing 4.Copywriting 5. Sales mindset, 6. Closing skills 7. Upselling etc. all blog topics are identified and supported by keyword research.
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