Find out how to make cold calling more effective so you can work with more confidence, more success, and a lot less stress.
If you make sales calls, you’ve undoubtedly wondered how to make cold calling more effective. Done well, cold calls can be a powerful segment of your overall sales strategy. They can bring in new customers and referrals, boost your sales numbers, and get your name out into the world.
Cold calling can also be stressful. There’s no reason to gloss over the fact that many of us feel uncomfortable with the idea of ringing up random people to sell them something. But that feeling can also push us to do better and be more prepared.
In other words, if you want to know how to make cold calling more effective, your biggest step is thorough preparation. And that’s easy enough to accomplish once you have a plan. Here are some tips to help get things moving.
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How to make cold calling more effective in 3 easy steps
In almost any activity, preparation and practice beforehand helps things go more smoothly. This is why stage actors have a dress rehearsal. It’s the reason airline pilots use flight simulators and why organizations from college basketball teams to the United States military conduct drills. Practice and preparation give us the confidence to know that we have the skills, training, and ability to perform a task.
However, practice just for the sake of practice will only get you so far. You need a plan and a strategy if you want to determine how to make cold calling more effective. You need to know how your preparation fits into the context of an actual call. So let’s look at a few ways to prepare and explore why these steps can help.
1. There’s no such thing as a cold call. That’s certainly a bold claim in a post about how to make cold calling more effective. In a sense, however, it’s true. Years ago, a cold call was quite a different story than it is now. There was no LinkedIn where you could find out details about someone’s job. There was no social media where you could browse a person’s thoughts on the latest game or the difficulty of finding the right auto or life insurance. Basically, you had to dial the number and do your best to figure out how to make a connection.
Today, a savvy salesperson can find out where someone works and what their hobbies are before ever picking up the phone. And while there’s still the task of creating a connection, you aren’t making a completely cold call. Do a little digging and you can find plenty of points to help you connect with someone. Just don’t go overboard. Even though we all know how easy it is to find information online, we still don’t like the idea of a total stranger asking us about our family vacation to Disney last week or if our children enjoyed the new roller coaster.
2. Know your product. Your product or service is designed for one of two reasons: to fill a gap and solve a problem for people, or to improve upon something that already exists. There’s a ton of room in there for your specific product, whether that’s home insurance with great prices and top-notch service or dialing software with built-in compliance. As great as that is, if you’re going to sell your product, you have to understand it inside and out. That’s especially true when you’re making cold calls. What problem does your product solve? How does it make a task easier? What are the benefits? Why is it better than anything else on the market? How easy or challenging is it to integrate into your customer’s work or life?
Think of every possible question, objection, and competitive angle. Knowledge truly is power here. The people you call will challenge you; they need a good reason to stay on the phone with you. If you can offer that to them, you have your foot in the door, and you won’t be caught off guard by tough questions.
3. Take notes. As you’re thinking about how to make cold calling more effective, think about your follow-up calls, too. Yes, you will have follow-up calls. Lots of them! And you want to be fully prepared for those calls. It doesn’t help you very much to nail your cold calls only to lose it on the follow-up. So take notes that you can refer back to. Anything seemingly important that you learn on a call should go into your notes. If a client tells you their current policy runs out in six months, write it down and make a plan to call them back. If you’re a recruiter and someone tells you they just started a new job, write it down, then check back in with them in six weeks to find out how things are going.
No matter how fantastic your memory is, there’s simply no way to remember the details of any given call. So the more you have at your fingertips, the more professional and competent you appear.
The perfect cold call isn’t a myth. With a strong preparation and good follow up, your cold calls could be a lot more effective, and a lot less stressful.
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