Before You Call, Get Organized!

Before you call, you should have a few things in order. Have a spreadsheet or a notepad of all your prospects.

Take note of how they respond to the call and anything they reveal about their business. This will help you for your presentation.

Keep in mind that you’re trying to find a way to help your clients, and that requires you to understand part of their situation.

The sales jobs of the future are consultative in nature and you need to have that consultant mindset when you’re making the call.

Here are the 7 steps to making a cold call.

1. Introduce yourself and get their attention.

The first few seconds of the call are so vital that your introduction has to be absolutely solid.

You have to address the ever-present question of “What’s In It For Me?”.

Give them your name and tell them why you’re calling.

Straight to the point. Busy people value their time. Don’t shoot the breeze for five minutes before getting to the point.

2. Make a huge claim.
Huge claims get attention.

3. Qualify the prospect.
Once you’ve gotten their attention, make sure they’re the people you’re looking for. Make sure they’re the people you want.

A side benefit of qualifying the prospect is introduce scarcity to the conversation. If you qualify a prospect, you limit the availability of whatever you’re calling about through the selection criteria you’ve created. Scarcity increases the desire for the product.

At the very least, qualifying questions signal that you’re not desperate. Your call moves from the “annoying salesperson” folder to a call of genuine business development.

4. Address the doubt
When you make a huge claim, people immediately become skeptical. They want to believe your claims, but huge claims are rarely backed up.

Use the huge claim to get attention, but step off the gas in the qualifying process.

5. Find out who makes decisions.
In order to close deals, you need to talk to decision makers. By finding out who influences decisions, you find out who you need to contact to get a deal done. You should also try to find out if there are others that have a say.

Sometimes, the key decision maker likes to get approval from a third party. Think husband and wife. In B2B, you might be dealing with someone who’s working with a consultant or a mentor.

6A. Go for the appointment.
Although it shouldn’t necessarily stop you from trying, you usually can’t close a deal on the first call and you’ll need to go for an appointment.

Try to get an appointment as soon as possible. Once you’ve agreed to a date, give your prospect some options for times. For example, you’ve agreed to meet on Tuesday. Which works best, 9 a.m. or 1 p.m.?

6B. Lock down the appointment.
Prospects sometimes flake appointments. You want to make sure they show up.

One of the best ways to avoid this problem is to lock down the appointment, which you do by making them honor their word. Sounds like a difficult task, but it’s actually quite simple. You ask the following question: “Is there any reason you wouldn’t be able to make it on that day?” If they say yes, try to find another time. If they say no, you’ve successfully decreased your chances of being flaked.

7. Confirm the appointment
Once you’ve agreed, send them a confirmation. You can send them a text, an email, and a calendar invite.

P.S. SOMETIMES, THEY FORGET.
One of the biggest reasons prospects flake meetings is because they simply forget. They forget the meeting. They might forget the time. They might forget the location. Sometimes, they even forget what the meeting is about.

To avoid that, give them a reminder call on the day of the meeting to make sure the meeting is still on.

It sounds something like this:

Hi, it’s [name] from [company]. We’re scheduled for a [time o’clock] meeting at [place] about [huge claim], and I’m just calling to make sure we’re still on?

Just make sure you don’t sound all desperate if they say no.

Remember: A Cold Call Isn’t Just By Phone

The term “cold call” simply describes all forms of cold contact. Cold contact is when the person you’re contacting doesn’t know who you are and they don’t know what you want.

It includes everything from phone, to door-to-door sales, to cold emailing, to messaging on social media, to everything in between.

I’ll use the phone as an example in this article, but you can extrapolate the principles across media.

The principles of a good cold call apply across the board. No matter how you cold call (and you should use all available methods), all calls have the same objective… and the same structure.