How to turn a “Cold” call “Warm”
One of the hardest things to do in sales is to make “Cold Calls”. Cold call is defined as “making an unsolicited call on (someone), by phone or in person, in an attempt to sell goods or services.” Also referred to sometimes as “Dialing for dollars”.
How to turn a “Cold” call “Warm” when prospecting for new business
Instead of picking up the phone and making a cold call try to make a “warm call”. A warm call is created by following a process prior to attempting to engage in a conversation with the potential decision maker that will improve your chances of that contact taking a call/talking. After researching a company’s website, product, and/or online profiles (like Linked-IN), try to do the following prior to making the first call:
- Find the right contact – Linked is a great place to determine accurate job titles, estimated age, mutual connections, and industry experience
- Call as a customer – Calling a company as though I am a potential customer is great why to learn how a company ships, ETAs, and if they the importer of record. EXAMPLE: My brother is in Winnipeg and if I wanted to ship him a drill from your website how will that deliver to him? Will he have to pay taxes? How long will it take? If the CSR thinks I am a potential customer, they will tell me what ever I want to know (Assuming they know). Not as effective to B2B prospects though
- Create a reference – Name dropping is a very effective way to get someone to listen to you. Get the name of the person that you are talking to and use it on future calls. Being able to drop a name when making your warm call will get the person to listen to you.
Case study; Keson Industries – Keson is good local customer and we consolidate parcel/LTL each week while acting as their CA customs broker and bill them TMS each month.
FIND THE RIGHT CONTACT: I discovered that their President was commenting on another Frontier customer in Linked-In profile and discovered that they were at the same trade show in Canada via Linked-In. I knew the President was going to be where I wanted to start and assumed he would be accessible as the company is less than 150 employees (Also via Linked–in). CALL AS A CUSTOMER: I called as a customer and learned that they have all kinds of trouble with Canada as they were letting their CA customers act as the IOR and using UPS to ship everything. I was able to get to the President’s (Aaron) extension by doing a dial by name. CREATE A REFERENCE: I left a message and name dropped my other customer (That I knew he knew) and told him that I wanted to discuss how I helped them grow their business in Canada as a NRI (I knew they needed this and he was probably not too familiar with how to get set-up that way).
He called me back, and I was able to educate him on how to sell into Canada as a non-resident importer (Used terms like GST, DDP, NRI, NAFTA). It is important to teach them something in order to build credibility while selling them on the fact that our solution will assist them in any effort to grow their business in Canada. We set-up an initial meeting in which he had 8 people ready to listen to me, I was able to educate them, and 6 months later they were a customer.