Cold Calling: There’s a Right Way and a Wrong Way

We all hate those cold callers who disturb our evening meal but well-placed and wanted telephone calls to interested prospects can really make their day.  I’m talking about business to business (B2B) cold calls or telemarketing calls that your prospects and existing customers really want to hear.  I mean, how else can we get the message across to people that we:
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• Have a brand new product or service
• Have a special promotion (only genuine ones please) and they must know about
• Need to make a follow up call about a product or service that they recently purchased

Ok, ok, the last point I made there doesn’t really constitute a cold call as such but it isn’t really a customer service related call either now is it? It’s what I’d call a cross-over call or a cross between sales and customer services.  The call starts with a call to ask how their existing purchase is going, how they like what they purchased, if they need any help with it and then comes the upsell.  And if you have a very good, functional sales funnel then you’ll know full well what I’m referring to here.  For those of you who are reading this to find out how to sell effectively then there are no real secrets.  It just taking proper planning, a smart approach and, most of all, hard and consistent work.  You’ve more than likely heard the old cliche – work smarter not harder.  Well, I believe in worker both smarter AND harder.

So the right way to cold call is to be particularly clever about it, to listen 80% of the time, your prospects or existing customers wil have problems with their business that you can solve.  Just listen and then provide a solution.  It’s as simple as that.  I think that the wrong way is simply the hard sell, where you batter your prospects into submission with your words until they buy and this does happen.  Many would argue that this isn’t the way and the best way to sell your products or service over the phone is to give people times to assimilate the information that you’re imparting to them and really adding value.

Here’s my top 5 ways to sell effectively over the phone:

1. Explain who you are, where you’re calling from and why you’re calling and establish a need.
2. Provide further information and make it easy for your prospects to establish you (or your company) as an expert in your field, the ‘go to’ company for what you provide and research you and your company as a worthy match for their business.  You need to have a great web presence for this as they’ll most likely check you out online.
3. Be consistent.  Make calls, write notes, always follow up, during your prospects’ buying decision making process you’ll need to stay in their minds via calls, emails, direct mail (this is getting more expensive and less green these days so we avoid this), Skype calls, social networking and so on.
4. Once you have a customer and you’ve sold to them over the phone make sure that they don’t regret it.  Buyer’s remorse will prevent future sales from the client and stop referrals from occurring.  Think lifetime value of customer rather than one-off sales.  Lots of successful businesses have grown from recurring payments.  Consider this when you’re speaking with prospects.  Treat them right then look after them.  Pushy salespeople aren’t general good for repeat business.
5. I know I said following up on calls is important in point three but I’m going to repeat myself in the fifth and final point because it’s so important that, once you’ve made contact, you keeping touching base and follow up when you’ve said you will.  Give people time to think about what you’ve said.  Then close.  You can’t sell if you can’t close.

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