Cold calling is an important skill to master for booking meetings with prospective clients and ultimately pitching products and services. From software products to real estate services, cold calling is a useful tactic for almost any sales professional.
Cold calling is effective but tough. Despite the difficulty on the caller’s end and the frustration on the receiver’s end, cold calling has remained a common practice for increasing sales. In this article we will discuss 7 effective tips for cold calling in 2022.
Fully Introduce Yourself
Let us introduce you to our first cold calling technique: fully introducing yourself. Before launching into your pitch, introduce yourself with your first name, last name, and company name. This is the first step to building trust with your prospect and earning their respect. This cold calling tip is especially important for real estate agents whose name is part of their brand.
The person who is asking the questions is the one in control of the call. If they are pausing to wonder who they’re talking to and what company you’re from, they’re already distracted. They’re not listening to what you have to say anymore. Once they start asking you for your name and who you work for, you’ve lost control of the phone call.
Keep Your Prospect on the Phone
The longer you’re able to keep your prospect on the phone, the better your chances of securing a meeting or obtaining what you’re asking for. Each statement or question in your cold calling script should crescendo into your big ask.
A cold calling tip for securing a meeting is to have a pitch that flows. Every sentence should make your prospect intrigued to hear what you’re going to say next. As you continue going through your script, you’re lengthening the time of your phone call and the amount of time your prospect is listening to what you have to say.
The tallest task of a salesperson making cold calls is to grab and maintain your prospect’s attention. Do this and your chance of securing a meeting through a cold call increases.
Research Your Prospects
Next on our list of seven effective tips for cold calling is to research the people you’re calling ahead of time. Between LinkedIn, Facebook, and employee profiles on company websites, you should be able to find additional information out about the people on your list.
Look for awards they’ve won and blog posts they’ve written and use them as potential talking points in your cold call. After reading what they’ve written, you can use their own wording back to them to help them understand you’re solving a pain point for them.
Knowing who you’re calling can also help prevent you from wasting both your own time and other people’s time. Doing your research on people’s job titles can potentially prevent you from calling the wrong person. You want to make sure you’re calling people who have the authority to set meetings and make decisions.
Don’t know which companies to target? Start with the ones who already showed an interest in your product and match your ICP with Leadfeeder.
Focus on Securing a Meeting
A cold calling tip to get a meeting is to make the focus of your phone call about securing a meeting. You don’t necessarily need to spend this phone call learning everything you can about your prospect. The focus of your phone call should be to secure the meeting with them. Once you’re in front of the person, whether in-person or virtually, you’ll have more time to ask questions, listen, and learn.
Perfect Your Closing Question
Your script is vital to the success of cold calling and it will probably change over time as you learn what lines work and which ones don’t. Learn what parts of your script perform well for you and which parts aren’t serving you. If your closing question doesn’t seem to be yielding the responses you’re looking for, try switching it out over the next few phone calls. Keep in mind, your end goal should be to book the meeting.
Variations include:
“Do you have your calendar in front of you?”
“What does next week look like for you?”
“Can we look at your calendar for this week?”
Learn from Rejection
Rejection is unavoidable when cold calling. One of the most important cold calling tips and tricks to remember is to learn from your rejections. Don’t let it knock your confidence before you get to your next prospect.
If someone has been friendly to you, ask them a follow up question to help you learn where your sales pitch fell short. Considering asking people, “Why do you think we can’t help you?” Their answers might surprise you and should help you on your future calls.
Keep in mind you can’t please everybody. If someone is annoyed, angry, or upset with you, you’ve probably caught them on a bad day at the office. Just move on. You can learn from your rejections without carrying the negativity with you.
Practice Makes Perfect
Like most every other skill, you have to practice it in order to become better at it. When you first start making cold calls, it might feel awkward, unnatural, and maybe even nerve-wracking. Knowing your script to the best of your abilities and being comfortable with what you’re saying can help. This is a learning process, so don’t be too hard on yourself while practicing and growing.
Beyond memorizing your script, you have to be comfortable using it in conversation. It doesn’t matter if you have great value propositions memorized if you can’t use them in natural conversation. You should be able to recite or read from your script without sounding a robot. After memorizing your script, add emotion to it. Your script provides the important framework for your call, but your personality gives it life.
Beyond mastering your script for when someone does answer the phone, you also have to prepare a script for when your call goes to voicemail. With the majority of cold callings going unanswered, you won’t want to skip this step. An engaging voicemail is similar in length and intensity of information to an elevator pitch. You have typically less than thirty seconds to convince someone to want to meet with you to learn more about what you have to offer.
Conclusion
Cold calling is an unwavering sales technique for booking meetings and increasing sales. In this article we discussed seven effective tips for cold calling in 2022. At the beginning of each cold call you should introduce yourself with your company name, first name, and last name. Try to keep your prospect on the phone for as long as it’s appropriate.
Your pitch should flow, so that every sentence leaves your prospect anticipating what you’re going to say next. It’s important to research the people you’re calling before you call them. This can help prevent you from wasting time calling the wrong people. The focus of your phone call should simply be on securing a meeting with them, not trying to learn everything about their needs.
When cold calling, you will perfect your script over time. Your closing question for securing meetings will evolve as you figure out which wording works best for you. You will frequently be rejected when cold calling. Take what information you can from the call and move on to the next call while maintaining a positive attitude. Make sure to practice your script until you know it backwards and forwards and can make it sound conversational.
These seven effective tips and tricks for cold calling in 2021 are designed to help you secure meetings and increase your sales. Happy cold calling!
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