Warm up your cold calls for more hot leads

The Real Selling Sales Training Sales Training Blog

Welcome to the real selling sales training blog, every month we will bring you a range of sales training articles, sales training tips and advice and way to improve your sales skills from our team of sales training experts

Warm up your cold calls for more hot leads

I recently noticed a number of articles breaking the news to its readers that "cold calling is dead" each article proclaiming that cold calling had once again had its day and that it no longer had a place in the world of modern selling.

It inspired me to share some breaking news of my own to my readers "cold calling lives on" Speaking from the perspective of someone that regularly makes cold calls with great success it always brings a smile to my face that this highly effective means of generating business opportunities takes such a battering the truth is that the secret to cold calling is this, not to actually make cold calls at all.

Straightforward but not easy

There are many myths surrounding cold calling but the simple fact is this, cold calling is by far the most effective method of generating new business opportunities, speaking as someone who has made cold calls for over 20 years and continues to do so today I am yet to find a more effective means of creating opportunities and although cold calling is by no means an easy approach, it is relatively straight forward when done correctly.

Getting things into perspective

One of the biggest mistakes people make with cold calling is to have an unrealistic objective from cold calling. The truth is this you are very unlikely to get a sale as a direct result of a cold call but you are very likely to take the first steps in the process of making a sale, you may secure an appointment or an opportunity to send some literature that you can follow up, just don’t
expect a sale, try to look at cold calling rather like dating would you honestly ask someone to marry you on a first date?

The numbers game

Another critical mistake people make is thinking that cold calling is simply a numbers game. Let me assure you this couldn’t be further from the truth, if you make large quantities of poor quality calls the chances of you achieving any meaningful success form these calls is very low

Learn from the bad calls

Many of the lessons we can learn about improving the quality of our calls can come from the experiences of badly made cold calls, if you get the chance to take a poorly executed cold call, think about what they say and how they come across and see what you can learn from it yourself and take those lessons with you the next time you make a call.

Quality over quantity

If you take one thing from this article it should be this, make less calls and ensure that the calls you make are good quality calls that have been well researched and you have reason for calling that will be appealing to the person you are calling, the best way to do this is to follow these three steps for greater cold calling success:

1) Research your calls thoroughly, make sure you know something about your target and ideally have some key relevant information that you can relate to when making the call

2) Plan your calls, plan what you are going to say before you make the call make sure your message is interesting and engaging, try testing your message by asking yourself would I take this call?

3) Don’t play the numbers game, but make regular smaller quantities of high quality calls for better results Keep in mind that the result you want is to create a number of good quality opportunities that will eventually lead to an opportunity to deliver a proposal or a quotation and ideally ultimately lead to a sale, so the secret to making cold calls comes from the quality of the calls not the quantity.

Cold calling has worked for me for over twenty years, it still works for me today and it can work for you as well if you do it correctly,so go out there improve the quality of your calls and see what difference it makes to the number of opportunities you create.

Written by Paul Routley FinstSMM

Paul Routley is an award winning trainer and one of the country’s leading authorities on modern sales techniques.

With over twenty years’ experience in sales and sales management, starting out in sales at the age of 17 and working his way up from trainee sales person to sales director, working for some of the world’s largest and most well-known companies along the way.

Paul has held a number of sales manager and sales director roles throughout his career and has a proven track record in creating and developing extremely successful and effective sales teams in every industry he has worked within.

As a trainer he brings a tremendous amount of experience and invaluable knowledge to all aspects of sales and selling within a variety of industries with a particular flair for telephone selling and a grown up approach to cold calling.
Paul’s training courses are always memorable and renowned for not just being educational and enlightening but also inspirational, motivational and entertaining.

During his career Paul has lived and worked in more than twelve European countries including: Germany, France, Sweden, Estonia, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium and Ireland

Paul is one of the UK’s leading sales trainers and also a fellow of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management

Enquiry about our in house sales training and open sales training courses
 

Call 01634 612 340 to discuss your sales training course needs with the team

Make an Enquiry	Email Real Selling	Request a callback
By Telephone      Call 01634 612 340