cold calling techniques - underpinning principles

cold calling techniques - underpinning principles

Important basic cold calling techniques are:

1. Preparation - self, environment, knowledge, and who you represent
2. Introduction - key phrases explaining and positioning yourself and your purpose
3. Questioning - help, facilitate and enable rather than assume, sell and push
4. Objectivity - the mark of an advisor - do not sell
5. Listen and interpret - do not sell
6. Inform and educate - do not sell
7. Involve and coordinate - do not sell
8. Keep in touch - keep notes and keep informed - keep ultimate ownership (by now you will probably be selling)

You will notice an over-riding theme of not actually selling during the cold calling process. Arguably of course all of this theory is selling of a sort, but it is not selling in the traditional sense of pushing, telling, advancing the features or benefits of your own products or services. Generally the aim of cold calling is simply to open dialogue, to get to first base, and possibly (if it suits the prospect) to make an appointment for further discussion and exploration.

An appointment need not be a face-to-face meeting. It can instead be an appointment to talk on the telephone again. Or a conference call. Or a video conference. It should be whatever suits the prospect's needs and processes and situation.

1. preparation

Preparation for effective successful cold calling is in three parts:

1. the supplier/product/service you are representing
2. your mental approach - the way you see yourself and the cold calling activity
3. and your understanding of your offering/proposition in relation to your prospects and their situations.

In detail:

1.1 Ensure you are representing a good quality ethical supplier/product/service

Your products and services do not need to be the most expensive or highest quality, but they must be completely fit for purpose for the given market and application, and they must meet the expectations created by your marketing and advertising communications. Similarly your organization does not need to be the most ethical and socially responsible and environmentally friendly on the planet, but again the ethical standards of your organization must meet the reasonable expectations of your target market. If either of these criteria is not met then you are building on sand and you should find another supplier or product/service to represent.

1.2 Your mental approach - the way you see yourself and the cold calling activity

Read and absorb the notes above. See cold calling as strategic and empowering, and yourself the same. Leave behind any temptation to treat cold calling as an indiscriminate or impersonal numbers game. If you want to succeed at cold calling then embrace it as the powerful process that it is and aspire to be great at it. Address and alter other factors which affect your attitude and mood for cold calling, for example:

Your working environment (change it to suit yourself and the cold calling activity as far as you can - see tips in time managementespecially). Standing up rather than sitting can make a remarkable difference, as can posture and ergonomics of desk and equipment.

Avoid behaviours that add to your stress levels. Eat and drink properly. Exercise. Take breaks. Manage interruptions and other demands. Cold calling is much easier when you are relaxed, fit, focused and free of distractions.

Have some personal goals and aims - whatever is meaningful and achievable - aside from whatever daft targets might be imposed from above - incorporate cold calling into your own personal career plans and aspirations. Focus on developing your ability, confidence and experience in dealing with ever more senior people, and discussing issues on an ever more strategic level.

Visualise how you want to be regarded by the people you speak to - and you will grow into and live up to that image. For example: "People I speak to will regard me as a highly professional business person - beyond a sales person or a telephone canvasser - they will think of me as someone they can trust - an expert in my field, someone who can enable improvement, clarity, cooperation, solutions, etc., completely irrespective of my actual job title." See the assertiveness and self-belief pages.

1.3 Your understanding and wording of your offering/proposition in relation to your prospects and their situations

You must understand your business extremely well. If your boss tells you that your job is simply to 'get leads' and not to bother with knowledge about anything else (for example products and services, the organization you represent, the market, the competition - seePorter's Five Forces for a much wider strategic list) then find another employer. Your usefulness to the market is defined by the way you help reconcile needs with information. Your success is ultimately limited by your knowledge. So inform yourself. Become expert, and the world will open up to you. You must also research large organizations before calling them. For all organizations, large and small, you must prepare and understand well your initial or basic proposition - whatever it is - as it relates to the organization and/or the organization's situation. This might not require you to research the prospective customer in any great detail, especially if you are calling domestic consumers, but you must have a good strategic appreciation of the issues faced by your prospect in relation to your basic opening proposition. This is an absolutely fundamental requirement and when omitted will drastically reduce the effectiveness of cold calling. The prospective customer has a very keen sense of what is important to them and what is not - and if you fail to acknowledge this in your opening exchange, or worse demonstrate personal ignorance about their perspective - then your cold call go no further. Bear in mind also that your basic or initial proposition should not make assumptions as to the final offering or product/service specification, which, especially in the case of large organizations might be several weeks or months away from defining. And even in the case of simple small supply situations, the customer must necessarily be involved later in the selling process in defining the precise specifications. So instead, your opining or initial or basic proposition must be of a strategic quite general nature, but at the same time sufficiently important, different, new, interesting, etc., in order to be worthy of continuing the dialogue and exploring possibilities in greater detail. This crucial strategic positioning is typically achieved by refining several different short introductory statements, or questions, which you can mix and match according to the situation. It comes with preparation and practice, and constantly seeking and adapting the words that you use to achieve the desired results. You must write down these phrases as you develop and refine them. Most sales people fail to do this - and then they wonder why their opening statements don't work. See thesales theory page and especially the section about the 'product offer'. Your opening proposition in the introduction should be a broad strategic interpretation of your more detailed product offer - this is both to save time and also to avoid making assumptions about what the prospect actually needs and how the final proposition might eventually be formulated.

2. introduction

Be very clear and concise about who you are and the purpose of your call, and have a powerful strategic basis (your main reason) for requesting dialogue, now or to be scheduled later, depending on the availability of the other person at the time. Base your opening proposition on your more detailed product offering, but keep it concise and strategic - not detailed and specific. See the guidance and explanation about product offers, propositions and benefit statements on the main sales training page.

3. questioning

Prepare and ask good facilitative questions which help the other person to see the situation more clearly, and which invite them to consider and explain how they decide about such issues. Sharon Drew Morgen's Buying Facilitation methodology is particularly helpful in developing superb and helpful questions.

4. objectivity

Remain fair and neutral - objectivity is the mark of an advisor. It's a tricky thing to do given that you are selling your products and services, but ironically the more you 'push' your own solutions and services, and the more you denigrate or criticize the alternatives, then the more you will damage your chances. People don't want to be 'sold' - they want to be helped and guided by an expert in a particular field to make and then implement an informed decision. This of course makes it important for you to be representing a supplier or products/services which are genuinely excellent. If you act on behalf of a crappy or unethical supplier then you will ultimately damage your own personal reputation. This comes back to very early preparation - you can afford to be objective only if you represent a good quality supplier.

5. listen and interpret

It is far better to listen and interpret from the customer's perspective, as would an expert advisor, rather than act as as a biased one-sided self-interested sales person. The former behaviour is helpful and appealing - giving - whereas the latter traditional pushy sales approach is seen immediately for what it is - taking. Remember your visualised image of yourself: how you want people to see you, and behave like it.

6. inform and educate

You are the expert in your service or proposition or technology (not necessarily in great technical detail, but strategically, in overview definitely) and if you are not then you need to be, otherwise you are wasting your prospect's time. Giving information and fair and useful feedback - educating effectively - in response to customers' requests for answers is much better than leaping in to 'close the appointment'. It's not a race or a rush. The aim is to build understanding and identify whether there is a potential useful fit between what you can offer and what the prospect might need. Do this and the situation quite naturally develops. Focus only on the appointment and you'll tend to skip the all-important stage of establishing yourself as a helper, information-provider, and enabler.

7. involve and coordinate

Involve the prospect in the discussion and decision to move to the next stage. Ask how they would find it most helpful to explore or move matters forward. Be guided by the prospect and also be guided by your own organizational systems and protocols. The prospect knows their systems and processes; you don't. Identify how the situation can be coordinated in order to progress things. You are the pivotal person. Revisit the cybernetics principle. You must aim to be the unit in the whole system which orchestrates events and people - on behalf of your prospect - to achieve what the prospect needs in terms of process and outcomes. This is your value to the prospect. You are the bridge, the interpreter, the enabler. Aspire to this role and you will begin to acquire a personal value and reputation greater than anyone.

8. keep in touch - keep notes - keep ultimate ownership

Information and knowledge are crucial to your ability to act as interpreter and coordinator at the start of the cold calling process.

You must therefore take full notes and keep clear records of the cold call at all stages.

You should also take notes or keep yourself informed as the situation develops, whether the development of the opportunity remains your responsibility or not.

If you stay informed and knowledgeable about the resulting sales relationships then you can keep a watchful eye on situations, and thereby grow your personal standing and role beyond canvasser or sales person.

This is not to say that you must be 'hands-on' involved at all times. On the contrary; your role as coordinator - together with the systems and processes within supplier and customer - should ensure that other people are brought into the situation as required to progress and develop the opportunity and the trading relationship as it grows.

You are however the ultimate owner of the relationship and responsibility - whatever your title - if you want to be.

How you meet your commitments to your customer counts more than your job title or job description. It's a matter of personal integrity.

Staying involved and informed is not be easy in certain organizations which rigidly compartmentalise sales and after-sales activities, especially sales organizations which marginalize cold calling or canvassing teams, but whatever structures exist, you should try to maintain an awareness and background involvement - especially with large customers - whenever and however you can.

You have a responsibility for all relationships that you begin: to your customer contacts - and arguably a personal commitment which transcends organizational systems and policies. Many customers, especially personal contacts who put great faith in you at the beginning of the relationship, will expect and appreciate your staying in touch - if only as a last resort in the event of unresolved problems.

For junior people this is not always easy, but retaining an informed and ultimately responsible interest in relationships that your cold calling instigates, is the sort of behaviour and determination on which great careers and reputations can be built.

This last piece of advice might not fit the divisionalised sales processes of certain organizations, in which case if you personally are serious about building a career in selling or business - or if your organization is serious about developing people - then you might discover that your cold calling activities will benefit from defining them more in terms of personal integrity and commitment than mere numbers on a board.