What Happens When a Sales Call Goes Really Well?

Have you ever noticed that when a sales call or client meeting goes really well, the customer almost always thanks the salesperson for their help? It’s a great feeling to be appreciated for the value you bring to the table—not just with your solutions, but also because of your vision, creativity, and foresight in coming up with the best solution.

But when was the last time you got thanked for making a cold call? I’m guessing never. By definition cold calls are naturally cold. You’re calling a stranger, pitching a product or service they may not even want or need. In addition, your call may be interrupting something else more important to the customer, and yours is probably not the only cold call that came in during the last 30 minutes. That’s no way to create a receptive audience, is it?

Penetrating new accounts is part of the job for most salespeople. For some sellers, like those on an inside sales team, breaking into new accounts is not only their primary role, it’s their job description. Even when assigned to existing accounts, sellers are always trying to get deeper, wider, and more strategic within those accounts…and that usually requires the seller to pick up the phone and make introductory calls (i.e. cold calls.) [image error]

There are several schools of thought on cold calling. Some training programs build mathematical formulas where they figure out how many dials should be made based on typical rejection rates, to come up with the right number of qualified leads. Basically, you bang the phones until you find someone who wants to talk with you. Other philosophies use sales gimmicks or clever one-liners to try to gain entry with new prospects. Of course, taking the coy approach where you sneak in before the client knows what’s happening produces plenty of pitfalls and has a wide disparity of success, or lack thereof.

In Question Based Selling, I actually encourage salespeople not to make any more cold calls. Now, hang on. I didn’t say you shouldn’t attempt to contact new prospects or make fewer calls than usual. I simply recommend that you don’t make any more cold calls. What’s the biggest problem with a cold call? Temperature—they’re cold! As a result, cold callers tend to sound purposeless, valueless, not relevant, and not credible. Each of those is a quick ticket off the phone in any sales culture.

Instead of making cold calls, warm up your call with a few simple QBS strategies. First, you need to sound like you’re calling for a reason, particularly early in the call. Why would you want to call for no reason? And why would a customer want to listen to a call without purpose. You’ve got to know that’s the first thing a customer wants to know—who are you and why are you calling me? So, being purposeful early in the call is a requirement in today’s competitive environment. The question is how exactly can you be more purposeful in your calls?

The simple answer to sounding purposeful is to be more specific. Specificity is your friend when making those all-important initial sales calls. For example, here’s a sample voice-mail message a healthcare sales rep might leave:

Salesperson: “Hi, Mr. Prospect, this is Joe Smith from XYZ Company, I’m on the team that work with healthcare accounts in the tri-state area. We’ve had 13 new announcements in the last three and a half months, two that I think might directly impact your current operations, one of which is time sensitive…so I wanted to be proactive and try to catch you in the office. If you get a chance today, could you please call me back? I should be here until around 4:30 this afternoon. My direct number is (770) 840-7640. I appreciate your help.

This particular technique is called ‘subsetting.’ The rep has taken a larger number of events or announcements and vetted them down into a reasonable sized to-do list that is far less threatening for the customer. Right off the bat, the customer will appreciate that you are trying to make the best use of their time. And that appreciation brings you one step closer to engaging the customer.

If you are purposeful enough, often enough, customers might just start appreciating your calls instead of dodging them. That’s the difference in old-fashioned cold calling and the QBS approach. Wouldn’t that be something, having customers actually thank you for taking the time to call them with information or products that are purposeful, relevant, credible, and valuable? What’s the alternative? Cold calls no longer work on me (as a consumer) and I bet they don’t work on you either.