Making Conversations Relevant to Your Clients in Cold Calling: Part 1
How can we make cold calls “work” when we’re talking to someone we haven’t met, about something they may not need? Well, it’s really simple. First we look at how to relate to them rather than hoping they’ll relate to us and our solution. When we approach cold calling with a question about what their needs are, potential clients respond much more readily to the idea of talking with us.
To help you with this, here are a couple examples of dialogues within two very different industries.
Example: Staffing
In the staffing or recruiting industry, the goal is to call a company and identify whether they need help finding new staff.
The old cold calling approach is, “Hi. My name is… I’m with XYZ Staffing Company, and we offer these services. I’m just calling to…” And by that time, the person pretty much says, “We’re not interested,” right? With this new cold calling approach, the idea is to think about the problem you’re solving. The problem you’re solving is helping them find good people.
So I would start the conversation with, “Maybe you can help me out for a second?” And they usually say, “How can I help you?” I reply, “I’m just calling to see if your company is still looking at finding good, quality employees to hire?”
The response to that is likely to be, “Well sure. Who’s this?” This is a normal response which we want to be ready for. I would simply say, “My name is Ari and I’m with XYZ Staffing Company and we help companies identify and find good people. I’m just calling to see if your company is in a situation now where you’re looking to hire and find new people.”
Example: Software
Let’s say you’re in the software industry, and that you sell software to improve the productivity of an organization. What you want to do is focus on the problem that you solve specifically.
What most software salespeople do in cold calling is say, “Hi, we sell software to help improve productivity.” But that doesn’t really identify the problem it solves. You have to focus specifically on an issue. So, for instance, the software might solve a problem with lost paper-based documents. That’s a very specific issue. In this case, I might call and say, “I’m just calling to see if your company is having issues with lost paperwork because of manual paper-based filing systems.”
See how specific that is? It’s very directed to the problem in their world. This is in contrast to, “I want to see if your company is looking to buy some software or looking to improve productivity,” or something similar.
Visit tomorrow when we discuss two more very important industries.
Until next time,
Keep calling and keep it conversational…
Ari Galper, founder of Unlock The Cold Calling Game, makes cold calling painless and simple. Learn his cold calling secrets even the sales gurus don’t know. To receive your 10 free audio mini-lessons visit http://www.UnlockTheGame.com
Tags: Cold Calling, cold calling techniques, cold calling tips, cold calling training, sales rejection, sales techniques, Sales Tips, Sales Training
