Having worked in sales since I was 16 – for years when hearing people talk about ‘social selling’. I always thought that they were too scared to pick up the phone and make a few phone calls, in the case someone said that scary phrase, ‘I’m not interested’. But for me, cold calling was sober Saturday nights in my early 20s with loads of rejection, but you will get one eventually.
Hearing people talking about sending an email to say, ‘hey I saw this link and thought I would share it with you as you may find it interesting.’ or ‘I listened to this Ted Talk the other day and thought you would enjoy it!’. (Also, am I the only person who had no idea what a Ted Talk is?). Don’t even get me started on following up every time someone downloads something from our website and say, ‘Hey, thanks for downloading this piece of content, what do you think?’
That ‘Cheesy American Bullsh**’ is not for me… pass me the phone, and I will make 50 dials!
That was the exact approach I took when we started Candio; making 50 calls a day and using the same techniques that I have used since I was 16 years old.
· Words are everything but mean nothing if not delivered correctly
· Ask open questions
· Objection handle via a loop
This technique had an average success rate of 80 dials and book two meetings. It was all good, but it started to cause me a few problems:
Firstly, cold calling for me is like a game of sports – I will choose football as an example; you need to warm up before having a decent game. It’s the same with cold calling, you need a few bad calls before to warm up, and some days I would only have time to do 10-20 calls, which were never good because it meant I hadn’t warmed up yet.
This leads to the second problem – book out a day to make calls. On those days, I would avoid any meetings and emails, leaving me with four days to do my other work. After all, I’m not a full-time telemarketer.
So, is it only those that are crazy enough to think they can change the world that do?
I changed by combining a series of tools: a great CRM, video prospecting software and LinkedIn. We create some great blogs, customer success stories and personalise every single outreach by only contacting people who know the people we are currently working with.
Hang on – is this blog another type of cold calling? Maybe. Really? What am I doing differently? I now create short videos saying the same thing as I would on a cold call. Instead of leaving voicemails, I send voice notes, and instead of sending generic email templates, I share blog posts like this that contain insightful information.
Any other salespeople that would like to share their experiences, I am all ears – drop me a message on LinkedIn or fire me an email on Tom.Chedham@candio.co.uk, and I will respond between Ted Talks.
