Golden Cold Calls

Closing deals over the phone is an art form. If you use this formula you will succeed.

1) Rapport

Would you help someone you hate? Probably not. But you're likely to help a good friend no matter what.

Sales is a relationship business, everyone hates cold callers, and won't do business with them, no matter the benefit. They just hate unsolicited contact.

If your call is not relevant, or personalised. It will fail. They key to starting a conversation and getting the time to communicate your offering is building Rapport.

This takes practise and has to be learned through trial and error, not by reading a blog post, but here are some pointers.

Ask human questions, about family, hobbies, holidays, interests, recent events.

Start by talking about yourself, people are much more likely to open up, once you've opened up. Show that you're human. Tell a little story. If you start a cold call by asking how someone is, they will most likely return the question

Cold caller: "How are you this morning?"

Target: (auto response) "Not bad thanks, how are you?"

Cold caller: (your chance to break the thoughtless routine) "Really well, my daughter just said her first words this weekend!" (or equally personal story).

Target: - at this point they will have to start thinking, and snap out of auto pilot, I don't want to speak to you mode. They will most likely start to connect with you on a human level, as apposed to a transactional one.

Cold caller: "Have you got any kids?"

As you can see, this conversation has NOTHING to do with your offering, you're just breaking the routine, and starting to build a human to human connection. You'll also find this makes your phone conversations much more fun!

2) The sell

Great you've established a connection and now have a chance to explain the benefits of your service/product.

Remember you talk about this every day and know your business inside out, but your target has never heard of it before and don't have a clue. You'll have to start from the very top level description, to ensure they understand.

In the sell there is a lot of work to do, good sales pitches are told as a narrative, the target gets engaged with the story, and can start to empathise with the benefits, and problems. Emotions are key to getting buy in.

Things you will need to cover:

Relevance (why do they care)
Credibility (why should they trust you)
Value (why should they bother strike 1)
Fear of missing out (why should they bother strike 2)
Urgency (why should they bother strike 3)
Objection handling (knock down their excuses and move to the close)

Mrs Smith recommended getting in contact with you, as she said you're interested in growing your business. We're already working with businesses like yours (your competitors) such as, name drop, name drop, name drop, some of the amazing value add features they are benefiting from are, feature one, customer x also came up with feature two which has driven statistic XYZ, they've left us some reviews you can read on google. We're now working with the leading companies in your industry, company X got set up in one day, they wanted to start receiving the benefits asap.

FOMA and Urgency are hard to manufacture, but essential in moving to the close.

3) The Close

Having rapport and a good sell makes for an easy close. Learn a strong line that works for your product or service. We use: "When would you like to start the trial?" Never give the option for them to say no, make it easy for yourself to close the deal.

Closure requires you to take the lead, and ask the direct question, to confirm the deal is going ahead.

Once agreed it's vital that you get any set up information, or first payments made, then and there.

"Who should the invoice be sent to?" "What are their details?" "Excellent, I can take card payments over the phone now"