When it comes to cold calling you should always begin with the person’s core challenge or problem. Once you are clear on what problems your product or service can solve for them, you will start to know what to say when you make a call. It really is that simple.

When calling, begin the phone call with, “Hi, my name is (your first name). I was just wondering if you can help me out for a moment.” How would you respond if someone said that to you? Most likely, “Sure, how can I help you?” or perhaps “Sure, how can I assist you?”

That is exactly the way just about all people, especially business people would reply when the person on the other end of the telephone says “I was just wondering if you can help me out for a moment” in a relaxed opening phrase like that. It’s a natural reaction.

Keep this in mind when you ask for help, you are telling the truth because you don’t have any idea whether you can help them solve a problem or not. And it is the truth of a matter that starts the trust relationship between you and your potential client/customer.

When they reply, “Sure, how can I help you?” Don’t respond by launching into a pitch about what you have to offer. As that will literally ruin it for you. Instead, you go right into talking about the core problem to find out whether your suggested core problem is a problem they can see for themselves.

So you say, “I’m just giving you a call to see if you are grappling (and the key word here is ‘grappling’) with (insert the problem you help them solve)?”

No pitch, no introduction, nothing about you. Just step directly into their world.

The purpose of the question is to open the conversation and develop enough trust, so your potential prospect feels comfortable having a conversation with you.

The traditional way of cold calling advises you to ask lots of questions to learn about the person’s business and to “connect.” The problem is that people see right through that. They know that you have an ulterior motive, and then you’re right back up against the wall from the get go.

To do the opposite of the traditional old way may be hard for you to apply to your own situation at first, because trying to leverage calls based on what we know about our solution is so ingrained in our thinking.

You need to discover how to step out of your own solution, and think about the problem your prospects has. And that’s the secret of building trust on calls. Using a language that articulates your prospects problems, so they can identify with you. It’s often the missing link in the process of cold calling.

Do you find that the telephone can become like a HUGE weight when it comes to lifting it up and making calls? I was like that at the beginning as well. The good news is that you are not alone.

If you’re like most people who make cold calls, you’re hoping to make a sale — or at least an appointment — before you even pick up the phone. The problem is the people you call somehow always pick up on your mindset immediately.

They sense that you’re focused on your goals and interests, rather than on finding out what they might need or want. This short-circuits the whole process of communication and trust-building.

Here’s the benefit of changing your mental objective before you make the call: it takes away the frenzy of working yourself up mentally to pick up the phone.

All the feelings of rejection and fear come from us getting wrapped up in our expectations and hoping for an outcome when it’s premature to even be thinking about an outcome.

So try this, practice shifting your mental focus to thinking, “when I make this call, I’m going to build a conversation so that a level of trust can emerge allowing us to exchange information back and forth so we can both determine if there’s a fit or not.”

Go ahead, try it. You will see it makes a huge difference.

Some claim that telemarketing is one of the most rapidly expanding industries in the business world today, and smart businesses companies are utilising this in an effort to increase sales.

Because it is so affordable and its ease of use, outbound telemarketing has been around almost since the invention of the telephone. Thousands of businesses depend on the telephone for a large part of their sales. Telemarketing now surpasses direct mail as an effective strategy for marketing. Outbound telemarketing provides the opportunity to make sales calls, to upgrade mail orders, do prospecting and speed up cash flow to the business through accounts receivable collection efforts. It can also be applied to build retail traffic, get appointments for sales reps, and even re-sell clients who have cancelled their orders. Fundraising represents another huge area where outbound telemarketing has brought dramatic results.

One pharmaceutical company realized the impact of outbound marketing when they found they could call hundreds of pharmacies an hour through outbound telemarketing compared to much less success with direct mail and they had lower costs to contend with.

Using the telephone as your main method of communication, you are performing a function that few in the world can do well. You are helping people to take action and make a decision, based almost solely on the words and ideas that come from your mouth. It’s quite an awesome feat when you think about it. And do think about it. It takes a talented individual to be able to do that well. You are that person. Feel proud of what you do, and always strive to get better!

You don’t have to speak to a prospect for very long on the telephone before you encounter an objection. There is a natural or should I say instinctive, “knee-jerk” response that people make to anyone (particularly strangers) calling on the telephone trying to promote their products and services.

But the last thing you want to do is spend a long time chasing up a prospect that is going no where. So you need to be able to distinguish between “knee-jerk” responses such as “not interested” and the genuine reasoned argument against your product or service.

I talked about the selling process in my last blog. The third stage was the Presentation. You could also refer to this stage as the Plan. This is the Plan you use to identify the REASON that it makes sense for the person to use your product or service.

Scfiffman says that 70% of the sale is completed prior to the presentation. This is because your presentation should just make sense to the prospect. It’s the pre- Presentation stages of Qualify/Open and Information where you are listening to the prospect and gathering information that you can use to explain to them in the Presentation why it does indeed make sense go ahead with the purchase or appointment.

After you have finished the presentation the “close” is just a matter of saying, “Makes sense to me, what do you think?” It either does or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t then ask them to explain why not and they will be giving you an opportunity to refine your proposal and show you how you can make it right.

Over the next few weeks ask yourself – does what I am presenting make sense to the prospect? Ask you prospect does it make sense? Please feel free to post a comment; I am interested to know how you get on.

Stephan Scfiffman says there are four steps to an ideal selling process: Qualify/Open, Information, Presentation, and Close. After the initial greeting and qualifying step you reach a critical point where the prospect is likely try to drop out of the conversation. If you can turn that around you reach the information-gathering phase after which you may again encounter another critical point before the presentation stage where you recommend your product or service.

So how do you turn the response (e.g. not interested) at the critical point around? For a start learn from your experiences. The first time you are faced with a new objection it is understandable if you are not to sure how to respond; however take note of the point the prospect raised and later after your calls, work out the best way to respond to that sort of objection.

I recommend you make a list of common objections and have prepared responses for them. Ask other sales people what they say or do when the objection is raised. Ask your colleagues, your sales manager and get a range of ways to respond. Then try them out and see which are more successful at turning the call around. Remember you can practice your script, practice responding to objections.

How do you keep track of the objections you encounter? Some people write the common objections on queue cards, flip charts or use an online knowledge base objection handler solution such as Acarda’s NowSayWhat.com service (www.NowSayWhat.com). What is your system? Can you give us an example of an objection you encounter and how you respond to it?

I’ve been searching for a house to buy as a rental investment. I’ve looked at dozens of houses over the past few weeks and had four or five different real-estate agents show me round. Some of the agents ask me what I am looking for and listen to my reply. Others don’t even hear me and seem content to just show me their listings – now that’s a waste of their time and mine.

It got me thinking about what makes a good sales person and who is more likely to close a deal with me. I think the best sales people are those that ask me questions and then listen to my answers.

Now if you use a script for telesales then that’s okay but a good sales person needs to ask questions so include appropriate questions as part of your script.

Rather than assuming you know what a prospect or customer “needs” you should ask them questions and engage them in a conversation. Stephan Schiffman talks about understanding the “do” of your prospect by finding out:

• What they do,
• How they do it,
• Why they do it,
• When they do it,
• Where they do it,
• Who they do it with, and
• How we can help them to do it better.

The “do” is important because armed with that information you can make your presentation relevant to them. They will decide to buy your product or use your serve because it just makes sense to do so. Make it your goal to find out what your prospect is doing now before you tell them what they should be doing…

In Stephan Schiffman book, Telesales, he talks about the five ways you can increase your income. In my last blog I said that you needed to measure your dials, discussions, presentations, and number of sales.

Let’s say you track your calls and you have the following ratios. You make 15 dials in an hour, you typically have six discussions which result in three presentations and the final outcome is one sale. So how can you increase your income?

In theory you could double your income if you made twice the number of calls. But is this possible? It may surprise you that there are call management telemarketing dialers like our TeamMax and CallAssist tools that can double your productivity over manual dialling.

Speaking to more decision-makers will also increase your income. By intelligently focusing your call backs, the time of the day you call people back, and using voice mail messaging strategically you can have discussions with more decision-makers.

Finding a way to have more decision-markers allow you to do presentations will also increase your sales. You could hone in on the “hooks” that make decision makers interested in learning more about your product or service. What makes anyone allow you to present to them? What catches their interest?

Now if your current ratio is one sale for every six discussions then if you could increase that ratio to say one sale for every five discussions that will increase your income. While that may not be as easy as it sounds if you can learn to close the presentation better maybe you can do this?

Finally you can increase your income by increasing the value of what you sell. That might be learning to promote the benefits of the advance edition of a product rather than defaulting to the standard edition all the time. Or maybe you can sell an extra product, an extended warranty or some other complementary service.

You don’t have to improve all five areas to increase your income but if you start monitoring your ratios and thinking about each of them you may be able to find some ways of gaining small increases which overall can significantly increase your outcomes.

I stated in my last blog that telesales was a numbers game. But that isn’t really the whole story. In fact some experts would argue that selling is not a numbers game; it’s a ratios game. It’s about the ratio of dials you make to sales or appointments you set. The ratios tell you how productive you are and once you know your ratios you know how hard you need to work to achieve a desired result.

In Stephan Schiffman book, Telesales he talks about the five ways you can increase your income. We will look at these in the next blog but before you can do this you need to measure the following items: dials, discussions, presentations, and sales.

In this case a “dial” is the number of calls you make that get answered by someone. A “discussion” is when you have a conversation with someone who could actually buy the product or service from you. A “presentation” is what happens when you make a recommendation to a decision-maker and a “sale”, of course, is when someone buys your product or service.

It is a good idea to draw up columns with these headings on a piece of paper or in a notebook and then under the columns draw rows for each of the hours of your calling day. Now track your calls through the day with a tic mark in the appropriate column/hour. Do this for at least a few days if not a week or so. If you can, make it an on going habit to track these results.

One benefit of doing this is that you can see what hours during the day give you the best outcome. Do you see a recurring pattern? Are there certain times of the day where you have a higher number of presentations or sales? If so is it a reflection of the way you are working, or is it that the market you are calling has good and bad times to receive calls?

If you suspect you may not be performing so well at a certain time of the day think about ways to improve this. Perhaps recording your calls at different times of the day and then listening to them may give you some clues as to what needs changing.

Start tracking these statistics and in the next blog I will talk about how you can increase your income by knowing your ratios.

Telesales is a numbers game, the more calls you dial the more sales you will close. No disputing that. It’s the same with appointment setting. The more people you phone the more appointments you will set. It’s not rocket science is it? Yet who knows the number of calls they have to dial on average to close a sale or get an appointment?

How many calls do you dial in an hour? How many contacts do you make? How many voice mails do you reach? How many invalid numbers? Out of the people you speak to in an hour how many genuine conversations do you have that might lead to something? 

Do you know your numbers? What are your ratios? If you don’t know them then I encourage you to keep track of your calls during the next week and find out what they are.

To do this just take a piece of paper, draw some columns down it depending on what information you want to record then each time you finish up a call add a stroke under the appropriate column and keep a tally. For starters I would suggest the following columns:

By positive final outcomes I mean if you are making sales calls then the number of sales closed, if its appointment setting then appointments made, if it’s to send out further information then information packs sent out, if surveys then surveys taken, and so on.

You may also like to record tallies for non-positive final outcomes such as ‘Not interested’, ‘Already have one’, ‘Can’t afford one’.  Down track we’ll look at this type of response in more detail but the more information you have as to why people are not responding positively then the better you will be able to fine tune your script and perhaps if appropriate the product or service you offer. Oh and don’t forget to record the date and the start and stop times of each calling session.

Some of you will have been tracking this sort of information for years. If that’s you, what other comments on the topic can you make? What are you ratios like? On the other hand if this is new to you then please give us your feedback, what did you learn about your ratios when you took note of them? How many calls do you make to close a deal?