How Do I Cold Call?

How to Cold Call

There are many great resources on sales.

Anything worth its salt doesn’t mince words about cold calling. It’s a must.

One of the most simple, but impactful takes on the subject comes from New Sales Simplified, a must read for any sales professional. In Chapter 9, Mike describes the years of success he’s had on the phones and outlines an easy guide for motivated sales reps to follow in his success.

We’ll summarize the main points here for you, but I highly recommend reading it yourself.

Fix Your Attitude Towards Dialing

First off, cold calling works. Plain and simple. Mike calls it “your most potent sales weapon” and that “it’s a fantasy that [inbound marketing tactics] are sufficient to produce the volume of sales meetings to hit your new business objectives.”

Now, does that mean it should magically become your favorite thing to do? No! It sucks, and guess what? Mike doesn’t like doing it either. Unfortunately for us, it’s too effective to ignore.

Mike’s advice: develop a positive, but realistic relationship with cold calling. Don’t see yourself as the “unwanted and irrelevant intrusion” to someone’s day.

Change that to seeing yourself as “an important business person representing a product that can potentially deliver great value to your prospect.”

Once you do this, you’ll resonate more with your purpose and shake off the negativity around dialing.

Sound Like Someone You Would Want To Talk To

Many of us have this idea in our heads that the most successful salespeople are those who are sound the most “sales-ey”, are the most polite, or have a sultry, late-night radio-host voice.

The reality, none of these are necessary and actually hurt you connecting with somebody.

Why? Simple, it’s fake.

Mike suggests, alternatively, that “salespeople should use a casual, comfortable tone and attempt to sound as genuine as possible.”

Additionally, he suggests you speak to your prospect slightly informally to convey that you are “equal to the buyer.”

Without dipping down too low as to sound disrespectful, an informal, genuine voice has the most success.

• Bonus: it just feels better too!

Should You Be Scripted? Yes and No

Now, that we’ve covered, how you think and sound, the last part is what you say.

Many salespeople have some sort of script that they are trained on. This is a good thing. You must practice so you can deliver consistently clear, aligned messaging.

Taken to its extreme, however, a script can completely kill a call, even with the perfect prospect.

Why? Think about when you read words off a page. It sounds monotonous and boring. Worse yet, many line-by-line scripts are “long, canned, and manipulative” according to Mike.

The happy medium? Practice your call out lines and scripted talking points, while developing a logical structure to your calls.

But, remember, it’s still a person on the other end of that line, so you’re still having a conversation.

Next Steps

While all of this knowledge is sitting perfectly in your head, it’s useless until you put it into practice!

Sometimes though, it’s hard to practice cold calls. Peer-to-peer role-plays are unrealistic and boring, but hopping on the phones immediately can burn leads unnecessarily.

Syrenn solves exactly this problem. With Syrenn, you can practice your cold calls with realistic voice AI agents, acting as prospective buyers.

Once you finish a conversation in Syrenn, you get individualized feedback and coaching for you to improve the next call.

By practicing with Syrenn, you can increase your chances of surpassing your quota by up to 52%!

Get started by hitting the button below.