A partner and I used to have a used medical equipment business. Cold calling, unfortunately, was a big part of it.
One trick we learned was to pitch the OPPOSITE of what we were trying to sell. That is, we asked if the medical office was interested in SELLING the equipment we were offering.
So the typical call script (yes it was a script) was like this: "Good Morning, this is XXX from YYY. We're the largest purchaser of ZZZ in the country. I wanted to find out if you might be replacing any of your ZZZ over the next 12 months."
Now we became somebody interesting to talk with because we could solve their problem, namely take some of their old equipment off their hands. Of course, anybody who might be "replacing" something could also potentially be interested in buying something.
I wish this were actually about cold calling techniques--i.e., how to honestly approach someone and maximize the importance of the information you transfer to them--instead of how awesome cold calling is.
excuse me, how awesome 'good' cold calling is. god. "why it's good that cold calling is so difficult for most sales people"
because that makes it more exclusive. bleh. hacker news was made less worthwhile with this link.
He gets more specific later in the article. It seems that the key to effective cold calling is patience and seeing things from the prospect's perspective.
Cold-calling is difficult for most people because they don't have the patience to understand the prospect's needs and help the prospect understand his own needs and how the product they're selling can help meet them. Bad salespeople try to convince prospects to buy their product.
Once you understand the basic principles of effective selling, it's up to you to creatively apply these principles in your own situation. There is no one true cold-calling technique in selling just as there is no one true programming technique. The best you can do is study the basic principles and examples of their application.
Great - I currently have 41 missed calls on my office phone.
41 of which will be people cold calling me, even when I've had the receptionist repeatedly putting them straight through to voice-mail if I don't recognize who they are and why they would be wanting to speak to me.
If you make want to sell things via cold calling please give some consideration to whoever you are calling.
Bletch, I hate cold calling, that is having to do it, and I've plenty of experience.
I had a job in a market research agency, and we'd do cold calls for mobile phones companies, car companies etc. usually to do a survey (yes I was one of THOSE people).
Then about a year later I went to a sales recruitment agency (I'm not a sales guy, but at the time I was desperate for work and would try anything, despite my father warning me to keep away from sales).
They were kind of a training outfit and recruitment agency. They would test a bunch of candidates to see who had potential, then put the ones who passed through a 1 week intensive coarse (great coarse by the way, I was exausted by the end of it).
Then they try to "sell" you to other sales companies, it landed me with a telesales job which lasted for about 6 months (in which I did much cold calling).
All I can say is I hate cold calling, it gives me the sweats, but it damnwell works, so if the margin is worth it, learn a little yourself and give it a try, you don't have to hire a salesperson, become one yourself.
This was in Dublin Ireland, and the agency was called School of Sales in College Green, their website was http://www.schoolofsales.com/ but theres nothing there now. It was 2007 when I went through there.
>* cold calling alone can create and be a business in its own right - because cold calling is effectively the ability to make things happen - whereas every other business activity needs cold calling to start up and survive
Huh. even if you expand cold calling to include all 'approach someone to ask for a sale' this is plainly untrue, especially after the advent of the Internet. I don't think I've cold-approached even one customer. And really, my business model simply wouldn't work if i had to. with my margins, paying even a mediocre salesguy a commission would eat me alive.
Actually, this is everything I don't understand about sales. What sort of person responds to a cold approach, when it is almost always the case that you can get a better deal (either a lower price, /or/ something that better meets your needs, sometimes both) going out and searching for something on your own? Are you targeting people who don't care about price only?
Everything is dependent on your market. To paraphrase Dharmesh Shah, "enterprise products are sold, not bought." Part of that selling process is making sure prospects know you exist, and understand the value you provide. Cold calls are one way to do that. Not a very cost effective (or effective) way to do it, but still one way.
Personal example: today I got a cold call from a guy who runs a shop that produces short video interviews with companies and their customers. Their product looks awesome, but they're so small and I new I probably would have never found them otherwise. We'll probably use them.
On the other hand, if we do it, that'll be the second cold-call product I will have purchased in 10 years running this business.
my biggest issue was his "all businesses depend upon cold calling" statement, which is simply not true.
But yeah, in your case, that sounds like a company I might buy services from... but I wouldn't respond to a 'cold call' at least not via phone, just 'cause I find that so offensive. (I might respond if the sales pitch was soft, and it was pitched in a semi-social place. A "oh, and what do you do?" at a local hangout, sure, i might buy from that, if I thought that the method of sales wasn't adding significantly to what I'd pay (which is to say, if the product wasn't available from a 'price on the website is what you pay' type vendor.)
I think a lot of people get caught up in the word 'cold', however what's most interesting about calling potential clients is the warm part of human nature and emotion. These elements of a sales pitch are learned in the form of raw feedback with the client on the phone. You can learn a great deal about human nature talking to people and selling them things. As a matter of fact I find that learning human psychology from books, or basing decisions purely off of numbers to be the 'cold' method.
I think that the article itself is pointing out that cold calling is useful not simply for sales, but many other areas that will benefit your business. For example, strategic business partnerships, advertisers, public relations and surveying your customer base.
In my experience cold calling, the people who only care about price are the tough nuts to crack. They usually ask the question within the first call as a 'time saver' and this can usually be side stepped with a qualifying question. Some sales people even think that these types of clients are not worth time spent on them, but I think handling the price objection is essential to progressing in your skill as a sales person.
A few of the types of clients that prospecting uncovers that buy are clients who have a genuine need (easy to sell, sometimes hard to service), information gathering 'tire kickers' who are converted with the benefits, and personable people who prefer service to price that are converted to a sale with personal touches.
Selling is helping prospects understand how your product can benefit them. It's teaching the lesson of the benefits of an innovation. If the innovation/lesson is simply a lower price for an existing product, it is not hard to understand, so the selling/teaching is easy and therefore not very lucrative. Where the innovation/lesson is a new way of doing business, the selling/teaching is harder and therefore more lucrative.
> Actually, this is everything I don't understand about sales. What sort of person responds to a cold approach, when it is almost always the case that you can get a better deal (either a lower price, /or/ something that better meets your needs, sometimes both) going out and searching for something on your own?
The most lucrative selling/teaching is where the lesson is complicated. The salesperson of tractors to farmers currently using oxen will make more money selling than a seller of a commodity.
If you know what you need and just want the best price, then you don't need a high-priced salesman/teacher to educate you. All you need to learn is the price.
I suspect that the reason you don't understand selling is that you do most of your learning on your own. Once you've decided what to buy, you then shop for the lowest price. You don't deal much with salespeople who are teaching you. If you did less learning on your own, then you would appreciate salespeople more. The best-paid salespeople deal with prospects who don't know what they need and need to be educated. (Interestingly, these people tend to work in big corporations.)
This is from the same site, different page (http://www.bu sinessballs.com/salestraining.htm#theproductoffer):
Moreover the few customers who recognise the product benefit by its features and advantages will also recognise all the competitors' products too, which will cause all the sales people selling features and advantages to converge on the most astute purchasing group, leaving the most lucrative uninformed prospects largely untouched.
>I suspect that the reason you don't understand selling is that you do most of your learning on your own. Once you've decided what to buy, you then shop for the lowest price.
I believe this is true. the part I'm still missing is this:
how can a person trust your average salesperson as a teacher?
I mean, most salespeople /openly snipe/ the competition, which in my mind brings laser focus on their bias. Also, I've never met a salesperson who knew as much as I do about hardware. It's pretty rare that I meet one who knows as much as i did when I was 14. I mean obviously, most of the time the sales person is talking to someone who doesn't know as much. But even so, when the guy is openly slagging the competition, even if you don't know anything about the actual product, wouldn't that make you just a little bit suspicious that the guy isn't working in your best interests?
Now, most of my salesguy experiences have been evaluating 'enterprise' products for companies I've worked or consulted for... when my company needs something, like you said, we figure out what it is we need on our own, then we call up the vendors involved (if it's the sort of product you can get a better deal calling in that buying from newegg or provantage) and figure out who has the lowest price. Now, sometimes we have a hard time getting people to talk to us, but especially if we have done business before, it's usually pretty quick and painless for both sides. the only real problem arises when it's a good that I don't know the approximate price range... I mean, I really only need a 2ghz chip, but if it's only another twenty bucks, i'll take the 2.2ghz... so if the part doesn't have enough public data for me to know about the price, I do waste some of their time trying to figure out the optimal price point.
But when I am experiencing real salesmanship, when, say, I'm evaluating two big-name brands of blade servers for a client[1] it seems like it's almost a battle between the sales folks trying to obfuscate facts and trick my client into acting against their interest, and me, trying to prove to my client that commodity hardware is commodity, and that when buying commodity hardware, you need to look at what is inside the box rather than the name on front. All the while the salesguys are handing out $50 amazon or starbucks gift certificates, or expensive booze to everyone they can get their hands on. I think the blade salesmen, after giving us all gift certs gave my boss a bottle of remmy; an unrelated sales team left a couple cases of beer in the ops room for us to share.
Over and over, I found the salespeople in blatant lies. Now, i don't know if they knew they were lying ahead of time, or if they didn't know, and they were just making things up that may or may not be true that might get the customer to buy. At one point they claimed that the 2.5" sas drives performed better than the 3.5" drives in most cases. I obtained datasheets from the manufactures in question, and was able to show the boss that the opposite was, in fact, true.
I guess my point is that the sales people knew very little about the products in question, and they were lying in obvious ways about the things they did know about.
[1]if you care, they are basically the same hardware, and the generation I was looking at was garbage because they used FBDIMMs. with the ram load my customer bought, a 1u pizza box with the same xeon CPU but with registered ecc ddr2 and the low power chipset used almost half as much power, and costs way less up front. Of course this was a few years back and all the hardware we evaluated is now thoroughly obsolete. None the less, blade servers do not always save you power.
> going out and searching for something on your own
Shockingly, many big companies don't search for products/services they need. They muddle along doing the same thing for 10 years completely unaware that things have changed. The best way to inform them that you've got something that might help them is cold calling or targeted advertising. It's depressing but true.
There is of course a paradox (albeit not a true one) when a sales person tries to act like an expert advisor. Prospective customers know he/she is a salesperson, so acting like an expert advisor may come across as phony.
> "Your opening proposition in the introduction should be a broad strategic interpretation of your more detailed product offer"
Right. It's exactly what makes you think, Huh? What on earth is their product? I see websites like that every day and I get annoyed. They show you a very general strategic message on the home page even though they are a one product company. I'm so grateful that startups do not follow this dated trick.
The best technique I ever learned was to say 'Mr. Smith Please' instead of 'May I speak to Mr. Smith please?'. The first sounds more confident and is a little devious (the receptionist often thinks you are a friend, coworker, or important client). You can't be called out for lying, and it is extremely effective at getting the cold caller past the 'gatekeeper'. I'm glad I'm not in sales anymore.
a cold call is a pitch, and a pitch is a story. learn how to tell a compelling story from beginning to end and you will find cold calls much easier and more profitable. this takes REPETITION
One trick we learned was to pitch the OPPOSITE of what we were trying to sell. That is, we asked if the medical office was interested in SELLING the equipment we were offering.
So the typical call script (yes it was a script) was like this: "Good Morning, this is XXX from YYY. We're the largest purchaser of ZZZ in the country. I wanted to find out if you might be replacing any of your ZZZ over the next 12 months."
Now we became somebody interesting to talk with because we could solve their problem, namely take some of their old equipment off their hands. Of course, anybody who might be "replacing" something could also potentially be interested in buying something.