Cold Calling Tip: If Your Results are Stress & Failure

Frequently I wish sales professionals could see themselves through my eyes. I see you as part of an amazingly talented group of professionals. My job as a lead new business development coach is to remove what gets in the way of your success so that you can soar to new heights of success using the skills that intimidate the rest of the world, yet come naturally to you.

Recently a seller relayed this cold calling scenario, "I cold call a prospect company for the name of an executive-level decision-maker then I call that person. Introduce my self and the name of the company. I do my best to get past the gatekeeper and get to the decision-maker, then, do my darnedest to keep him on the phone. If he stays on the phone with me I qualify him - ask him a lot of questions to see whether or not he meets my market's identity. If not then I tell him to expect a call from another member of our team who is better suited to handle his size of company. If he fits my market then I ask about his needs and ask for an appointment. " I could hear his brain short circuiting, as the sounds of too many synaptic firings sped through the phone lines - sounded something like "bzzzzzz ...t!" I heard him trying to stay upbeat as he said, "I usually get one appointment out of every 600 calls."

I got tired just typing that vignette. Wow. What a high level of stick-to-it-ness he and his colleagues have. By the way, they are part of a tremendously successful company.

As we look closely at his story, one of many things that hit me right off the bat is the number of important goals he is trying to accomplish in 90-seconds or less of phone time:
- establish credibility
- get to the decision-maker
- get past the decision-maker's front line of defense
- get the decision-maker to open up about a lot of private information
- qualify the prospect
- turn the sale over to another sales professional
- get the decision-maker to agree to a call from another colleague
- stay upbeat and enthusiastic in the face of cold calls that create stress, failure, and require a lot of work for negligible results

You can reduce considerable amounts of stress and boost your results significantly if you have a clear, new, positive direction that allows you time to actually think during a cold call. Stop being committed to such a long agenda that in and of itself is virtually impossible to accomplish within the time constraints of the initial cold call.

Have one goal in mind and one goal only. To schedule an appointment.

If you do all of your work by phone as I do, use the cold call to schedule a phone appointment with your prospect. If you want face-time with your prospects, use the cold call to schedule an appointment for face-time. Then, work your way through the rest of your agenda during your meeting.

One clear-cut, single focus during your cold calling will leave your brain free to think about how to respond to your prospect's questions as opposed to reacting to what they say so you can plow your way through your long agenda.

Learning to respond effectively and efficiently to everything that occurs during each cold call is an indication of masterful selling skills. As you scrutinize the words that are spoken during each call you will begin aligning yourself and your focus on the ultimate reason for your cold calls - to meet with high-level decision-makers. If you continue to go down "rabbit trails" of conversation that take you away from this goal you are missing the critical element to accomplishing your mission.

Visit: www.coldcallingexecutives.com

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Cold Calling Techniques: Distill Message to Bare Essentials

So many sales professionals think they have to know all about the businesses of their prospects before they venture to make even one cold call. This approach to cold calling puts a tremendous amount of responsibility on you to know a lot about many different business arenas. This kind of self-induced pressure consumes a lot of energy that eventually leads to burn out among sellers.


Given that you have 60-90 seconds of "drive by" cold call talk time with your prospect the less draining and more effective route is to really force yourself to know a lot about your business. Not just what you do and how you do it, but truly what your clients get out of doing business with you.


You will be well served to force yourself to focus on the few points about your business that make an exponential difference in the lives of your happy clients. Your energy stores will be replenished to overflowing as you distill your message and strip it down to the very few words your prospects want/need to know to make the decision to welcome you in for an appointment. With this kind of message your prospects will be glad to hear from you. Their gladness will feed your enthusiasm for your own product/service and create a symbiotic relationship.

Make the mistake of building habits of maintaining and reviewing a complete inventory of what your prospects' businesses needs are, and you will find you have spent a lot of valuable hours that could have been spent cold calling and scheduling appointments on time consuming activities with low payoff.

Ever noticed how newbies to sales have remarkable cold calling results even though they know next to nothing about the product/service they are selling? The reason is the only choice they have is to focus on the positive outcome they want, an appointment. They do not yet know enough to get tripped up talking about this, that, and the other thing in regards to their company. Getting your cold calling back to this kind of refreshing simplicity is vital to consistent success, and as you may have realized by now, not so simple.

Visit: www.coldcallingexecutives.com

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Cold Calling Tip: Know Where You Are & Where You Want to Go

If you are in need of a good laugh read greeting cards. If you are in need of a new perspective on the ruts you get stuck in when cold calling, do the same.

There is a friend-to-friend greeting card that says, "Where ever you go, there you are."

Another one has a picture of a guy flailing his arms in the middle of a fast moving river. He cries out to the dog on the river's bank, "Lassie! Get help!" Open the card and you see a picture of Lassie belly up on a therapist's couch.

These cards both good object lessons for sales pros who cold call.

You can try the newest, most improved cold calling techniques only to find that you are still getting the same results you have always had. Because not matter where you go to try new cold calling techniques, there you are with your old habits.

Then when you "go for help" if you don't know what kind of help you need, you'll find yourself jumping from one "couch" to the next wondering why all of these "experts" are unable to give you the help you need to move forward.

A new client heard from his sales pros, "Leslie spent the first 25 minutes of our hour long consultation asking us about what we do. You (the sales director) could have done that then we could have spent the whole hour learning from her rather than just 35 minutes."

My response was this, "Fact is at this point in time your sales pros feedback is meaningless. The best they can do is to say whether or not they like what I have to say. Quite frankly it doesn't matter whether or not I am liked. What matters are the results.

At this point your sales pros do not have the critical thinking skills about cold calling needed to objectively evaluate what transpired during out coaching session. What doesn't even register as a blip on their radar screen is this ... they were unable to identify where they need help. It took 25 minutes of questions from me to drill down to the specific areas in which they need help.

At the end of the session I was clear about what we need to accomplish over the next six to nine months and could detail the road map about how to get there. At the end of the session all they could say is - this is good stuff. They have no idea where they are and how to get to where they want to go."

Sellers are often anxious to try the next new thing, to find the one best tip, only to find themselves buried under lots of new information and frustrated because of getting the same old results. So, what's missing?

The sales professionals have no clear inventory of where they are. Without knowing where you are you are unable to deal with the changes that are needed to move you to the next level of success.

Most people who sell have a vague sense that they would like their sales to be different in the future. But without a reality-based reference point of where-they-are in the cold calling process they are doomed to drift.

What you need to do is have clarity about where you are and where you want to go. Even a small degree of clarification will help you stay on track for improvements in your cold calling.

Without knowing where you are on the "map" of cold calling you will be clueless as to what adjustments you must make to stay on track to reach your goals of improving. You'll just pull over to the side of the road, try the next new best thing, and continue to wander about aimlessly. You will have no objective criteria by which to determine whether or not this-new-improved-cold-calling-technique will help or hinder your progress.

Consciously acknowledging where you are in your cold calling strategy is a challenge. But the acknowledgement of what is factually true will allow you to change your level of skill and change your results exponentially.

Visit: www.coldcallingexecutives.com

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Cold Calling Tips that Give Power to Scripts

Using the same old cold calling script, that predictably yields low to no results is just wrong.

Why do we stick with a script that has a low to no payoff?

I think there is a payoff of sorts. The payoff is predictability and the feeling that we are doing something. And doing something is better than doing nothing. Right?

Well, no. Frantic activity with little movement forward is just a lot of frantic activity. Better to think about each activity you engage in and then to keep doing what gives you desirable results; and let go of the activities with little yield.

Top notch sales people know they are to speak "from" a script when making cold calls. These same sellers know that rookies and telemarketers "read" the script.

What's the difference?

Reading "from" a script gives the freedom you want along with the structure you need to maximize your cold calling effectiveness. A thoughtfully crafted script allows you to function throughout each call with laser- like focus; to pay keen attention to the realities of the call with your prospect; and allows you conversational flow that moves toward your advantage.

To get through each cold call you must have a sense of connectedness with your prospect whether it is the executive assistant or the executives. You must be able to think about the impact of your words; what your prospect's words are telling you; and how to adjust your words accordingly.

The more aware you become of the components of a cold call the better quality information you will have available to help you create a strategy and a process for dealing with subtle and not so subtle shifts in each conversation.

You want structure so you can concentrate and leverage the opportunities at hand. Additionally, you want that structure to give you the freedom to think and the ability to make adjustments during each call.

Eventually, you will build a high level of awareness of the details of your cold calls. This may even look easy and appear to be seemingly effortless to those around you. But it takes skill and concentration to maintain a crisp consciousness about what you are saying, what your prospect is saying, and what you need to say to keep a 90-second prospecting call on track for an appointment.

Visit: www.coldcallingexecutives.com

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Why "More" Cold Calling Tips Usually Don't Work

With some bazillion "sales secrets" flying at us from equally as many sources we sellers start to wonder, "what's wrong with me that these cold calling tips aren't delivering big time results?"

One group of sales professionals has grabbed hold of the phrase, "Is this a bad time?" They open every cold call with that sentence (as they were taught to do) and settle into a routine of making 100 to 600 cold calls and expecting one appointment.

What this phrase does for them is gives them verbiage to use and predictable results. In the short term this allows them a bit of relief as they have a sense that they are doing what they should be doing during cold calls to prospects.

In the long term this is the path to total, possibly irrevocable burn out.

Here's the problem. These sellers have yet to evaluate how the tactical phrase, "is this a bad time" serves them. There is a lack of evaluation of the pros and cons of using that phrase. There is a belief that the phrase itself will serve them well. There is a short term sense of relief because they are trying something different from "the same old patter" that got them zero appointments.

By way of brief example here's what evaluation "looks" like:

Pros:

• By using the phrase "is this a bad time" the seller appears to be taking the prospect's busy day into account;
• This is a polite way to ascertain whether or not the prospect is in a position to take an unexpected call.

Cons:

• By using the phrase "is this a bad time" the seller's first words plant negative thoughts in the brain of the prospect.
• Fact is, just about anytime in the day of a busy person is indeed a bad time for an unexpected call.
• This phrase positions the prospect to say, "no I do not have time to talk, this is a bad time" leaving the seller in the position of identifying a "good time" ... tough to do when the prospect is clueless as to what the call is about.
• As the seller then tries to explain what the call is about, the prospect becomes agitated because it has already been made clear this is a "bad time".
• Although, the intent behind using this phrase is to be polite and considerate of the prospect's time, the impact is something else altogether.

The tools of our trade as sellers are words. As we catch our cold calling rhythm the words flow seemingly effortlessly as do our results. "Lift the veil of thought" and you will see that a successful cold calling rhythm rests on a rock solid base of sophisticated thoughts.

Begin your own sophisticated thinking by doing this: take a few minutes, find something you can write fast with, dump all of your "cold calling scripted words" that pop into your head.

Do not analyze or evaluate.

Later, you can figure out the impact of the words. For now just dump. Capture it all without feeling a responsibility to evaluate a thing.

Then when you are ready to come back with objectivity, put on your "extraordinary sales professional" hat and determine which words serve your purpose and which ones don't.

These are two separate steps. Don't confuse them, rush them or try to do both steps at once.

From now on, as you make changes to your scripts, make use of this cold calling tip - think about the changes, really give thought to pros and cons of each change. Brainstorm with other sales professionals, friends, even family members. Ask them, "what are the thoughts you think when you hear these words on the phone?" Implement the changes that serve you well. Repeat as needed.

Visit: www.coldcallingexecutives.com

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Cold Calling Therapy

One of my favorite authors, a man whose words have had tremendous impact on my life, is David Allen, productivity guru.

In David's book "Ready for Anything" he says, "Sometimes the biggest gain in productive energy will come from cleaning the cobwebs, dealing with old business, and clearing the decks--cutting loose debris that's impeding forward motion."

David's references have to do with organizing the paper and the systems that provide structure for your personal and professional life. His thoughts about organizing inspired my thoughts about the need for sales professionals to clear the decks of emotional clutter that holds them back from experiencing the success that awaits as emotions are transformed from being a hindrance to being a help.

In regards to cold calling the biggest gain in productive energy comes with cleaning emotional cobwebs, dealing with old emotional business, and clearing your mind--cutting loose emotional debris that is impeding your cold calling success.

Hindering thoughts include thoughts such as:

1. Don't I need to know more about my product and the client and about sales before I cold call top decision makers?
2. Do I really belong at the "top" of my prospect companies?
3. Does my product/service really warrant an audience with high-level decision-makers?
4. And the most crippling thought of all ... Do I warrant an audience with high-level decision-makers?

I think of these as "victim" mentality thoughts. Sales professionals who soar choose "victor" mentality thoughts.

Whether you realize it or not what you believe is in fact your choice. When you have chosen your thoughts, then your emotions enter the picture to solidify, to reinforce, and to give your thoughts great power.

So, for example if for some reason, perhaps from your childhood, you chose to believe that you do not warrant an audience with people in authority then your emotions kick in to reinforce that belief. The emotional impact plays out in feelings of:

1. fear when you think about calling the top
2. intimidation when you are around authority figures and of
3. self-worthlessness when you are presenting your products/services

These feelings by design, protect and reinforce the thoughts you believe ... and in turn the outcomes you experience.

When you choose thoughts that tell you that you do not belong at the top and your emotions jump in to reinforce those thoughts, your brain quite literally is unable to accept that you do indeed belong at the top.

How is this situation remedied?

You, the seller, must learn to build new thoughts of belief that you do indeed belong at the top. These very thoughts "build a bridge of new thought" in your brain. A bridge of thought that will allow you to believe that success is yours to be had.

How is this done?

Successful sales pros identify and scrutinize their thoughts. They choose to replace thoughts that hinder them with thoughts that help them accomplish their goals. They prepare for the "old emotions" to kick in that scream out "danger, danger, be fearful" ... and mentally "tell" their emotions to get in line with new beliefs.

For example, when a sales pro recognizes the old thought "I do not belong at the top", every time that thought comes up the sales pro counters with "I do belong at the top."

Then, when the emotions of fear, intimidation, and self-worthlessness come up, the sales pro mentally "tells" his/her emotions, "let's choose fearlessness, belonging, and worthiness instead". After a short while, the emotions line up with the new thoughts.

In the beginning this process takes time and concerted effort. After all your belief system has a lifetime of momentum behind it! However, once you have learned the process of holding your thoughts captive, that process itself becomes lighting fast and will appear effortless.

You will be among those who are labeled as being "gifted in sales." Yet you will know what your colleagues do not know -- you have learned to go through the process of "holding your thoughts captive" so quickly that it appears to be innate. Fact is you like other gifted sellers learned how to rule your brain. How to clear the emotional cobwebs. How to regularly clear the decks of the emotional debris that impedes your progress.

People who are "brain junkies" understand these facts and gobble up anything on the market that will help them leverage the power of their minds and help move them forward sooner rather than later.

In the sales arena I've found that sellers suffer from ignorance about the brain, how it works, and how to leverage thoughts for maximum impact. The good news for you is that you have access to "insiders' secrets" that your colleagues don't even realize exist.

Scientist Peter Julian and I collaborated on a product that gives sales pros a leading edge on getting a hold of this process. We christened it "Ultimate Cold Calling Intelligence Secrets".

If you want to be among those to rule your brain rather than having your brain/thoughts holding your back, and you want to accelerate the process do what I've outlined in this blog entry. And/or find out more at www.UCCISecrets.com .

I want to warn you ahead of time, chances are UCCISecrets is unlike anything you have experienced before. You will also want to know rock-solid science and experience show that it works, extremely well.

Visit: www.coldcallingexecutives.com

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