1. Begin with telling your name and company’s name, and do it as succinctly as you can.

2. Use this brief moment to gain access to more time, may be 45-50 seconds more. This can only be done, if you address the client’s problem in one single line. You got me right. You will need to do some research before making the cold call. No blind cold calls please!

3. Once you got the time you asked for, get directly to the point and build the case, so that you can get a chance to have a face to face meeting.

4. Give some detail about the problem you seek to address and hide some details. The idea is to build curiosity.

5. Let the client take the lead. Your objective is to get to the meeting table, not to practice the one-upmanship.

6. No one likes pushy sales person, so hang up if the person is not interested.

Yes, if it’s done right then it is worth the effort. Cold calling is one of the most cost effective and widely used lead generation techniques. Indeed, there are many much more effective ways of lead generation, but the utility of cold calling cannot be ignored.  If you are running tight on budget, cold calling can help you getting your foot in the door, and from there you can begin your elevator pitch. Cold calling can be more effective than any other means of communication in the following three situations:

Introduction: There are situations in which cold calling is more effective than any other technique. If you are new in the market, and you want the clientele to take notice of you then you can consider using the cold calling techniques. Unlike introductory e-mails, a call to one of your prospective clients will buy you at least 10-15 seconds before they hang up. Use these 10-15 seconds to introduce your business, and if the call continues ask for 45-50 more seconds to discuss the things in detail. Use the time allotted to you very wisely. You do not need to supply all the essential detail in this 45-50-second time, just power pack the allotted time with an objective to fix a meeting by building interest in the services or products you are offering.

Database Tuning: A reply is not guaranteed when you send an e-mail to a random person from your database. The chances of your e-mail landing directly into trash bin are quite high, but when you make a call the person on the other end has to reply with either a yes or no; at time, people may be rude and just hung up the phone, nonetheless, you got the answer you were seeking. Use it to clean up the garbage from your database.

Sales Qualification: Use cold calling to see if your prospect is in the frame of mind to receive your salesperson or not. Given the complexity of sales life and the demand put on the organization’s resources (time, money and effort) cold calling can save hundreds to hundred thousands of dollars. This of course depends upon the size of your organization and resources you allot to prospecting and lead generation.

Be pushy and you lose the customer. This is guaranteed. No one likes pushy salesperson. Can you think of any more way in which we can use cold calling effectively? Write into the comment box below your inputs and suggestions. In the next article on cold calling, I will be giving a framework for a typical cold call.

]]> http://itlist.com/cold-calling-is-it-worth-the-effort/feed/ 0 http://itlist.com/10-everyday-sales-mistakes-to-avoid-part-ii/ http://itlist.com/10-everyday-sales-mistakes-to-avoid-part-ii/#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:37:08 +0000 bikram http://itlist.com/?p=1300 As we discussed in the first part, a friend of mine from X-Paper (codified name of the only organization I worked for) was not very successful in selling the ad space despite his glittering MBA degree from a reputed institution, whereas, my bosses, most of whom had just plain vanilla graduate degrees, made a killing out of it. This article will tell you why?

But before going deep into it, let’s figure out the mistake my friend was making. The methods he was employing to woo clients was creating a layer in front of his eyes, which he named professionalism, and the layer was so thick that it hardly let anything other than the works requirements, issues and problems pass through it. Whenever a client started speaking about other things, the salesperson would either shut their mind away from the question, or at worst they will try to cut the discussion short. Anything other than business related problems were prevented to enter seller’s mind.

To a pair of untrained eyes, it looks like utter professionalism: work at the time of work, no small talks, but to a mind that is well-trained in the working of human psychology this step will look utter nonsense. As a human, neither we are capable of, nor can we compartmentalize our thinking, every day we find ourselves sandwiched between our professional requirements, and familial demand. In the context of human relations with his surrounding, this is normal, and everything else is not. My friend did not understand that he was not dealing with a machine made up of blood vessels and synaptic nodes, so pure ruthless professionalism would not fetch any result, instead it would put off the person on the other side of the table.

In the recent time, the scene has changed a lot. People leaving in the post 9/11 world are no longer looking for stark professionalism. Now unlike the 80s, the speech or interaction devoid of emotion is no longer considered the epitome of professionalism. These days, people are looking for human touch in everything they do, as the societal fabric is getting torn and tattered. They want to deal with someone who is empathetic towards their needs, desires, goal and aspirations, so what if it is personal. The dividing line between the work life and personal life is blurring. Every salesperson need to understand that the person on the other side of the table is as human as he or she is, so providing them an audience when they need is not a waste of one’s time, rather it will help the salesperson develop a strong bond with the buyer that will last longer, as the connection is on human level.

As we have discussed the problem one can have if any transaction is devoid of basic human emotion. Now, it is time to talk about 10 everyday sales mistakes that you can avoid while dealing with clients.

1. Focusing more on the hard data and giving less consideration to soft skills.
2. Focusing too much on the strength and sporting an ostrich-like attitude on weaknesses, (if you cannot see it, it hasn’t vanished, so burying your head in the sand will not work).
3. Constant jabbering and not listening to client.
4. Continue to sell even after client is sold to the product, idea or services.
5. No follow-ups
6. Not sweating on doing the required background research for the client
7. Too self-conceit to ask for referral
8. Not reading the psychological and behavioral cues let out by client.
9. No knowledge of where to pull the plug and ask for order
10. Not enough knowledge about the products and the services you are selling.

Let’s give you a personal account in brief to explain this more clearly. Couple of years back, I was employed in a space selling team of a national newspaper (for convenience sake let’s call it X-Paper). My stay there was not long, but I learned quite a few things there. While in X-Paper, I made a friend, who was very polished, professional, and stiff and had a quirky sense of humor. One fine day, he was not in his usual mood, not cracking his kind of jokes, which made me ask, how he was doing. In response to this he started verbally bashing our bosses (we had a handful of them). As he said, his issue was with the way our bosses lick the clients boot by being polite (overly) to make a sale (perhaps he was referring o their soft skills), and to meet their targets. He felt, it was not being professional. He went on saying he was against such things; one should do what he used to do, make a good PPT, put all the necessary information in it, and deliver the presentation, as best as one could. And that according to him was how sales should be made; no personal chit-chat, no small talks. What he was suggesting was this: do not be friendly (over, as he put it) with the people on the other side of the table, they are just business associates, so, instead of showing concern to their matters, we should focus on solving problems in their business. As he said, we should focus on what problem clients’ business had, and how our product was going to solve it.

After couple of months in the only corporate job, I quit and started a viral marketing and buzz generation agency (I come from MARCOM background), and hired this person for sales job. Six months into the position, he was still looking to make his first sale. I tried convincing him the other method, but he did not listen, and shifted the blame on our agency being a new thing. His point was well taken. Interestingly even when he was with X-Paper, a very well established niche newspaper, his sale was still not justifying the salary he drew. I was naïve then, and due to lots of other reasons my venture failed, but while taking its last breath it taught me the power of soft skills. The power of a simple smile, saying sorry, listening carefully, politely disagreeing when the difference in opinion arises, and admiring heartily when come across wonderful thing. All in all it taught me the wisdom that lies in being a good human.

Why my friend from X-paper despite those glittering MBA degree from a reputed college failed in doing what my bosses found it every day affair? Most of my bosses did not even have an MBA degree, they were plain vanilla graduates! I am not planning to kill you by the length of this post, so return tomorrow and get the answers. Till then, so long!