***Cold Calling: Do I Have To?

You are ready to start your cold calls, your anxiety goes up, you can feel it throughout your body, and yet you have decided YOU ARE GOING TO DO IT!

Let’s define what exactly a cold call is. A cold call is you, personally, calling or visiting a person that you do not know at all or you know only slightly. The primary purpose of the call is that you are selling something either personally or for your business. Cold calls can be made to people that you know, prospects or people that you have met.

Your prior knowledge of the person only breaks the ice for a mere moment. Nothing can be as uncomfortable as prospecting someone for your cold call. Fear is at the root of anxiety. Let’s look at the fear. What are we really afraid of? It is the fear of being rejected, being told no, being shouted at or feeling foolish. The reality is that most often people are polite and some of the fears are unrealistic. The power of your fears is that they stop you cold and you end up not doing the call.

You can choose to break through your fears and overcome them with a few positive steps. First is your attitude. Being positive is a key essential, not to be negated or ignored. Second is a solid plan. Don’t just “wing it”, prepare for your calls and practice, practice, practice.

Let’s look at these keys a little bit deeper.

1. Be Positive, No Matter What!

Cold Calling is a useful and powerful business building strategy. Your person demeanor is a key to the strategy’s effectiveness. Feel positive about yourself and feel especially positive about the person that you are calling. When you expect negative results, you end up communicating that to your prospect. Your positive energy and enthusiasm are communicated immediately. Check yourself before you make the call. If you need to spend a few minutes preparing your mental attitude then take those minutes. It is that important.

2. Do Some Prep in Advance, Don’t Just Wing It.

Your personal preparation is essential. It can make or break your success. It is not effective to “know” the process or the “script”, you need to spend time preparing for each meeting. Start by creating your list of who you are calling. Create your process: how to start the call or visit; your introduction, include in your process a way for you to listen to the prospect. Taking the time to prepare a process and script in advance is an important part of preparation. Of course you don’t want to read from the script or be stuck in the script; but rather to use it as a guide. And last but certainly, not least, be sure that what you are offering is of real value to the prospect. By being clear on who you are calling will ensure that this is true. A good cold calling plan can be the difference between success and new business, and total frustration.

3. Be Yourself, be who you are, real and authentic.

Being who you are with real authenticity will help you to not sound nervous or contrived. When you have a true belief in your product or service and communicate that authentically it will help you to make the sales. You don’t want to be someone you are not. Set your goal at the beginning to begin with building a long term relationship of service. With that as your goal instead of making the sale, you will have greater results.

4. Breathe, Stay Calm, and Accept Whatever Happens

With cold calling, you have to expect that some of the time you will be turned down. By knowing that up front you are more able to accept it and not take it personally. It is not about you, but rather about the person that you are talking to. By maintaining your professionalism and honesty you can still accomplish a goal of building a good rapport. You can leave a lasting impression of professionalism and high quality service. At the same time, each time you are turned down is an opportunity for you to learn from the experience. There are a few good questions to use in your evaluation: what went right or well; what didn’t go quite right; what would have made it right. Make some notes to yourself and incorporate what you should into your process or script. By doing this you will find the strategy or approach that works.

5. Master the Skill of Artful Questioning

For the most part, it is not often that people sign up right away with whatever you are offering. As part of your script and process you need to include questions that can guide the process. Questions can be the key to your success, or at least part of it. Craft your questions during your preparation. When designing your questions you want to be asking questions that get at emotion, and asking questions that the person cannot say “no” to. For instance a few questions that I might use as a business coach are:

• Does your company want to increase its revenue over the next six months?
• Would you benefit from learning how to do this more quickly?
• What would the value be to your company?

Each question is leading to a coaching product or service, and most often people are going to answer in an expected way.

You can also ask questions that are focused on your service, gathering information from the prospect, such as:
• What strategies are you using to get new leads each week?
• Are you getting more leads than you need?
• Would you be interested in seeing a system that we have put together for gathering highly targeted leads at a rate at least 3 times of what you described?

Questions can get a conversation moving and lower the person’s guard. Once you have gathered some information you are able to use that information throughout the conversation.

6. Commit to Being Persistent in Your Strategy.

You have to commit to a strategy of cold calling. Set a minimum of what you are going to do and reach that. Reevaluate your strategy at least monthly but better yet, weekly. Take the information that you learn and integrate it into your strategy.

By following these steps in developing your cold calling strategy you will have greater success overall. Of course, you need to know your numbers as well. How many calls have you made, connections made, resulting sales. By using these approaches you will be able to create and refine a strategy that works for your business.