Understanding and Conquering the Fear and Pain Associated with Cold Calling by Roger Hamilton
Understanding the Fear
The underlying reason for poor performance (and low productivity) when setting first appointments on the telephone is a lethal combination of Fear and Pain.
The Primary Fear is one of sounding stupid, or unprofessional, in front of a target when you get them on the phone. You fear that once you have a target on the phone, you will stumble and fail to convert the conversation into an appointment. This is not a fear of rejection: we are sales people and rejection comes with the territory. No, this is a fear that comes from not having mastered the simple, but critical, sales skill of converting a conversation into an appointment.
The Second Fear is that you are not “working” the target correctly; that you are in a random pursuit. A call here, a call there; leave this voicemail and craft an email to say what, exactly. You flail and you fear your results will correspondingly flail: your efforts will be ineffective.
The Third Fear is the dread in starting a process that you inherently believe is unproductive and painful. You have the same hesitation and take the same deep breath you would take before starting to rake leaves with a shovel in a wind storm. Experience says that there is no efficient way to do this task with this tool in this environment.
The Pain in prospecting is entirely mechanical (and, arguably, fosters the third Fear.) The tool kit you currently use to manage your calling, to record results and to generate reports requires a fairly high degree of “software literacy and operation.” You must correctly sequence through multiple screens to operate the correct pursuit process (that you may remember from sales training.) And, it always feels like you spend more time navigating the software than you spend talking on the phone.
OK, now what?
To address and resolve these issues, proper attention must be given to the three (3) core elements for developing an effective calling or business development process and make these elements easy for the caller to execute. These three areas are:
Art (Skills Training): A proven way to improve the ability to control the flow of the conversation, to handle pushbacks and to secure an agreement to meet. The Art defines how to deftly and professionally handle the predictable negative responses to a request for an appointment and still secure an appointment. There is a confidence that comes from being able to control the conversation. Having the skill to turn the “I’m not interested, I’m too busy, Send me something” into conversations and then into appointments.
Best Practice (Methodology): Sets in place the specific pursuit of any group of suspects including how many times to call, the frequency of those calls and the messaging used in voicemails, emails, and/or videos. Developing a Best Practice will eliminate the feeling of flailing or being caught up in a random pursuit going nowhere.
Science (Technology): A proven, specialized process engine that enables callers to execute the pursuit of multiple Best Practices (cycles) very precisely and in the most efficient way. Generate Automatic metric reports so callers can manage their activity and in larger organizations the reported activity will assist first level management in coaching and any level of upper management in forecasting based on previous and predictable activity levels.
A process can now be put in place to improve the process over time and hold everyone in the organization accountable for the business development activity necessary for success.
Further on Reporting and Metrics:
While most sales meeting focus on leveraging success once an opportunity is in the pipeline, proper attention (in sales meetings) should be given to the way sales teams use the telephone to find new business to keep pipelines filled. Accurate and automatic metric reporting facilitates this process but management and callers themselves currently lack this necessary information because it is unavailable to them or is not easy to assimilate with the current available technology.
Also, being able to understand and track information such as how many initial appointments are needed for a sales person or sales team to achieve quota, how many conversations are needed to get those appointments, how many calls are needed to make my conversation goal give a definite purpose, direction and ability to improve the calling process over time.
The solution is to set up a calling process that will automatically report on what a sales rep has done and is generated from a program the sales rep embraces because it works. A good sales rep will adopt any process that works and if that process provides accurate reports as a byproduct, then everyone wins.
Roger Hamilton is Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Contact Science and may be reached at 214-483-5800 or via email at rhamilton@klpz.com. The Cold Calling 101 system combines prospecting effectiveness with prospecting efficiency, creating the first holistic solution that allows companies (and independent professionals) to design a combined and custom solution to their telephone prospecting process that addresses their total sales picture.
More calls in less time, with more conversations converted into appointments and activity reports generated automatically.
