Cold calling can be really difficult, especially if you feel uncomfortable on the phone. However, it’s sometimes necessary to cold call for a business, especially when you’re on the hunt for those first few clients. Since cold calling can be necessary and important, we are going to examine how to cold call effectively.
Before we hone in on some cold calling strategies that will help you nail your next call, let’s remind ourselves what exactly cold calling is. Cold calling simply means picking up the phone and calling somebody who you don’t know, and attempting to convince them to buy whatever you’re offering. It’s named cold calling because the people have never before expressed interest in your product directly to you. If you’re contacting a person who has shown that they’re interested in your product, that’s a warm call (and those are much easier to close a deal on).
Cold calling can sometimes be pretty painful, but it’s often one of the easiest way to get your first customers. In this article, we are going to look at the following:
- General planning.
- Researching your prospects.
- Trying to find a personal connection.
- Practice like crazy.
- Keep records of your calling.
- Leaving voicemails.
Let’s elaborate on each of these 6 parts of how to cold call effectively.
1. General planning
Before you even pick up the phone, you should be asking yourself various questions that help you focus on calling the right people. These questions include: “Who am I going to be calling?” or “When am I going to place calls?” These questions are important because if you form a routine around who and when you’re going to call people daily, you’re going to feel comfortable about the regular routine of calling up potential sales prospects.
2. Researching your prospects
Researching your prospects may sound boring and monotonous, but, if you’ve done your research on who you’re calling, you’re going to have a much better call. Researching a prospect doesn’t mean learning about each person you’re calling in detail, it means simply searching for the person online and jotting down relevant or interesting things that you learn. You may not even use the information you learn about the prospect on the phone call, but simply being more aware of who you’re talking to makes it easier to sound confident and genuinely informative.
3. Trying to find a personal connection
Hunting for a personal connection, whether you find it during your research on the prospect or during the phone call, will be extremely valuable. A connection can be anything from attending the same college, to both loving triathlon, to really anything that makes it easy for you to hit it off with the prospect and quickly earn his or her trust.
4. Practice like crazy
Practicing like crazy means a whole lot of talking to yourself. A great way to practice what you’re going to say on the call is to talk through your pitch in the mirror. You may feel goofy doing this, but it’s a seriously effective strategy. When you practice your pitch standing in the mirror, it’s a good idea to also just give the pitch standing up when you’re actually doing it. Standing up while you’re on the call will help you remember the familiarity of standing at the mirror practicing, but also help you sound more alive and pronounced.
5. Keep records of your calls
It’s important that you keep records of your calls. Records of your calls should include details such as: when you called, the result of a call, and who you called. When you have detailed records, you’ll have an easier time learning where you can improve your cold calling and also easily see just how hard you’re working (which is really gratifying!).
6. Leaving voicemails
Most people don’t leave voicemails when they cold call, and we think that this is a mistake. A voicemail can be an easy way to get a prospect’s full attention, for the entirety of what you’re saying to them. This is potentially very valuable time for your business, which means you should try to use a personal connection that you discovered during the research process to say something that will increase the chance of getting a call back.
Collecting Contact Information
You can’t make cold calls if you don’t have phone numbers to call. To collect more phone numbers and have a decent idea of how successful you’re going to be reaching out, we recommend adding a lead pixel to your website. A lead pixel will reveal who is on your site and what the prospect is interested in. Click here to try adding a lead pixel to your site, for free.