In this week’s Mindset Monday, we discuss how to decrease the fear of cold calling. Regardless of your level of sales experience, we all can feel a fear of cold calling, or at least a dread of cold calling when it is time to pick up the phone. This anxiety or dread will always be there to some degree, but there are some real and practical things you can do to decrease it, and we will outline those here.
View yourself as a helper
The first tip is to view yourself as a helper, which is actually what we discussed on last week’s Mindset Monday. This can help to decrease the fear of cold calling because your natural mode will be to call up prospects to try to get them interested in what you sell.
This will put you in more of a taker mindset, where you are trying to take the prospect’s time so that you can talk about your product and company with the goal of ultimately taking their order and money. This type of mindset will increase your fear of cold calling because it is all about you and is more likely to trigger objections and rejection.
But the reality is that you are not a taker, you are a helper because your product or service helps your customers in some way or another. If you can realize this, that means you are not calling to bother and take from your prospects. You are calling to help them. You are calling to see if they are in the group of prospects who need your help. This should help you to view the calls you are making in a completely different way and help to decrease the fear of cold calling.
Increase confidence
One reason you may feel fear or dread when cold calling is that you are unsure how to navigate all of the complexities that can happen after a prospect or gatekeeper answers the call. If you agree or relate with that, then you can decrease the fear of cold calling by improving your knowledge and preparation regarding what to do when you get someone on the phone.
There are many small things to do here that can boost your confidence, but the two big things you can do are invest time in the areas of sales training and sales scripting. We help you with both of those in our sales training program called The SMART Sales System, and you can access that full training program on YouTube for free.
Have objection responses
Another reason you might feel a fear of cold calling is that you are guaranteed to face some amount of objections and rejection on almost every call. If you are not prepared for this, you will not just feel an initial fear of cold calling, but your fear will likely get worse because you are going to get consistently beaten up and shut down.
If you agree with that, then the solution is simple: prepare responses and a game plan for the objections that you are likely to face. We provide tips for this in our training program, and this tip could actually fall under the previous tip of training and improving confidence, but we are breaking it out because it is such an important area to work on if you are trying to decrease the fear of cold calling.
Practice and Role-Play
One of the best ways to decrease the fear of cold calling is to practice and role-play cold calling. If you are a quarterback for a football team, you do not just jump in the game cold. You will practice and perform drills before the game so that you are warmed up and ready to go when it is time to play for real.
A salesperson should do the same by practicing and role-playing cold calling so that when they get connected with a live prospect, they are warmed up and have more clarity for what to say and do.
