In this video, I am going to show you how to improve your cold calling efforts by making your cold calls more about the prospect than the product you are trying to sell. With this prospect-focused approach, we will make 80% of the cold calls about the prospect and 20% about us and our product.
The Product-Focused Approach
This is actually completely different from what most salespeople use, which is a more product-focused approach where they talk primarily about the product they sell and the company they work for. I get a lot of cold calls, and they all sound something like this:
Hi Michael, this is Tom Smith calling from Web Pros.
We are a web design agency and do everything from web design to creative design to SEO services.
I am calling to see if you guys are looking to update or redo your website.
Is that something you all need or are thinking about?
Can we schedule a meeting to discuss our services?
It is actually understandable and logical for a salesperson to try to sell by talking primarily about their product. But here are the problems with this approach:
- All about me
- You look like a salesperson
- Triggers guardedness
- More objections, rejection, and resistance
- Prospects are most likely not in buying mode
- Mismatch
- Only fits with an exact match
- Missed opportunities
The Prospect-Focused Approach
We can completely eliminate and reduce those challenges by simply flipping our approach, focusing more on the prospect than on the product. To help with this, we can use the prospect-focused sales message we created in a previous video because this sales message creates a set of building blocks. And most of these building blocks actually align more with the prospect than with the product.
We can use these building blocks to create a cold call script and outline for what to discuss:
- Open
- Value
- Pain Questions
- Current State Questions
- Pain Points
- Product
- Customer Example
- Close
I will go through each of those steps and show you an example of what can be said using the sales message we created in the last video of this video series.
Open
Hi Tom, this is Michael Halper calling from Web Pros.
Did I catch you in the middle of anything?
Value Points
The reason for the call is that we help businesses to:
- Increase the revenue and leads generated through their website
- Improve the design, traffic, and conversion rates for their website
- Improve website conversion rates
I don’t know if you are a fit with what we do or not.
Pain Questions
- How important is it to get your website generating more leads and revenue?
- How do you feel about the look and feel of your website?
- How important is it to increase website traffic and conversions?
Current State Questions
- Are you working with a website design agency?
- Are you using any type of CMS platform?
- Do you have internal resources to help with your website?
- How many websites do you have?
- How many leads per week are you currently generating through your website?
- When was the last time you updated your website?
Pain Points
A lot of businesses we work with have challenges with:
- Need to generate more revenue through the website
- Their website does not look good and tell a good story
- They need to increase website traffic and conversions
Are you concerned about any of those areas?
Product
I am with Web Pros and we provide:
- Web design
- Graphic design
- SEO
- Web hosting
Some ways we differ:
- Utilize cutting-edge technology
- SEO best practices
- Ongoing support and maintenance
Customer Example
- We worked with Smile Bright.
- They weren’t getting enough website traffic.
- We helped to solve that with our SEO services.
- This helped to increase their website traffic by 40%.
- This ultimately led to an increase in new patients by 15%.
Close
But I have called you out of the blue, and I don’t know if this is the best time to discuss this.
Are you available for a brief call next week to discuss this more?
We hope this provides some new ideas for your cold calling efforts!
