In this video, we discuss three things to do before making cold calls that can transform your sales efforts.
1. Think about how your product helps
The first thing to do before cold calling is to stop and think about how your product helps your customers. This is important because we typically are thinking about our product and what our product does most of the time. This can put you in more of a product selling mindset where you are calling prospects to try to talk them into buying what you sell.
But if you stop to think about the benefits your product delivers, this can help to replace product details that are at the front of your mind with the ways that your product helps. This can greatly improve your mindset because you go from being a taker by trying to take the prospect’s time to talk about your product to being more of a helper by calling to see if the prospect needs the help you have to offer.
2. Picture the prospect that needs your help
When you cold call prospects, a lot of people you talk to do not need what you sell. This is because they either have already purchased what you sell, or they just do not fit and have no need. When you interact with these prospects, you will face objections, rejections, and resistance.
With that being a large percentage of your calls, you can start to lose confidence in what you sell and feel like it is something people do not need and something you cannot sell. But those feelings are not correct because if your product offers value in some sort of way, then there are people out there who need what you sell.
With that, before cold calling, think about these people. Picture them and think about the challenges they have that you can make go away. These are the people that you are looking for with the calls you make. Sure, you are going to talk to people who do not need what you sell. But by picturing the prospects that do need your product, you can prevent yourself from forgetting about them.
3. Practice your pitch
The third thing to do before cold calling is to practice your pitch in some type of sales role-play. This is helpful to the salesperson who is new or does not have experience making cold calls. But even if you have experience, practicing your pitch is helpful because it may have been a while since you have spoken to a prospect, and it can be easy to forget the questions to ask, points to make, and objection responses.
If you can practice and sales role-play with a colleague or manager, that is great. At a minimum, you could practice on your own by saying out loud your sales pitch.
We hope these three tips help you with making cold calls!