Cold Calling - The Trustmary Way
In this short blogpost, Venla, a Business Development Representative (BDR in short) will walk you through the basic cold calling process and practices of Trustmary Finland. She makes around 50 cold calls a day and is one of the senior BDRs at the moment.
The Internet is full of content about cold calls: You can read success stories by senior sales personnel or watch training sessions on Youtube, you can even find step by step script on how to make a cold call, what to say so that you get to your goal: a booked meeting.
What is cold calling and why do we do it?
First things first: Cold call is a sales practice in which a salesperson contacts a business decision maker, usually the CEO, to determine if there are conditions to book an appointment to discuss the topic further. You need to pitch the idea and arouse interest enough to book a meeting. Cold call is simply the first contact between two individuals, who haven’t been in contact before or at least not in a while, to find out if the conversation should and/or could be continued.
The prospects tend to dislike cold calls, because it might interfere with their tasks at hand. However, that’s definitely not the intention of the calls, the caller can’t possibly know which moment is appropriate.
Basics of succeeding in cold calling the Trustmary way:
Remember to appreciate both of your time: Nothing is more annoying than being interrupted in the middle of a flow-moment. Of course one always has the option of not answering the phone, but if they do answer, as a caller it’s polite to ask, whether the person wants to and has the time to discuss your proposition. Generally the best times to call are in the morning before lunch and in the afternoon between two and four.
Focus on learning from your not so successful calls and don’t dred failure: It’s an undeniable fact that it takes consistent effort and enough repetition to become a good cold caller. The more you call, the faster you’ll learn from those not so great calls. That is, if you’re ready to reflect and learn from those “mistakes”
Research, research research: First Of All, it’s important to know your “audience” and how you can produce surplus value to them. We search for and find our prospects ourselves. That is a great way of getting to know the prospects and their business, so you’ll know what to offer them. Second, you need to know and be comfortable with talking about the service your offering so that you can make the best proposition and answer the questions professionally.
The last and most important thing is to BE YOURSELF! Only that way you can stand out from the crowd, since you’re probably not the only caller that day. It can be numbing for the business decision maker to listen to monotonous sales pitches 10-20 times a day and they won’t remember your greatest service/product, if you can’t get them to actually listen to YOU. So be as bold and easy to remember as you want, as long as you’re polite and appreciative to them.
That’s it! Sounds simple and it IS simple and fun, but it might be frightening at first. The only way in life usually is through and that holds true for cold calling too, but the faster you make that first call, the quicker you become good, even a pro, at it!