Posts with Category "Cold Calling"

3 Ways to Get Cold Prospects to Talk to You

Use these 3 techniques, and you'll warm up cold prospects and fill your pipeline.

Cold prospecting – reaching out to targets you don’t know to generate an initial meeting – is one of the hardest parts of sales. Partly, it’s a numbers game. With decision makers more insulated than ever, it’s getting harder and harder to get past gatekeepers and beyond voicemail.

But what happens when you do get a cold prospect to pay attention – whether it’s because they picked up the phone, or responded to an email or a direct mail piece? Do you feel like you nail it every time?

Much prospecting success is determined in this first interaction. Many opportunities die here before you have a chance to engage.

What can you do to get cold prospects to shift from “go away” to “sounds good, let’s talk?”

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6 Keys to Prospecting Success

By John Doerr

Prospecting can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack...

I recently conducted a webinar for a client on prospecting. Leading up to the webinar, I asked what questions the client had in regards to prospecting so I could tailor the content to their particular challenges. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when I only got one response. And that is not because they are masters of prospecting. Quite the contrary. It’s because they do so little of it and were unsure of what questions to ask. Like most sales people (50% according to Dave Kurlan’s extensive studies), they were doing little prospecting at all.¹

While most sales people will tell you that creating conversations is important and must happen if you want to succeed in sales, the dynamics of how it works continues to baffle many. When sales people seek to understand it better they find conflicting advice. Different situations rightly call for different approaches, so some of the experts themselves are confused about what works and what doesn’t.

If conflicting advice and lack of understanding is holding you back from prospecting and becoming a great sales person, let me break it down for you to its most simple steps.

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Overcoming 3 Common Cold Calling Objections

By Mike Schultz

Cold calls don't always start perfectly. But learn to overcome these objections, and you'll instantly find more success in it.

A business-to-business client we at RAIN Group work with recently closed a mid-six figure deal that started with a cold call.

But it started out rocky. Indeed, about 20 seconds in to the cold call it almost fell apart.

After the prospect answered the phone, Jim, a sales person that works for our client, began speaking and the prospect immediately said, “I’m not interested.” This is where many salespeople give up.

Jim didn’t.

He knew that this was just the first of three common cold calling objections. He persisted and, as a result, he got our client on the prospect’s radar screen and ended up winning a major deal.

If your initial attempt to capture attention and create interest on a cold call doesn’t work, don’t just wilt! It’s easy to say “okay” and just move on, but, then again, it’s easy to fail at cold calling.

All is not lost. You can overcome common objections and make saves.

Here are the three common cold calling objections along with examples for how you can overcome them.

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4 Crucial Elements to Rainmaking Success

By Mike Schultz

Salespeople that exhibit the 4 crucial elements are often the perfect fit.

People often ask me, “Can rainmaking be taught?”

It can surely be taught, but the question that people must ask themselves and their teams is, “Can we learn to make rain?”

Makes me think of this one:

Q. How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?

A. One, but the light bulb has to want to change.

Same goes for rainmaking: if you want to turn on your rainmaking light bulb, you can.

If you’d like to discover if the rainmaking bulb can turn on for you (or for members of your organization), you need to know if the following four elements are in place.

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7 Steps to Turn Sales Calls into New Clients

By John Doerr

Like King Midas, as I was told, everything he touched turned to gold.

- Joseph Simmons and Daryl McDaniels

“If I could just get a meeting with my target prospects I am certain I could close five (or six or eight) out of every ten.”

How many of you think the same thing? You know that when you get in front of the prospect you can wow them. Every time a lead comes into the firm and you go on the sales meeting, it's a slam dunk. Made-in-the-shade. Can of corn. You know you'll get the gig.

Let's assume you set a meeting with someone you believe will be a good prospect. It's not from a referral – they neither know you nor have they heard of you beforehand. Thus there is no transferred trust as when you are referred in. It's also not from a client who's sought you out, thus there's no hot need. You targeted them, and you asked them for a meeting.

You secure the meeting and drive off to the prospect as confident as ever only to sit down across the table from a buyer with crossed arms asking, “Who are you again, and what are you trying to sell me?” You leave with a sinking feeling; you've wasted your time.

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