How to Hire Effective Cold Callers for Your Business

I'm Eric Watkins, president at Abstract. So cold calling is really the foundation for sales enablement for a lot of reasons. First reason, there's no more impactful form of marketing than actually having person. Ideally, we'd love for that to be face to face, but in this day and age, it's just not possible. So without that direct connection in person or over the phone, all of your marketing is really just in the background. And what cold calling does, it makes your emails more real, it makes your ads more real, it makes your LinkedIns more real, because now you are a real person that has talked to me, and I've had a conversation, and I know who your business is. So there's a lot of ways you can attack a cold call. And depending on who you talk to, everybody has ten different ideas. And frankly, all of them could be right. One thing that we use here is because I believe in as simple as possible is the best solution, is what we call our engage call process. And so it's just an acronym that stands for the different principles of how we want to attack a cold call. So the e stands for establish credibility. Right off the bat, we need to make sure we let this person know why they should be having a conversation with us. Because frankly, they're busy, and we caught them in the middle of their day, and they weren't planning on our call. If you can't establish some credibility on why you're calling me right away, I'm probably hanging up and moving on to what's next. Second from there is we wanna neutralize resistance. Inevitably, after we establish credibility, there's gonna be a little skepticism. There's gonna be a little hesitation. And what we wanna do is neutralize that resistance. And the way you neutralize it is you address it. You don't act like it's not there. You don't act like you didn't bother them. You bring it out into the open, and you appreciate them taking the time to have a conversation with you. Once we've done those two steps, we're now in the conversation. And what we wanna do is the g, which is gather information. This is where we wanna ask good, open ended questions to get the prospect talking. Find out more about their current state and their current situation and what's going on. And then once we've done that, the next step is a, actively listen. We don't wanna just ask our questions and then go to the next question. We wanna truly hear what they're saying. If something didn't add up, say, hey. That didn't make much sense to me, could you explain that a little bit further? Or oh that's really interesting, tell me more about that. That is the goal of the call. When we actively listen is where we uncover the pain, we uncover the problems on how we could eventually have a solution that could help them. Then after we've actively listened, that's when we're gonna generate interest. So we're gonna take everything we learned from actively listening and gathering information in the conversation, and then we're gonna correlate that to our value prop. And we're gonna talk about how the problems they're experiencing and the solutions that we could potentially provide that they should be open to hearing about, in sitting down and meeting with us how we could solve their problem. And then once we've done we've done that, we're going to engage the prospect. And that's the final step. We're gonna lock down a calendar invite. We're gonna send them some materials pre call. We're gonna confirm the meeting. We're gonna make sure that when we show up on that meeting, we're prepared to have a great conversation. And we need to remember, this was a cold call. They didn't reach out to us. They weren't looking for anything. So when we go out to that meeting, we need to act as such. We need to thank them for taking the time to hear about our solution. We need to address that they may not be looking to make a switch today, but let them know that we have some really good information that we'd love to share with them. And then if there's potential interest, we would love the opportunity to partner together. And that framework is really simple. It's worked across thousands of different industries and verticals that we've called on behalf of. And I think it's really good to have a consistent approach, because if not, you're just guessing. At the end of the day, you don't know what works and what doesn't. Where I think people go wrong with cold calling is they think about, I have a list of a thousand people. I'm gonna call through that list, and I'm gonna see who's interested. The reality is at any given time, maybe five percent of the market is actually interested in your services. So the value in cold calling is not in the five percent. It's in the ninety five percent. And so that ninety five percent, if you nurture and you build relationships and you follow-up and you talk to them consistently, they actually come to you instead of going to Google or asking for a referral. So I truly think where people get outbound cold calling wrong is they think of it as a quick fix. Where in reality, what they really need to do is they need to continue to call build relationships. And once you do this for long enough, it turns into more of an inbound type lead because you've already established that relationship. It almost becomes like a referral. We've had companies that call us and say, hey. I'm ready to work with you. Frankly, you've called me more than my current vendor calls me. And that's really where cold call works the best. So cold calling has definitely gotten harder over the last five years. And, you know, five years ago and ten years before that, it was pretty simple. You pick up the phone, you dial a bunch of numbers, and, you know ten percent are going to pick up. But contact rates have continued to drop. Now they're dropping for a couple reasons. One of the reasons is your number is getting flagged. So you constantly have to have the tools and technology and systems in place to make sure every number you're calling from is cleaned and you're not showing up as spam. The second reason why it's gotten harder is because it's effective. Because it has worked so well, there's a lot more people doing it and making calls. So you can't just rely just on the cold call anymore. You really need an omnichannel approach. So when you make that cold call, they recognize the number, they recognize the name of the company, and then that cold call isn't a cold call at all. It's not a warm call when we're reaching out to these prospects. In my opinion, it's the most important piece of the puzzle, but it's still a piece of the puzzle. Cold calling alone doesn't work as well as it used to. You need a variety of other channels and ways to get in front of prospects in a day and age where everybody's fighting for prospects' attention. But, if you master this and you do it right and you build this process in, it will make everything else you do that much more effective.