Smart Calling

Eliminate the Fear, Failure, and Rejection from Cold Calling

Art Sobczak

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119676744
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Master cold-calling and eliminate rejection forever

In the newest edition of Smart Calling: Eliminate the Fear, Failure, and Rejection from Cold Calling, celebrated author and sales trainer, Art Sobczak packs even more powerful insight into what many people fear: prospecting by phone for new business. This best-selling guide to "never experiencing rejection again" has consistently found its way into the Top 20 in Amazon's Sales category, because its actionable sales tips and techniques have helped many minimize their fears and eliminate rejection.

The newest edition builds upon the very successful formula of the last edition to help sales professionals take control of their strategy and get more yeses from their prospects. With new information, this info-packed release provides powerful sales insights, including:

• The foundational concepts of cold calling, featuring real-life examples you can carry with you into your sales career
• Multiple case studies and messaging from successful salespeople across the globe, providing even more insight into what works and what's a waste of your time
• New methodologies that are proven to push you past your fear and into the world of successful prospecting
• Free access to Art Sobczak's Smart Calling Companion Course, where he builds on the many techniques and strategies in the book, and will update it with new material and tech resources so that you will always have the current best practices and tools.

If you're failing to convert your prospects into dollars, Smart Calling will help you push past the obstacles holding you back until you're an expert at taking a "no" and turning it into a "yes."

Part ONE
The Smart Calling Concept

CHAPTER 1
Cold Calling Is Dumb, but Prospecting Is Necessary
Smart Calling Is the Answer

Cold calling. Just hearing the term causes chest-tightening anxiety for many people.

It may trigger the memory and distaste caused by a telemarketer who, three seconds after you answered the phone, mispronounced your name and robotically read a poorly written script, trying to pitch you something you’d never be a prospect for.

Few people can argue that cold calling is pleasant.

The mere notion of cold calling arouses fear, which is why most people are reluctant to do it. Add that to the fact that many cold callers lack the knowledge and ability to do it well. They think their only option is to rely on the cheesy, sleazy, salesy-sounding techniques that make people instinctively reject them.

There’s also this crazy notion that to sell over the phone, you should love rejection. Tell me how that would be possible in the real world?

Making cold calls is distasteful—and it’s dumb. In fact, after finishing this book, I want you to never use those words again when referring to professional telephone prospecting.

The great news is that soon you will be able to confidently call people you don’t know, who are not expecting your call, engage them in a conversation, and interest them in speaking with you—and ultimately buying from you. Imagine never having to place a cold call again.

But how will you know what never to do again, and what to absolutely do instead? Let’s begin by defining a cold call: It takes place when a salesperson calls someone he does not know, and—with little or no information about the prospect—robotically dials number after number, giving the same pitch to everyone who answers.

Of course, these calls are destined for failure. To illustrate the absurdity of the concept, let’s look at this scenario: An entertainment writer is assigned an interview with Beyoncé.

He begins his conversation with the world-renowned personality by saying: “So Ms. Beyoncé … or is it, um, just Beyoncé … ah, anyway, I’m going to do the same type of interview I’ve done with hundreds of other people. Now, what is it exactly that you do?”

Ridiculous, right? Such a scenario would never take place.

Now imagine this: A sales rep phones a company, gets someone she believes to be a decision maker on the phone, and says, “Hi, I’m Erin Nelson with Able Supply. We sell maintenance supplies. I’d like to tell you about our products and talk about becoming a vendor for you. Now, what is it that your company does?”

Though equally absurd, conversations like these occur every day—I know because I get them regularly. Unprepared salespeople blindly make phone calls, using tired, old-school sales techniques, hoping that because they picked up the phone and made a call that they will find someone who will agree to do what they want.

But hoping is clearly not enough.

Why Telephone Prospecting Is Both Essential, Profitable, and Still Works

Now that we have thoroughly trashed the concept of cold calling, let’s get something else perfectly clear: Telephone prospecting is essential for business sustainability and growth.

That’s right. Prospecting by phone is a necessary part of new business acquisition and growth.

Ideally, it’s not the only way, but it’s a vital component of the model. Businesses that merely react—waiting for the phone to ring, hoping a prospect will reach out because of a brilliant tweet, for web orders to stream in, while relying on business from existing customers—are not nearly as successful as those who employ proactive telephone prospecting as part of the mix.

Think about it: Every business has customers who quit buying for lots of reasons—bankruptcy, downsizing, switching vendors, death, lack of attention from the vendor, and more. Therefore, you need to replace that business just to stay even. If you hope to grow, you need to add even more clients. And telephone prospecting can do that for you—quickly.

Of course, it needs to be done in the right way—the Smart Calling way—as we’ll discuss soon.

Of course, there are detractors out there, people who believe that prospecting is dead. They use the term cold calling in their denouncements, but they usually are referring to phone prospecting in general. Some of these anti-cold-calling gurus have made names for themselves and profited by preying on the fear of cold calling.

Many of them are pushing their own programs on “social selling,” “email marketing,” “content marketing,” or whatever shiny fad makes people who are afraid of the phone feel good about themselves by doing something else instead.

These resources typically suggest either getting people to refer you to decision makers, creating social media and inbound marketing strategies and campaigns, writing lots of online content, or doing old-fashioned direct marketing to generate leads so that people contact you.

All of those activities accomplish certain objectives, and they are preferable to cold calling, given a choice. If you have the time, ability, and money to engage in those types of marketing programs to generate leads, I suggest you take advantage of them. They all work, and smart companies realize that there are many avenues that lead to new business. I use them all myself. In fact, I have personally generated millions of dollars in sales from direct-response advertising, a process wherein people I’ve never spoken to simply placed orders with us over the phone, through the mail, and online.

Here’s where I differ with some of the new-to-the-scene gurus: many of them suggest that their method is the only thing you should be doing, and you should not be using the phone.

I suggest you use a mix of them to complement your calling.

In reality, all these forms of marketing are just that: marketing. And when a sales rep—whose primary job is to sell—spends precious selling time drafting email campaigns, putting out door hangers, posting on social media sites, and completing other administrative busywork, then he is avoiding his most important function: talking to people. I’ve seen many sales reps who thought they were being productive by sending out email. In fact, they were just busy. In many instances, they were afraid to make the calls, so they deluded themselves into believing that they were engaging in sales behavior, which, in actuality, was avoidance behavior.

I love the environment we operate within today. As I’ll discuss later, social intelligence makes it so easy to place a Smart Call. Even easier than 10 years ago when this book first came out. And many forms of social media make it easier to make ourselves favorably visible to our prospects, to connect, and even frame a positive premise in the prospect’s mind before speaking with her. We’ll touch on those later. But despite what the “social selling” crowd wants you to believe, these techniques are not selling. When someone gets too caught up in ancillary activity and makes it their main focus, it is time that is not being devoted to your most high-value activity: talking to another human, in real time, speaking with your voice.

Mike Weinberg, author of the great books New Sales. Simplified., Sales Management. Simplified., and #SalesTruth says it perfectly: “Sales is a verb.” He adds, “Top performers in sales don’t wait for anything or anyone … Top performers act … Waiting is the key for new business failure.”

I couldn’t agree more. When you have identified a prospect you feel would be a great customer—someone you just know would benefit wildly from a business relationship—you may very well grow old and poor waiting forever for that person to respond to a marketing campaign.

In fact, one rep, Brian Switzer, shared how that actually happened to him after buying into one of the cold-calling-is-dead programs.

Signing up clients without prospecting to 10–20 strangers? Hell yeah. I was in.

I traded in my calling methods of business development and put that other fella’s plan into action. And when I say put it into action, I mean followed it to a T; no skipped steps, no doing it my way.

And then, crickets. Upfront I told myself to give it a full year to pay off. After one calendar year, it has been by far the worst year of my career. A total disaster. Sale...