Red-Hot Cold Call Selling

Prospecting Techniques That Really Pay Off

Paul S. Goldner

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780814473481
• eBook ISBN: 9780814429532
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

This guidebook is a vital resource for all sales professionals, brimming with field-proven techniques that work in any industry.

Completely revised with fresh examples and all new chapters, the second edition of Red-Hot Cold Call Selling reveals the secrets, strategies, and tips you can use to elevate your prospecting skills and take their sales into the stratosphere. You will learn how you can:

• define and target your ideal market -- and stop squandering time, energy, and money on unfocused prospecting
• develop a personalized script utilizing all the elements of a successful cold call
• get valuable information from assistants -- and then get past them
• view voice mail not as a frustrating barrier, but as a unique opportunity

Red-Hot Cold Call Selling includes new information on using the Internet for research and prospecting; cold-calling internationally; using e-mail instead of calling; and much more.

Prospecting

An Essential Element to Your Selling Success

Not too long ago, our company had the honor of working with one of the largest banks in the world. We were working with their mortgage business here in the United States. Their business has enjoyed a significant boom since the turn of the century as interest rates declined to historic lows.

The company was often reaching its annual sales goals by April or May. And this was done in the absence of a proactive sales effort. This is not to degrade the sales organization in any way. The company had a great team. It's just that inbound demand for its products was so high that the loan officers had no time for a real proactive sales effort. Many of the loan consultants could be found at their desks at 11:00 P.M., still processing inbound loan applications.

Management of the company was concerned. There were a number of loan officers in the company who had never worked in other than a declining interest rate environment. What would happen when rates started to rise? Would the younger loan consultants even know how to sell in this type of an environment?

So, the bank brought us in to help it develop and implement a proactive new-business development process. This was its strategy to respond to a rising interest rate environment that was inevitable. Even though the bank brought us in to help, managers wanted to understand exactly how our programs and processes would help them face their dilemma. In fact, when you are in the training business, you always get asked about the results your programs will generate. Everyone knows that training is good for individuals, but its impact is often not apparent unless their progress is tracked.

Our client was no different. Bank managers wanted to know what results our programs would generate. After all, we were going to train their entire mortgage sales organization here in the United States. This would be a risky, costly, and time-consuming exercise for them. They have every right to ask this question. And it is incumbent upon us to have a valid answer.

The answer to this question is, of course, to track the progress of the sales organization. We are going to provide you with the methodology we used to do this later in the book so that you can track your own results; if you are a sales manager, vice president of sales, or business owner, you can track the results of your team.

However, at this point, it is sufficient to know that we were simply going to track the progress of the people in the program.

If you were to consider the prospecting process, it might have the following steps:

1. Pick up the phone and dial the number you are trying to call.
2. Speak to the person you intended to speak with.
3. Get a face-to-face selling appointment; or, if you are in telesales, enter the telephone discovery or needs assessment process, which is your equivalent of the face-to-face sales call.
4. Develop a proposal. Here, a proposal is simply a solution that you offer to customers that they can purchase. It doesn't have to be lengthy and written. It can be brief and even verbal. The key concept for you to understand is that, on the basis of your proposal, long or short, written or verbal, the customer or prospect has something she can buy,
5. Win or close a sale on the basis of your proposal from step 4.

The first action item that we asked the sellers to complete, after doing their market intelligence research (which we are going to talk about extensively later in this book in Chapter 5, on Smart Prospecting), is to actually pick up the phone five times a day and dial the phone so that it rings. That's it.

We asked them to pick up the phone, press the appropriate buttons, and make the phone ring. It didn't even matter if someone at the other end picked up the phone. The goal was is simply to make the phone ring.

Before we talk more about what we saw, I want to share an interesting insight with you. When we started working with this company, most of its sales force was not doing any prospecting. Inbound demand for the company's products was so significant that the sales force had no time to focus on new-business development. However, things were going to change!

I am used to making many calls a day when I prospect. Sometimes, when I tell executive management teams what my expectations are, they think I am out of my mind.

If you are essentially doing no prospecting, suddenly switching to doing a lot of prospecting can be overwhelming. An easy-to-understand analogy is to imagine you have never run in the past and you are going to take up running to get yourself in shape. Depending on your current physical condition, you may start out with a quarter mile or maybe just a little bit more.

The level of prospecting that I was recommending to the bank seemed like an unattainable goal. So, we negotiated with executive management and came up with the idea of making five calls per day. Five calls a day is a very attainable goal. In addition, if one sales person makes five calls a day, he makes 25 calls a week. Assuming there are 50 workweeks in a year, just to make the math easy for all of us to see and understand, the same sales professional makes 1,250 incremental prospecting or new-business calls per year.

Let me ask you a simple question. Let's say that you made 1,250 incremental new-business development calls this year. Do you think you would sell more this year than last? Of course you would. In fact, you would sell a lot more than you did last year.

Prospecting is a highly leveragable way to spend your time as a sales professional. For a small increment in effort (five calls a day), you can have a major impact on your business over the course of a year (1,250 incremental calls per year).

There are two other things you can learn from this.

First, if you can't make five calls a day, make four calls a day. And, if you can't make four, make three. If you can't make three, make two; and if you can't make two, make one incremental prospecting or new-business development call a day.

Never go down to zero. That is simply unacceptable.

If you make the one incremental call per day, that amounts to five calls per week and 250 calls per year. Even that will have a major impact on your business.

The second thing is also very simple.

Once you figure out that you can make one call per day, try to make two calls per day. The incremental effort on your part is minimal, and the impact on your business is significant.

When you make the incremental one call, whom are you helping? You are helping yourself. The only possible outcome of making more calls is that you will make more money. I'm sure that is one of the reasons that you entered sales. In sales, there is really no limit to your success.

When we implemented this system at the bank, the first thing that I noticed was that the sales force started to make some calls—not as many as I would have liked, but they did get the process started. Just by calling, they were able to speak with decision makers, the next step in the prospecting process. These were the primary results we observed in the first month of the implementation—dials and completed calls. Next came month two, and the process continued. More calls were made, and more calls were completed; however, the important difference between month one and month two was that the sales organization was now going on to many face-to-face meetings, the third step in the prospecting process.

Our client was incredibly pleased with the results, and also surprised. One of the bank's primary objectives in implementing the program was to increase customer face time. In month two of the implementation, we were already doing that.

It is important to note that while our client was surprised, I was not. Prospecting has a very predictable result. It's like anything else. If you put more effort into the process, you achieve a greater result. Any of us who has ever worked out to get into shape, dieted to lose weight, or budgeted to save money for the future knows what I am talking about.

As you work out, you continue to improve your conditioning. As you diet, you continue to lose weight, and as you save for your future, your money grows and grows. In fact, it was Albert Einstein who said that his greatest discovery was the compounding of interest. What he learned was that as you save money, your savings grow as a result of the process. However, what Einstein was talking about was that the saving process actually takes on a life of its own through the compounding of interest. Your money actually starts to work for you.

Believe it or not, prospecting is no different. As you continue to prospect, the process takes on a life of its own. Your prospects start to recognize you and your company, they start to admire your persistence, and you develop recognition in the market that you could not achieve otherwise. In fact, the more you prospect, the easier it gets.

So, in month two, the meetings started to happen. In month three, we saw a lot of new proposals being issued, and by month four, the sales started to happen. There was no magic here. All that we observed was the prospecting process in action.

I like to say that selling success is the only possible outcome of the prospecting process. Be aware, however, that your success will never be immediate. As you can see from the case study that I am sharing with you, it took several months for the process to start. This is what we call the sales cycle. Unfortunately, you can't make up your mind to sell today and start to generate significant revenue today. It takes time, and this time, again, is called the sales cycle. As you can see from the example, sales started to happen in a significant and predictable way in month four. An average sales cycle is usually four to six months long. It can be shorter if the dollar value of the sale is lower, and it can be longer if the dollar value of the sale is extremely significant.

There is one other interesting observation that I would like to make. As you can see from the sales cycle and the example that we just reviewed, it takes four to six months, on average, for the benefits of prospecting to start to impact your business. What I would like to do now is discuss what happens when you forget the basics and stop prospecting.

When you stop prospecting, you will still have a pipeline of prospects from your old prospecting efforts. However, the pipeline will get smaller and smaller because you are not filling the pipeline with new prospects (since you stopped prospecting). Eventually, the pipeline will dry up, and you will have only your current opportunities to work one. This is the single worst place a sales professional can be—working only on current opportunities.

Eventually, your current opportunities will all come to closure as you either win or lose the sale. And what happens next? You will be left with very little to do. You will have few or no current opportunities to work on, and you will have no new opportunities because you ceased prospecting many months ago. So, you are going to be faced with a significant revenue challenge. You will have no revenue, and you will have nowhere to go to start immediately generating revenue. This tells you that prospecting must be part of your daily activities, no matter what.

You can always justify not prospecting in your mind. You will probably say to yourself and your manager that you are too busy working on your current opportunities. But when you say this, it is as if you are saying that you are going to the gym to exercise and then stopping at the ice cream parlor, instead. You are engaging in activities that will not lead you to your long-term goals. Sure, the ice cream tastes good now, and, sure, life is better when you don't prospect (at least it's easier), but over the long run, you will be a lot better off if you exercise and if you prospect than if you kid yourself with false ideas.

There is one other interesting point here.

When you are in the position of having no current opportunities to work on and no future opportunities to work on, you always come up with the same idea—prospecting! The only problem is that you should have thought about prospecting months before you got into this position. It's too late to start now. It's clearly better than nothing, but you can see now that your revenue stream is about four to six months over the horizon.

Prospecting and business development are possibly the most crucial elements in your selling success formula. Most salespeople realize this. However, most salespeople do not enjoy prospecting and try to minimize the time spent in this area.

As you will see, if you are not successful at prospecting, it's unlikely you'll be a successful salesperson, but if you are, you will undoubtedly be successful in one of the most challenging and rewarding careers this country has to offer. Let's see why.

Steps in the Sales Cycle

A sample sale cycle might have the following steps:

1. Planning
2. Prospecting
3. Meeting
4. Recommending
5. Closing
6. Servicing

Although you will clearly be more effective if you plan your sales activities, planning is not a prerequisite to prospecting. You can always take a copy of the local yellow pages (as I have done), begin with the As, and continue on until you reach the end of your selling career. This strategy will not maximize the return on the time you invest in the sales process, but it will allow you to move forward.

Prospecting, on the other hand, is clearly a prerequisite to the remainder of the selling cycle. If you are not effective at prospecting or business development, you will never have the opportunity to be effective at any remaining element in the sales process. You will never be able to meet prospects, recommend appropriate solutions for their needs, close sales, and provide exceptional postsale customer service.

Given this fact, you could easily conclude that if you are not effective at prospecting, you will not be effective at selling. While the same could be said of any remaining step in the sales cycle, you will clearly reach a premature dead end because of your lack of effectiveness in the prospecting area.

This book is devoted to the fine art of prospecting and business development. Together, we are going travel a path that will completely reengineer your outlook toward business development. As we travel on this journey, one of my goals is to present a few new ideas that will enhance your probability of success in the sales cycle.

Your Path to Success

Enhancing your probability of success in the sales cycle is a crucial point. Sales is a highly competitive business. It should come as no surprise that if you are not calling on your customers and prospects, someone else will be. Accordingly, it is critical that you obtain every possible edge. During my studies of sales and motivation, I have learned that the differences between the winners and losers, the top performers and the average performers, are not large. Rather, the top performers in a given field are doing things just slightly better than the others in their profession. In sales, for example, the top producers might make that one extra call or attend that one extra sales meeting. Although the difference in performance is not substantial, the difference in income for the top performers can be significant.

Consider Jack Nicklaus, perhaps the greatest golfer of all time. During one year in the 1960s, at or near the peak of his skills, Nicklaus earned approximately $400,000 on the PGA tour. There was another golfer on the PGA tour that year, as well. His name was Bob Charles. As a professional, Bob Charles was not as successful as Jack Nicklaus. During that same year, Bob Charles earned approximately $40,000 on the PGA tour; the difference in earnings between Bob Charles and Jack Nicklaus was approximately tenfold (excluding income from endorsements and other revenue-generating activities). It might surprise you to learn that the difference in their respective per-round stroke averages was less than half a stroke. Imagine that! The difference between the greatest golfer of all time and a very good golfer was less than one-half stroke per round.

This phenomenon takes on even more significance in the world of professional selling. After all, Bob Charles still got paid even if he came in second, third, or tenth. Suppose you are competing with another company for a sale. You submit your proposal and feel that you have done the very best you can. Further, you feel that this is one of the very best jobs you have ever done. You call up the prospect to find out his decision. He tells you that you wrote an excellent proposal and did a really great job of understanding his needs. Then he tells you that had it not been for this other company, you would have won the work. Your proposal was second best.

How much revenue does your company earn when you come in second? How much commission do you earn when your company comes in second? The answer to both questions is obvious, which is why it is absolutely crucial that you make every effort to give yourself that competitive edge. The recommendations in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Prospecting: An Essential Element to Your Selling Success
• 2. What Is Prospecting?
• 3. The Power of Prospecting
• 4. Becoming Rejection-Proof
• 5. Smart Prospecting
• 6. The 10 Commandments of Prospecting
• 7. Anatomy of a Cold Call
• 8. Your Prospecting and Business-Development Strategy
• 9. Handling Objections
• 10. Working With Voice Mail and Administrative Assistants
• 11. Public Relations: How to Make Your Prospects Come to You
• 12. How to Leverage Your Success
• 13. Tracking Your Progress
• Conclusion: Final Thoughts: The Four Teps to Success
• Bibliography
• Index