Cold Calling Tip #1: Prospecting Is a Game
/About 10% of us like to make cold calls the rest of us don’t like doing it at all. You can get better at making these kinds of sales calls and they don’t have to be drudgery. This is the first of several tips from Joe Friedman on how to make your cold calling more effective.
Cold Calling Is a Game
Transcript
In this segment, I want to talk a little bit about cold calling or prospecting or making introductory calls. We don’t distinguish between any of those three. And yet it is a part of the sales process that most people really don’t like.
I would say in our experience about 10% of people that we come into contact with love prospecting. And 90% of us really don’t like it at all. We teach it. I do this as part of my job in selling. But it is not one of my favorite things on the planet to do.
Why is that?
- Number one, it’s hard work.
- There’s the amount of rejection that we all get and nobody likes that at all.
- People think it just doesn’t work.
Well, I can tell you depending upon the sales cycles that exist for your products, it does work. It takes time. It takes effort. And you have to look at it as a game. In most cases, the behavior that you will use when you get face to face with someone is 180 degrees different from the behavior you use when you’re prospecting or cold calling.
It is a game. You have to be tenacious. The game is cat and mouse. They are the mouse. You are the cat. Our job as sellers is to pursue those people to force our foot into the door to find a way to get face to face with them. And as a result, you have to look at prospecting as a game.
Here are some other tips and topics on Selling Skills from Joe Friedman:
Previous Cold Calling Tips...
Cold Calling Tip #1: Prospecting Is a Game
Cold Calling Tip #2: Why Even Make Cold Calls?
Cold Calling Tip #3: How to Make a Cold Call Warmer
Cold Calling Tip #4: Plan Your Cold Calls
Cold Calling Tip #5: Value to “Them” Gets You in the Door
Cold Calling Tip #6: A Positioning Statement Puts Your Best Foot Forward
Cold Calling Tip #7: Handling Resistance to Meeting
Cold Calling Tip #8: Make Them an Offer They Can't Refuse
Cold Calling Tip #9: Be CHARMing When You Get Resistance Cold Calling
Cold Calling Tip #11: Handling the Objection “I’ve Got No Time”
Cold Calling Tip #12: Three Last Gasps for When All Else Fails
Related Topics...
Socratic Selling Skills: How Socrates Sold
Buyers Should Talk More?! Selling Is Not Telling (revisited)
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Joe Friedman
Joe has over 20 years experience in sales, training, and consulting. Selling and delivering training is Joe’s passion. Joe’s career path has taken him from the faculty at Northeastern Illinois University to First Chicago, to another training firm before joining his friend David (who kept calling, and calling, and calling) to form ZEHREN♦FRIEDMAN.