How to never fail on another Cold Call -- Guaranteed!

During a recent presentation to a Client’s sales team I was asked how to apply the principles of Trust-Paced Selling to their least-liked and least-successful client acquisition activity – cold calling.

I gave the team a guaranteed method to ensure they never made another unsuccessful “cold call” – whether by telephone, email or face-to-face visit.

Here’s the method – Never, ever make another “cold call”. Remove the activity, totally and permanently, from your vocabulary, and your client acquisition process.

The definition of “cold” (relating to other than temperature) includes :-
“lacking in passion, emotion, enthusiasm”, “not affectionate, cordial or friendly”, “unresponsive”, “depressing, dispiriting” and “ineffective”.

What business owner or sales manager would want their sales team to attempt an initial contact with a new prospect that conformed with any part of that definition of “cold”?

So, does that mean I’m proposing you never again initiate contact with a prospect within your target market?

That depends on your marketing effectiveness.

Peter Drucker declared “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous”. So until your marketing activities provide the quality and quantity of incoming enquiries from prospects within your target market to achieve all your business growth objectives, contacts will need to be initiated by your sales team – but no “cold” contacts please!

Ultimate sales success is an ongoing business relationship based on mutual Trust, where the seller authentically places higher value on the relationship than the next transaction. A relationship based on a genuine “fit” between the buyer’s needs and the seller’s solution.

The single most powerful variable affecting trustworthiness in new business relationships is the perceived level of self-orientation of the seller.

The traditional cold call script or pitch is a perfect example of seller-orientation – emphasising the seller’s expertise, without the necessary pre-call investigation to “invert the focus” and pinpoint a specific need of the prospect, which your proposed solution addresses.

It is often said that “selling is a numbers game”, in other words – “Don’t worry about the quality of the conversations you initiate – just make a high quantity of calls, and a few will proceed to a sale”. Cold calling is a numbers game, and the numbers don’t add up.

Every initial contact should be a mini version of the steps of the Trust Building Sales Process:-
T – Talk to me.
R – Really listen.
U – Unanimous on Issues.
S – Share the future
T – Take action.
For more explanation , see the August 30 post entitled Trust Paced Selling, http://business-trust-relationships.blogspot.com/2010/08/trust-paced-selling.html

So the bottom line is this. Until you identify an issue, problem or challenge specifically relating to the prospect you are intending to phone, email or visit – and you are able to propose and deliver a viable solution --DON’T phone, email or visit!

Does that mean your sales team will make a lot less initial contacts? Certainly.

Does it mean they will initiate two-way conversations leading to a lot more commercially satisfying business relationships based on mutual Trust and authentic customer orientation? Even more certainly.

In the next post the principles of Trust-Paced Selling will be applied to the handling of incoming enquiries.