When you publish a blog post on a company website, at some point search engines will likely scan the blog post and index it. When that happens, they will identify what topics the blog post pertains to and they will basically catalog it. After this point, when someone puts in keyword searches into the search engine that relate to the topic that your post is tied to, your website can come back in the search results and stand to have that prospect sent to your site.

The higher you come back in those search results, the more prospect leads that you will produce and there are some very clear search engine optimization tactics that can be done to help with your ability to rank high. There are also some very clear things to do when producing the actual blog post to improve its effectiveness at getting in front of target prospects.

Identify the Right Keyword Phrase

It is critical to identify the right keyword phrase that you want search engines to label or associate with your blog post. If you are publishing good blog posts but those are not centered around topics that target prospects would search for, your ability to create prospect leads may be limited.

The first step in this would be to identify the overall topics are related to our products and services. But we cannot stop there as we need to look at two other factors before moving forward:

Level of search activity: It is important to identify how much the keyword phrase is being searched. If a blog post is published and tagged with a perfect phrase, but that phrase is rarely searched, new web traffic will not be produced. Although, you do not want to target keyword phrases that also have a volume of searches as those will be more difficult to rank on.

Level of competition: Another parameter to assess is how much competition there is for the keyword phrase. This is essentially the amount of other companies that are trying to rank on the phrase. If the competition is high, it will be difficult to come up high in the prospect’s search result. Try to find phrases that fit well but have little competition to improve prospect leads.

There are tools available that can provide this information and help you to find the right keyword to target.

Keyword Optimization

Once you find the right keyword phrase, you want to have the blog post optimized for that phrase by having it mentioned the right amount of times and in the right places in the blog post. The rules around this change but some experts say to have the keyword phrase mentioned 1% of the total word count. Having the phrase in the title and in the first and last sentence can help to tell the search engines what to label the post as being tied to.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Prospect Leads or Sales Coaching.

Identify Ideal Prospect

The first step in building a good target list is to identify what our ideal prospect looks like. While we maybe able to sell our products to a large or very diverse market of prospects, it is likely that our products or services fit best or better with a particular segment.

We should identify what this segment looks like in terms of characteristics and build our prospect list around those as focusing primarily on that segment will yield the best results. This does not mean that we will not sell to the other segments, but from an outbound sales perspective, we should focus on the prospects that fit best as they will be more likely to purchase.

To identify what our ideal prospect looks like, we can look at five characteristics and determine what ideal prospects look like for our products or services.

Geography: We need to think about what geographic area we should focus on. Again, we can likely sell our products and services everywhere or at least in a very large area. But if we focused our effort in one particular area, we can improve sales prospecting results.

Size: Identify what size of company fits best with what we have to offer or identify what size of business will be the easiest to do business with. Identifying a range of either annual revenue or employee count is a good way to narrow this down.

Industry: When building a prospect list, identify what industries fit best with your products or services. Is there one or two industries that gain more business value when consuming your products than others?

Title: Identify the best title or individual that you should connect. There is likely a certain individual in the organization in terms of level and functional department that you should focus on.

Current state: A key thing to identify for your prospect list is the ideal current state for your prospects. This would be details for your prospect’s current environment in the area where your products or services fit.

Build Primary List

Once you know what your ideal prospect looks like, you can begin to build a primary target list. This could be a brain dump of all of the prospects that you know about or already have a relationship with. Think of this as your warm list.

Build Secondary List

Once you have gone through or have identified your warm prospects, you can use different services to build a mass cold list. For example, there are services that allow you to build a list by going online an inputting your ideal prospect characteristics and can produce a list of thousands of target prospects in a matter of minutes.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Prospect List or Sales Coaching.

Create Accounts

The very first thing that we need to do when trying to improve our use of social media is to create accounts and profiles on the different social media platforms. This step may not be necessary as many of us might already have accounts on outlets like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Although, we need to be sure to have both personal and business profiles.

As a first step, do an inventory of your social media profiles and add any that are missing. Two social media platforms that are often over looked are Youtube and Wikipedia. These are very social communities and good places to have exposure.

Establish Connections

Once we have all of our accounts and profiles created, we need to work on building our network of connections on each platform to ignite social media. This basically involves increasing our total number of connections, followers, or friends. The more people we are connected with, the more likely we will be to generate leads.

One way to go about this is to send requests to everybody you come across on the platforms regardless of whether you know them or not. One tactic to use here is to try to make your requests more tailored and friendly when possible by sharing that you don’t know each other but you want to connect and give a reason why. Another thing you can add to this are any things you have in common like mutual contacts, work experience, common interest, etc.

Post Regular Updates

To fully ignite social media, we need to be active from a posting updates standpoint. These updates can help to let people know that we are out there and help us to stay fresh in peoples mind and this can help to generate leads.

We want people to see our updates and at the same time we do not want to do is annoy the people we are connected with. To help avoid this, we can focus on four factors:

1. Timing

We are likely connected with people that are located in different parts of the globe. In addition, we all have different routines so we are viewing social media at different times of the day. As a result, we want to post updates at different times of the day so that we can increase our odds of reaching more people.

2. Frequency

It can help to spread out our post updates, not only to help with reaching more people, but also to minimize the possibility of bugging any of our connections.

3. Quantity

There is no correct answer for how many posts are too many as each social media platform is different as is the tolerance for each connection. But we need to figure out what quantity of posts per day makes sense and stick to it.

4. Content

To ignite social media, we need to be strategic in the content that we share in our updates. We don’t want to just post updates about ourselves and our products as that is a very self-absorbed approach. Instead, we want to make the posts primarily about our connections and to do that, we can post updates that inform, help, and entertain our connections.

Interact

The power from using social media can really come in when we increase our level of interactions. This can be accomplished by contributing and communicating inside of groups, commenting and liking update posts, and sending any direct messages when it is appropriate.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Ignite Social Media or Sales Coaching.

When working as a business owner, there are many different hats that you have to wear. In some cases, you have to wear all of the hats – you might be in charge of sales, HR, legal, operations, marketing, accounting, finance, etc. On top of all that, you have a life to live and might have responsibilities in the family department as well as personal interests.

This can be a heavy load and one way to deal with this is to break down the week into different compartments where we focus primarily in one area that we have responsibility over and minimize our thoughts and attention in the other areas during that time. This is explained more as we talk about some of the main compartments that can be built, but this concept cannot only improve focus and effectiveness, it can also decrease stress.

Accounting

Who really enjoys accounting? It could be debated whether many accountants really enjoy accounting. Yet, there are tremendous accounting needs that need to be taken care of when building your business. There is a decent amount of accounting work that needs to be done when getting a business going and there is always a decent amount of work that needs to be done each week and month on an ongoing basis.

One way to not only keep the books straight and clean, but to also decrease some stress that can be created by this area, is to set aside some time each week where everything else is shut down and the focus is put on the accounting work that needs to be completed.

Sales

Sales is likely something that you need to do everyday and all day when building your business as you likely always need to be out there meeting prospects in order to be successful. But even if you are always selling in some way or another, it can help to block out some time that is dedicated primarily to sales. Especially if cold calling can help with your sales, setting aside time that is to be spent solely on picking up the phone can greatly help.

Marketing

Two key marketing tactics for building your business might be search engine optimization and social media. While these two tactics can be highly effective, they can also be extremely time consuming. Setting time aside side specifically for blogging, improving the website, and ignite social media can help to make sure enough time gets spent in this area.

Physical Fitness

A personal compartment that is very important and helpful is to have one for physical fitness. Building a business can sometimes mean working everyday and sometimes all day. When this is the case, this can take a toll on both your mind and your body. To help with this, you can set time aside to turn everything off and focus on working on you and your body.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Building your Business or Sales Coaching.

1. Focus on the Right Goal

One of the first things that we can focus on to improve results is to focus on the right goal while cold calling prospects. This is important because we can naturally fall into the trap of trying to sell our products and services while on a cold call. While our ultimate goal is to sell our products, this actually might not be the best goal for us to work on during a cold call as it in some ways is too ambitious for a cold call.

A cold call should only last between two to five minutes and with that being the case, we can benefit from focusing on a goal that fits well with that amount of time. Since we cannot completely and effectively sell our products during a cold call, a good goal to focus on is one of getting the prospect interested in and committed to a conversation. In other words, a good goal to stay focused on is getting the appointment set.

2. Build Rapport

It is very important to build rapport with prospects. Not only is this important due to the fact that people buy from people they like, but also because prospects are more likely to agree to taking an appointment with someone that they have a decent level of rapport with.

A cold call does not present at tremendous amount of time to build rapport, but there is enough time to use a few tactics to start to establish rapport. By doing some things like respecting the prospects time, showing that we understand the prospect, listening, disqualifying, and qualifying, we can take some minor steps toward building rapport.

3. Qualify the Prospect

Spending time and energy in the area of qualifying the prospect will have some noticeable impacts on getting the appointment set. At first, qualifying will actually have a negative impact on our number of appointments that we get confirmed as we will be becoming more selective of the appointments we make by asking performing more thorough qualifying. This is not a bad thing as it can decrease time wasted on unqualified prospects.

But by qualifying prospects during cold calls, we will actually create much better conversations with prospects as we will be asking questions and making prospects more interested and engaged in what we are calling about. Without qualifying questions, a cold call can be very one way in terms of information sharing and those are the type of conversations that make a prospect’s guard go up and can make them shut down.

4. Build Interest

Before we try to get the appointment set, we need to build interest. It is similar to trying to reel in a fish. When a fish has a hook in its mouth, we need to get it to bite down before we can try to reel in. With scheduling appointments, we need to get the prospect to bite down when we try to get commitment to move forward.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Appointment Set or Sales Coaching.

But the reality is that we do have control over rapport as there are some very clear and easy to implement things that we can do to build and trigger stronger connections with others.

1. Display Humility

An example of one thing that we can do to create a better connection with clients is to display humility. This is a little counterintuitive as we have always been taught to act confident and assertive when dealing with clients. Displaying humility is somewhat the opposite of that as this would be presenting us as more modest, human, and capable of making mistakes or not knowing everything.

Of course when working in sales, we want to be confident in whom we are, in the products we sell, and confident in the company we work for. But to show the client at different times that we are human and in some ways very normal or average can help to create a more friendly and personal relationship.

2. Compliment the Competition

Another counterintuitive tactic for building rapport with clients is to give a compliment to the competition. An example of this would be to share something that the competition is good at if the client shares that they are currently or are considering doing business with the competitor. Of course we will want to follow this up with some areas where the competition might have weaknesses or where we clearly have strengths over them.

By sharing something positive about the competition, we will accomplish some very clear and powerful things in that exact moment. First, we will display a tremendous amount of confidence in ourselves and our products if we are not afraid to share something good about the competition.

Secondly, we will present ourselves as more of an advisor than as sales person as we will be sharing valuable and what appears to be unbiased information. We will also improve our level of credibility if we are sharing what is good about the competition, we will appear to be more genuine and trustable with what we are sharing about our company and products.

3. Disqualify the Client

Sticking with the counterintuitive theme, disqualifying can help with building rapport with clients. By doing this, we are likely to instantly decrease the client’s guard as they may view us as looking out for their best interest. By making the client feel like we are putting their interest before our primary interest of closing sales, we are likely to positively impact the level of rapport.

4. Understand the Client

We as humans have an internal need to be understood. When we are able to make a client feel like we understand them in terms of their challenges, what their goals are, and what they are trying to say, we will take huge strides toward building rapport with clients. Some of the tactics next will help us to sub-communicate to clients that we understand them.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Building rapport with clients or Sales Coaching.

1. Focus on your core value

The very first step in improving outbound sales is to clearly identify the core value that you have to offer the prospects you will be calling. This is the business value that transfers from you to your clients when they purchase your products or services.

Not only is this important as it should likely feed into your script and objections responses, but having a clear awareness around the value that you have to offer can also improve your mental state while cold calling.

This is because we can easily have a needy frame of mind when calling because of all the pressure to close deals. But when we focus on the value that we deliver, we can transition from neediness to confidence.

2. Identify the ideal prospect

It is very important to clearly identify what your ideal prospect looks like. We cannot and should not try to sell to everybody as there is likely a segment of the market that fits better than others.

By identifying what this segment looks like in terms of geography, size, industry, and contact title can help to create a laser focus for the prospects that you should spend your valuable time on when figuring out how to make outbound calls.

3. Identify differentiation

Regardless of what you sell, you will face competition. Even if there is no direct competition in the market or in the actual deal that you are working on, you still compete against the prospect’s option to do nothing. Figuring out how you differ from the competition is a key step when looking into how to make outbound calls.

4. Develop a call script

During outbound sales, we could just wing it on every call and just say what comes to our mind at the time. Or we can develop some sort of cold call script or plan. This could be as detailed as a script that we read word for word or it could be something that is more of an outline with key points. Either way, having a document that has your thoughts organized can greatly improve your probability for successful calls.

5. Prepare for objections

You are guaranteed to run up against objections on every cold call. These are statements that the prospect will make to try to end the call. The better we are prepared to deal with these, the more success that we will have when improving our knowledge around how to make outbound calls.

6. Reflect back to improve moving forward

One of the most important steps to improve outbound calling actually takes place after the call as it involves reflecting back after a call ends to evaluate what took place to improve moving forward.

You can look back at questions that could have been asked, look back at objections that the prospect delivered, and identify what could have been done better. Going through this routine after each call can greatly improve your success on future calls.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about How to Make Outbound Calls or Sales Coaching.

If things are just OK or could be better, pain could exist and getting the conversation focused on this pain will yield strong benefits. On the other side of that scenario, if things are great or if we are not able to find pain, there will be some very powerful factors that will go against everything that we try to do while cold calling.

Gets the Prospect’s Attention

When you are on a cold call, one of the most effective ways to help establish the call and keep it going is to get the prospect’s attention and uncovering pain will help tremendously with this. By getting the conversation centered around what the prospect is having trouble with, we will greatly increase our likelihood of grabbing and keeping the prospect’s attention.

On the flip side of that, if we try to establish a cold call and the topic of discussion is not connected to any area of pain or priority, we are not going to be building a conversation that is interesting and attention grabbing for the prospect.

Connection with the Prospect

When trying to improve selling, we can increase our interactions by making people feel like we understand what they are trying to say and understand where they are coming from. When we are able to talk about a prospect’s pain on a cold call, we can sub-communicate to them that we understand them. This minor step will enable us to begin to build a connection and rapport with the prospect.

Collect Valuable Information

Being able to get the cold call focused on the prospect’s pain will make the call more productive from an information gathering standpoint and this can help with to improve selling. Even if the call does not go anywhere in terms of commitment or action, if we are able to gather some key details around pain that is being experienced in the organization or in the business, we will have made the conversation productive as we can use this information in our strategy and in future conversations, presentations, proposals, etc.

Qualification

If we are not able to identify any pain that the prospect has, that means that everything is going well for the prospect. If things are going well, there will not be a significant amount of motivation to make a change. If there is not motivation to make a change, even if the prospect shows a level of interest, the lead or opportunity might not be qualified.

Even if the prospect is available to attend demos and meetings, when it comes time for them to pull the trigger in terms of making a commitment or spending money, the deal may stall or get killed because there might not be enough motivation due to the lack of pain. As a result, uncovering pain is a key step to qualifying the lead and prospect and this can help to improve selling.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Improve Selling or Sales Coaching.

To use an sporting analogy, if we were fishing, at the point where we get the prospect talking about pain is where the hook is inside the mouth of the fish. But before we begin to try to reel in the fish, we want to try to get the fish to bite down on the hook. If we do not, we could begin to reel in before we really have anything on the hook.

Connect Pain to Value

One of the most powerful ways to build interest is to connect any of the prospect’s pain with value that you have to offer. Essentially sharing with them a way that you can decrease or eliminate their pain. If you are able to successfully do this, closing for a first conversation should be fairly straightforward and easy.

Deliver Silver Bullets

Another way to try to create interest is to fire some silver bullets at the prospect. These are key points that are company facts, product characteristics, competitive advantages, ROI statics, etc.

A good way to handle this is to have list of silver bullet type of facts or details in your call script or call outline. Then when you get to the point in the call where you want to try to trigger interest, you fire a few of the points off at the prospect.

Examples of silver bullets could be:

We have been in business for 30 years (company facts)
We are a local provider (company facts)
We have a full portfolio of solutions (product characteristics)
Our products have won awards for the past three years (product characteristics)
Our products are easier to get up and running and use (competitive advantages)
We have award winning service and support (competitive advantages)
We helped many companies in the chemical industry to decrease cost of goods sold by between 10 to 15% (ROI statics)

An important detail on using silver bullets to build interest is to not read through them like it is a list features on a brochure. Have the list in front of you and pick a couple that you feel might resonate well with the prospect based on what they have shared so far. If the conversation up until that point has not uncovered enough information to where you know what points fit best, just share the three that you think are most attention getting.

Tell a Story

One very effective way to build interest on a cold call is to tell a story about another client that you have worked with. If you can paint a picture in the prospect’s mind by telling a story of another company that had similar challenges and needs and then briefly explain how you help to drive positive improvements and share where the company ended up in terms of results, you can make large strides in terms of building interest.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Build Interest or Cold Call Training.

According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we have a level of needs called “Love and Belonging” and this is where we have a need to be accepted by others. This need is very important to us and according to Maslow’s model, this is a need that we put right behind or after physical safety and security.

When we experience rejection, we take a fairly negative hit in that area of needs and this can cause us significant emotional and mental discomfort. To avoid this mental pain, we consciously and subconsciously avoid situations where we may experience rejection.

If you can relate to this feeling and you can see the potential connection with approach anxiety, the first step to effectively dealing with or decreasing it is to simply become more aware of what it is and why it occurs. From there, there are some very clear things that we can do to improve our ability to deal with sales rejection.

1. It is Not Personal

We need to keep in mind that when someone says “no” and rejects our cold call, they are rejecting the sale and not us as a person. It is nothing personal against us or anything about us personally as they likely do not know who we are or anything about us. This may sound silly to point out, but our first natural reaction to sales rejection on a cold call can often be to take the rejection personally in some way.

2. There is no Physical Pain

We can sometimes look at the phone and dread picking it up and making calls due to the potential for sales rejection. But one thing to keep in mind is that there is not any physical pain that can result from cold call rejection. The worst thing that can happen is to get hung up on. And there is really no real impact on us when that happens.

3. Not Everybody can be a Fit for Our Products

If we are cold calling to sell a product, there is no possible way that everybody that we call is going to be a qualified prospect. There are just likely a set of requirements or characteristics that make someone a good prospect and it is simply not likely that everybody that we reach will fit well. As a result, we have to get rejection from most of the people that we encounter from the segment of prospects that are simply not a fit for what we sell.

4. We are Still Accomplishing Something

When someone rejects us, it may hurt and feel like we are wasting our time. But the reality is that even when someone hangs up on us or says “no”, we are still accomplishing something as we can now take that person off of our list of people to call. Every “no” gets us one step closer to a “yes”.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Sales Rejection or Sales Coaching.