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.

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.

After a cold call ends, it can be very productive to stop for a minute to reflect on how the call went in an attempt to identify what could have done better. While there are many different scenarios that we can come across, they tend to recur again and again. With that being the case, if we can consciously reflect on what happened on the previous call and identify what we could have done better, then we can improve our ability to handle similar scenarios that occur on future calls.

We are likely to face objections on every cold call. And whether the objection brought the call to an end or not, it can be helpful to reflect on the objections that a prospect used so that we can improve and be better moving forward.

1. Reflect on the Objection

It can be very helpful to reflect back during outbound sales to identify what objections the prospect had. Ideally, if there is one that brought the call to end, that is a productive place to spend time and energy. Once you identify the objections, reconcile those with your list of anticipated objections. If you faced any that are not on the list and you think it is likely that they may come up again, this would be a good time to get them added so that you can begin to be more prepared on future calls.

2. Reflect on the Response

The next thing that we should do in this process is to reflect on how we responded to the objections. Were there better responses that we could have given to keep the call going? If the objections were on the list of anticipated objections, it can be good to look at whether or not we delivered a response that was part of our plan and if we followed the plan. We can also reflect on how the prospect responded to our objection response to measure how well our response worked in our effort to keep the call going during outbound sales.

3. Strategize Moving Forward

Once we have evaluated both the objections we faced and the responses we gave, we can strategize how best to handle objections on future calls. If we already had a responses scripted, this step may involve adjusting or tweaking our plan. If there are new objections encountered, this step could involve building responses for the new objections moving forward.

By stopping to look back after each call during outbound sales, we will can greatly increase our ability to be prepared for all of the different directions that calls go moving forward.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with individuals and organizations helping to drive growth and improvement. For more information about driving positive results, please visit Launch Pad you can read more about Outbound Sales or Sales Coaching.

Those goals are great, and if you are a true sales person, having difficulty with not getting lured in by the “trying to sell something” temptation is understandable. But due to the amount of time to work with, a cold call is not the right place to try to accomplish a tremendous amount. As a result, we can improve results by keeping our focus on the main goal of moving the prospect to an appointment or conversation where we have more time to work with and are able to accomplish large goals.

What is the First Conversation?

The first conversation is the stage of the sales cycle where the sales person and the prospect have a first official conversation. This could get confused with the cold call as that is the first time that the caller and prospect are talking but it is not an official conversation until the prospect officially agrees to talk in more detail.

In an ideal scenario, the sales person will connect with a prospect on a cold call and at that point communicate why they are calling and why it may makes sense to talk in more detail. Once the prospect agrees to talk more, the sales cycle progresses to the first conversation.

In some instances it may be best to schedule the first conversation for another day where the prospect can be more ready and available for the discussion, both from a mental and schedule standpoint possibly by formally blocking out time on their calendar. Although, there are some instances when performing sales telephone calls where the prospect is available and interested in talking more at the actual time of the cold call and the first conversation takes place at the same time (technically right after) as the cold call. It will depend on the product or service being sold as to whether it is best to schedule the first conversation at another date or try to execute it right away.

Cold Call vs. First Conversation

It may be confusing what the difference is between a cold call and a first conversation and where one leaves off for the other. A cold call when performing sales telephone calls should be designed to only be between two to five minutes. During that time, there should be a laser focus on communicating business value, qualifying the prospect, identifying pain, and building some interest.

You really should skim the surface in those areas and once you complete what you need to do in each area, it is time to transition to closing to secure the first conversation. One of the reasons a transition is needed is that you likely have eaten up most of the time that is available for a cold sales telephone calls. As a result, you now need to get permission from the prospect to continue.

You can get this permission by checking in with the prospect and identifying if they are available and interested to continue. Based on the product you sell and the vibe from the prospect, you can then determine if it is best to execute the first conversation right then or try to schedule for another day.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with individuals and organizations helping to drive growth and improvement. For more information about driving positive results, please visit Launch Pad you can read more about Sales Telephone Calls or Cold Call Training.

Improve Your Mind

Making sales calls over the phone can be a very mentally challenging and taxing activity. With that being the case, we can improve not only our results, but also our stamina by taking some time and effort to improve our mind. Improving your mind refers to going through some mental steps and exercises to improve your mental state and frame and this can have a positive impact on results.

One thing that we can do to improve our mind is to go through a mental exercise periodically to affirm ourselves on all of the great things that we have to offer the people that we call. It is easy to feel like we need to sell something so when we cold call a prospect we can easily have a needy mental frame or mental state.

But if we stop and think about it, the products we sell offer some sort of business value to our clients. If our products don’t, we have a bigger problem to deal with than trying to figure out how to improve our phone sales calls. If we stop to think about this value, and think about the great qualities of our company and in our personal strengths as a sales professional, we can greatly improve our mind and our mental state.

Improve Your Voice

One we have worked on improving our mind, we can move on to focus on improving our voice. During phone sales calls, the only real thing that we have to communicate with are the words we say and the way we say them. And it is important to be aware that the way we say our words is the much more important and impactful variable in that equation. Supporting this is the saying that it is not what you say, but the way you say it that matters. As result, improving your voice and tonality that can a large impact on your effectiveness selling over the phone.

There are some very clear things that we can do to improve our voice, but the good news is that half of the work is done when we spend time to improve our minds as being in a stronger mental state will come through in your voice and tonality when talking on the phone.

Another simple thing that we can do to improve our voice is to smile when we make phone sales calls. It may sound like wasted effort since the people you are talking to cannot see you, but you can actually hear a difference when someone is smiling as they talk over the phone and this can have a positive impact on sales results.

Invest in Cold Call Training

One of the great things about sales is that there are very specific things that we can do and not do to impact our results. With that being the case, there can usually be a return on investment for time spent in the area of continuing to learn and there is cold call training can typically have an immediate impact on phone sales results.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with individuals and organizations helping to drive growth and improvement. For more information about driving positive results, please visit Launch Pad you can read more about Phone Sales Calls or Cold Call Training.

1. Improve Your Mind

Making outgoing sales calls can be very challenging mentally. This is because we are likely calling people that are not expecting our call and we stand to face some sort of rejection. This can stir up some cold call anxiety that is comparable to how a young man feels at a high school dance when he needs to walk across the dance floor to ask a young woman to dance. In both of these scenarios, there is an awareness that rejection is possible and this can cause a decent level of discomfort.

To decrease this stress and improve your mental state, there are a few things that can be done:

Know your value: It is likely that your business helps customers or clients in some way. It is helpful to be aware of this value that you deliver and have it at the top of your mind when making outgoing calls.

Go through sales affirmations: It can help to go through some sales affirmations that summarize why your company, your products and services, and you as a sales person are good and possibly better than the competition.

2. Have a Value Statement

One thing that you can use on every outgoing call is to have some sort of value statement. This is a one to two sentence statement that summarizes the core value that you have to offer the prospects that you are calling.

3. Prepare for Objections

You will face objections on just about every outgoing call that you make. With that being the case, to improve sales results, we can easily prepare for these objections by outlining which ones are likely to get thrown at us and then script out the best responses that stand to keep the call going.

4. Cold Call Script

One of the most challenging things about outgoing sales calls is that you never really know what direction the call is going to go. One way to decrease this uncertainty is to develop some sort of cold call script.

This does not need to be some lengthy and verbose script that needs to be read word for word. But some sort of outline that one can either use as a guide or as a tool to figure out what direction to take the call at least right out of the gate, can greatly improve results and make the outgoing call easier.

5. Perform Some Research

We can always stand to improve outgoing calls when we do some research prior to the call. This could be doing some research on the company, on the individual we are calling, and some research on any history between your company and the prospect. There are many online resources that should be able to provide valuable data that can help your call in some way or another.

The information that you collect during research may enable you to modify the questions that you ask to make them more tailored to the prospect, which can make your questioning more powerful.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with individuals and organizations helping to drive growth and improvement. For more information about driving positive results, please visit Launch Pad you can read more about Outgoing Call or Cold Call Training.

Confirm Availability

It is safe to assume that everybody that we call is busy. Especially with headcount reductions taking place, the prospects that we call are possibly more busy today than ever. With that being the case, it can help our results to make sure they are available for our call.

If we assume the prospect is busy, we can try to validate if they are normal busy or if they are crazy busy. If they are normal busy, we can try to move forward with the call with their permission. If they are crazy busy, we may want to regroup and call them another time as it will be very difficult for us to build any interest.

Communicate Value

It can improve our results if we can communicate the business value that we have to offer early in a phone call. The core of what a prospect wants to know from potential vendors is how you are going to help them to increase revenue, decrease costs, and/or decrease risk. They will not get as excited about how fancy or advanced your products are if you have sold them at the business value level yet.

By delivering some sort of value statement early on sales phone calls, we can improve the odds of the prospect taking our call.

Disqualify the Prospect

When a prospect takes our call, they will likely have their guard at a medium level, especially when they detect that we are some sort of sales person. Everything we say and do will either make them increase their guard or get them to decrease it.

One thing that we can do to get them to decrease their guard is to disqualify the prospect. This would be to tell them that you do not know if they fit well with what you have to offer. This is a very powerful thing to say as it makes the prospect think that you are going to make sure it makes sense to move forward before you try to sell.

Qualify the Prospect

It can be very productive to try to qualify the prospect while making sales phone calls. This would be asking a couple of questions that ensures that it makes sense not only for them to talk with you, but just as importantly that it makes sense for you to spend your valuable time selling to them.

Uncover Pain

At some point during sales phone calls you will want to uncover pain. If there is no pain, the prospect might not be qualified as if there is no pain there is no reason to change.

Build Rapport

In order to get the prospect to continue talking with you and possibly set up a first conversation with you, it can help tremendously to establish some sort of rapport with the prospect.

If you show them respect for their time by confirming that they are available, communicate how you can help them through communicating value, and disqualify/qualify them, you can make some large strides toward building rapport.

Build Interest

In order to create any momentum, you will need to create some level of interest. One way to achieve this is to connect any pain that is uncovered with the business value that you have to offer.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with individuals and organizations helping to drive growth and improvement. For more information about driving positive results, please visit Launch Pad you can read more about Selling Process or Cold Call Training.

1. Increase the quantity of cold calls
Whether an organization has dedicated cold calling resources or it has more general sales resources that need to do some level of cold calling, there will be a certain level of cold calling activity that is needed to meet targets. For the pure cold callers, this may be between 50 to 100 calls per day. For the general sales personnel, this may be a couple of hours per week. Whatever the case, it is very likely that by providing training to these individuals in the area of cold calling will increase the level of cold calling activity and increase the quantity of cold calls made.

We are all human and naturally get some level of cold call anxiety when it is time to pick up the phone. By training sales staff in the area of cold calling, we will increase their level of knowledge on what and what not to do. This improvement in knowledge will decrease the level of resistance with making calls in improve the total quantity of calls made.

2. Increase in quantity of leads
The first data point to consider when looking at cold calling or lead generation activities is the quantity of leads that are being produced. With cold calling, there is always some sort of cost per cold call so it is critical to look and find ways to improve the total number of leads being produced per hour or per employee.

When cold call training is provided, it is likely that an immediate increase in the quantity of leads will be seen. This is first from the fact that more cold calls will be made, but also that there will be an improvement in successfully getting past the gatekeeper, getting prospect’s to decrease their guard, communicating business value, etc.

3. Improvement in the quality of leads
If good training is provided for cold calling, not only should the total number of leads increase, but the quality of the leads should also improve. This is because a key piece of cold call training should be focused on qualifying prospects and qualifying opportunities.

4. Decreased turnover
One of the most powerful benefits from investing in training for cold calling is that it will likely have positive impact on decreasing sales staff turnover. This is because the most common reason for sales people leaving a company is due to sales performance. Either they are not making enough money and leave or they are not selling enough and asked to leave. Providing more or better sales training to these individuals will improve sales performance, which will likely keep sales staff around longer.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with individuals and organizations helping to drive growth and improvement. For more information about driving positive results, please visit Launch Pad you can read more about Cold Call Training or Cold Call Training.

1. Qualify the Prospect
A critical step to implement when trying to set appointments is to qualify the prospect. This refers to making sure that the person you are trying to meet with is a good fit for what you are tying to sell. If it is a good fit for them, they are more likely to accept your request to meet.

The best way to qualify the prospect is to ask a couple of questions during the cold call to see how they fit with what you have to offer. Not only will effectively qualifying the prospect help with setting appointments, but it will also make sure the appointments that you spend your valuable time on are a good use of your time.

2. Decrease Guard
When cold calling prospects, it is very important to be cognizant of the fact that the people we talk to will likely have their guard at a medium level. This is due to the fact that they have answered a call from someone they possibly don’t know and they are trying to determine if you are friend or a foe.

In order to improve results and set appointments, we need to do what we can to decrease prospect’s guard and there are very clear and practical things that we can do to do this. Two things in particular are that name drop other individuals in the organization that you are calling into and you can disqualify the prospect.

3. Build Rapport
Taking the act of decreasing guard one step further, we should do what we can to build rapport with the prospect as this can improve their openness to taking our meeting. This can be challenging on a cold call as you really only have between two to five minutes to work with. But there are some minor things we can do to build rapport like confirming they are available, disqualifying, delivering a value statement, active listening, qualifying, etc.

4. Build Interest
To improve our appointment making results, we can focus on our ability to build interest. One of the keys to building interest is finding pain. If there is no pain, there is no reason for change and if there is no reason for change, there is no reason to meet with you. Once you uncover pain, you can focus on it and then connect to it the business value that you have to offer.

5. Tell, Don’t Ask
Once you have effectively built interest, you should go for trying to get the appointment set. One thing to help with this is to shift from asking for the meeting to telling. There is something very powerful about the difference between the two following statements:

“Based on what we discussed, are you interested in meeting to discuss in more detail?”

- compared to –

“Based on what we discussed, we should definitely meet to discuss in more detail.”

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with individuals and organizations helping to drive growth and improvement. For more information about driving positive results, please visit Launch Pad you can read more about Appointment Making or Cold Call Training.

In many cases, the prospect will not be available to talk more at the time of the cold call and there are some benefits to ending the call so that we can regroup and get back with them when they are more prepared for our conversation. For this reason, we must focus the goal of moving the prospect to the first conversation and setting the appointment. Below are tips to help improve results with this.

1. Build Rapport
Even though a cold call is very short, it can be very helpful to do what you can in that brief period of time to build some level of rapport with the sales prospect. You don’t have a ton of time to work with but there are a few very key things that we can do and avoid doing to improve the level of rapport when trying to get the appointment set.

If we show respect for the prospect’s time at the beginning of the call and confirm they are available for our call, we can show that not only do we respect their time, but also that we understand them and how hectic their job is. This is an example of a minor tactic to build rapport.

2. Qualify
Qualifying the prospect during the cold call can help with effectiveness when working on appointment setting. Not only will going through some qualification questions help you to ensure that the meeting makes sense for you, but it can also communicate to the prospect that it will make sense for them when they give you the answers that you are looking for.

3. Build Interest
In order to get the prospect to commit time on their schedule for your appointment, you have to trigger some level of interest. A good way to do this is to build your qualifying questions so that they uncover some level of pain. When you uncover pain, you should then provide some very brief details on how you can help to decrease that pain. This can begin the building interest process and help to get the appointment set.

4. Move to Schedule First Conversation
Once you have qualified and triggered some interest, it is a good time to bring the cold call to an end and try to move the prospect to a first conversation. A good way to begin this transition is to acknowledge that you have called the prospect out of the blue and propose to get back together at a scheduled time to discuss in more detail.

If the conversation is going well and the prospect is available at the time of the cold call, the first conversation could happen right then. But if not, that is a great time to set the appointment.

Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with individuals and organizations helping to drive growth and improvement. For more information about driving positive results, please visit Launch Pad you can read more about Appointment Set or Cold Call Training.