If drumming up new corporate accounts is on your to-do list summer, you might want to pick up the phone, rather than send an email.
Gordon Tredgold, founder and CEO of the consulting firm Leadership Principles, recently committed to making 3,000 cold calls in one month (compared to about three a day in his normal work life), and he said putting more time and energy into phone calls reminded him of the many sales advantages of verbal communication.
“To the chagrin of many, cold calling is not dead,” he explained “It’s the manner in which we do the cold call that is dead.”
Cold calling in 2017 does require persistence, he added: “No longer does just dialing through a list of numbers work. People are harder to get in touch with, and on average it took me 15 dials to get through to a conversation.”
Tredgold’s tips on how to reinvigorate (or reinstate) successful cold calls into your sales practices:
Listen for cues. Phone calls (and human voices) can provide more information than an email. “When someone types ‘no,’ all you can read into that is ‘no,’” Tredgold writes. “But when you’re in a conversation, the tone of the ‘no,’ the emotion used when saying ‘no’ all give you some verbal cues. You can hear ‘no’ as ‘I don’t understand,’ ‘I’m not sure,’ ‘I don’t think so.’” A phone conversation can help you identify those potential opportunities and navigate around a customer’s initial resistance.
Call the top dog. Hesitant to pick up the phone and call a company’s owner or president? Don’t be, says Tredgold. “If you’re going to call, then the best person to call is the senior decision-maker” he writes, adding that during his experiment making 3,000 cold calls, “I averaged speaking to 10 percent of the time. Not only that, they were often very open to having a brief conversation.” That brief part is critical: If you reach out to busy business owners, make your “ask” clear and your pitch (the service your business can provide) concise.
One caveat to Tredgold’s advice: If your prospective client is a millennial, think twice about making that phone call. For many members of that generation, calls (and voicemails) are “Dark Ages” technology, likely to go unreturned. Instead, use text or messaging services to try to set up a face-to-face meeting.
