Making cold calls certainly isn’t glorious, but chances are it will probably be a significant part of your early career, which means a lot of opportunities for rejection. You can always expect more unsuccessful calls than successful calls. You can’t win them all when you’re prospecting because not everyone will be a good fit for your products or services or it may be the wrong time. Even if they could benefit from your offer, they may be resistant to change. This article will help you get through that process.
1. You never have to like cold calls – you just have to do it.
If you’re still dragging your feet, you don’t necessarily have to worry that you’re not cut out for the job. No one likes doing cold calls – those that say they do have just learned how to pay the price of discomfort to reach their objectives. Fake it until you make it.
Identify the unpleasant parts of the job, but focus on the end result. The work of separating a few prospects from a large pool of suspects may be long and tedious, but the results will be rewarding. Think of yourself as a fishermen casting a wide net, then sorting the catch and throwing back the small fish. No matter what, keep casting your net with a consistency that borders on obsession.
2. It’s okay to fail. It’s not okay to take it personally.
First of all, youdon’t have to interpret the rejection as failure. The goal isn’t to convert unwilling people into prospects, but to find them. The tricky part is to balance that with taking responsibility for the outcome of the sales call – but that usually comes further down the line. Second of all, you have to learn to separate the “real” you from the “role” you. When you fail to close a sale, it means there’s room for improvement in your sales-person skills. You as a person are not a failure. Thinking this damages your self-esteem and self-worth, depleting your energy. Of course it’s easier to think about this intellectually than deal with the emotional reality.
3. You have to learn to fail, to win.
Failure holds a lot of positive potential if you take the time to extract important lessons from it.Once you realize that you can’t win them all and rejection doesn’t reflect on you personally you can feel free to experiment with new things, get creative, and reach outside your comfort zone. Instead of shrinking from failure and rejection, embrace it while acting as a kind of outside observer in the sales process, gaining valuable knowledge to your repertoire.
4. Learn a lesson from every unsuccessful call.
Try to commit to learning a lesson during every sales call and applying it to the next one – how to do something more effectively or simply something you can avoid. This leads to compound interest.
Pay attention to the put offs you’re getting – those preprogrammed responses prospects give to end the conversation. Prepare a better pre-emptive strike. Before they tune you out, try addressing the typical put-off. Figure out if some part of your phraseology is triggering them to tune you out. Maybe your product/service is the type of thing most people already have and don’t want to replace. Show you’re familiar with the fact that most people probably already have the service you’re offering, but you’re not afraid of it.
5. You can’t lose a sale you haven’t completed.
If you think real opportunities are scarce or you’re stuck in the mentality that you’re either a winner or a loser, you may hang on to poor quality prospects out of fear. Be assertive (not aggressive) and get to the bottom of it when prospects become evasive or stall, using direct questions. You may think you will lose the sale by antagonizing/alienating them. In reality you’re probably afraid of uncovering the truth that they don’t want what you’re offering. Remember that you can’t force someone to buy from you. Therefore, you can’t lose a sale from someone who is truly reluctant.
Don’t waste time and effort on a sale you aren’t going to close anyways. The perceived or anticipated pain of replacing a prospect is greater than the actual pain. The longer you wait, the more you’ll have paid in terms of time, frustration, disappointment and depleted energy. Do what needs to be done: close the sale or determine that the opportunity isn’t there.
Motivation for cold calls can be a difficult process, especially in training. Learn more about how to apply these principles from Sandler training solutions.
