Cold Calling Tips to Success

Cold calling has received an obviously nasty stigma for being a nasty way of getting noticed around the country.  However, whether you want to admit it or not, cold calling works!  However, it’s the way you go about doing it that makes all the difference…

Unfortunately phone calls come with the business, make sure you follow out advice and go about making the calls appropriately and you won’t look back;

Script

Don’t go into an professional call blind - make sure you know exactly what you’re going to say and practice what you’re going to say until you are completely confident before picking up the phone - a bad call will reflect on your business.

Therefore you need to write a script and be confident of everything that you are saying.  Have contingency plans in place for a number of possible answers so you don’t have to be stuck saying ‘errr” and ‘ummm’ while the person at the other end of the phone thinks about how they can hang up.

After a while you will become a pro at it!

…But don’t rely on it…

Having a script is obviously a must, but don’t rely on it!  Don’t read every word as if it were Gospel because you won’t be able to follow the person on the other end of the phone and they will know straight away what is going on.  You’ll be too busy worrying about your next line to even notice…

You need to be able to react to what the person on the other end of the phone is saying and that means you need to listen - you can’t do that without the confidence of being able to follow the script without having it in front of your face.

Open Questions

Open questions invite the person on the other end of the phone to go into more detail - a closed ended question leaves them with no other option to respond other than either yes or no which is fairly useless.

Plan out in advance what questions you will ask and if necessary, if you don’t feel confident, ask someone else for advice, particularly someone with experience in questionnaires.

Be In Control

Cold calling can be a horrible thing to do sometimes as people can end up being quite rude and mean before you even explain who you are.  Some people really don’t want to know from you or hear what you have to say but every time someone throws your polite demeanour back in your face simply take it on the chin and be just as cheery the next time you pick up the phone?

Cold or Hot Calling?

Are you having to fall back on cold calling to get your businesses message out across the country?  Do you have some useful tips that you could pass on to our other readers?  Leave us a comment and let us know…

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