Maximize Your Company’s Cold Calling Training with these Dos and Don’ts

Cold call­ing is a hard art to mas­ter, and when con­duct­ing cold call­ing train­ing for your team, the instruct­ing part can be just as dif­fi­cult as the cold call­ing itself. After all, how do you teach con­fi­dence? How do you help peo­ple deal with rejec­tion? Part of the prob­lem with tra­di­tional cold call­ing train­ing is that it relies on rote scripts and teaches peo­ple what to say, rather than teach an atti­tude and guide sales reps on what not to say.

If you are grow­ing frus­trated with your cur­rent efforts to improve your staff’s cold call­ing effec­tive­ness, con­sider tak­ing a dif­fer­ent approach – con­sider help­ing your team adopt a new atti­tude toward the prac­tice, and help them under­stand that know­ing what not to do is just as impor­tant as know­ing what to do dur­ing a call.

One of the first steps in cold call­ing train­ing is to do an attitude-check with your team. Is your team out to sell some­thing? Are they try­ing to estab­lish rap­port by talk­ing about last night’s game or build some sort of com­mon­al­ity? If so, they are set­ting them­selves up for a feel­ing of rejec­tion and fail­ure if their call ends quickly with­out any lead generation.

Instead of approach­ing cold call­ing as a sales call – sim­ply to sell a prod­uct, take a dif­fer­ent approach. Coach your team that they are pro­fes­sion­als, and their whole goal is to build a rela­tion­ship. A pro­fes­sional who calls a col­league to find out about busi­ness prob­lems and inef­fi­cien­cies is a much dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship than some­one sim­ply call­ing to sell some­thing. If you begin with the atti­tude that you are there to lis­ten, to learn, and then to offer solu­tions, you are no longer just a sales per­son mak­ing a call – you are a col­lab­o­ra­tor, a problem-solver.

Cold call­ing suc­cess can be made or bro­ken in the first 30 sec­onds of a call. The way your sales rep­re­sen­ta­tives open the call, say who they are, and iden­tify a poten­tial prob­lem that the prospect could be fac­ing, can either lead to a longer con­ver­sa­tion, or a very short con­ver­sa­tion that ends with “no thank you.” When guid­ing your reps on cold call­ing train­ing, make sure they know that they first have to under­stand the prob­lem they are try­ing to solve for the prospect, and com­mu­ni­cate this under­stand­ing at the very out­set of the call. Your prospects are busy, and they don’t have time to chit-chat or spend extra time on calls for prod­ucts they don’t under­stand the ben­e­fit of. There­fore, it’s imper­a­tive to lay the ground­work within the first 30 sec­onds of the call. If the prospect is strug­gling with the prob­lem you men­tion – and they under­stand that your solu­tion can help make this prob­lem dis­ap­pear – you have just begun a con­ver­sa­tion based on solu­tions and col­lab­o­ra­tion, rather than selling.

A sec­ond, and related point in effec­tive cold call­ing train­ing, is to make sure that your reps are not mak­ing the point of the call all about your com­pany and your prod­uct. Again, the point of the call is to build a rela­tion­ship and col­lab­o­rate on solu­tions, so if your reps open the call talk­ing about your lat­est inno­va­tion or tech­nol­ogy, you’ve just lost the customer’s inter­est. Instead of focus­ing on what your com­pany can do, focus more on what your prospect is need­ing to hear – what is the ben­e­fit of your prod­uct? Focus on the end solu­tion instead of the tool. You can weave into the con­ver­sa­tion the name of your prod­uct or tech­nol­ogy, after you’ve cap­tured their atten­tion, but the con­ver­sa­tion is not straight sales for what you have – it’s instead a con­ver­sa­tion about what they’re need­ing (which hap­pens to be the prod­uct you’re con­nected with). See the difference?

Before the call even begins, make sure your sales reps have done their home­work. In addi­tion to research­ing the prospect and indus­try, an equally impor­tant step is to antic­i­pate the pos­si­ble objec­tions from the prospect and write down the answers to these objec­tions. Based on your par­tic­u­lar indus­try, and past track record with cold calls, it should be fairly straight­for­ward to come up with a list of objec­tions and your responses to the objec­tions. The main les­son here is to not be caught off-guard, but rather, to re-direct the con­ver­sa­tion con­fi­dently and back toward your solution.

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Cold call­ing and train­ing your team to be effec­tive cold call­ing lead gen­er­a­tors need not be a dreaded task, if you keep in mind that above all, you are build­ing a rela­tion­ship and offer­ing a solu­tion. If you approach your cold call­ing train­ing with this approach, your sales results will pos­i­tively follow.