Lesson 26 - Make a Cold Call

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Cold calling can be intimidating, but it’s a crucial skill for sales success. In this lesson, you’ll learn strategies to make effective cold calls and handle objections on the fly. Your assignment will involve making five cold calls to prospects and practicing the techniques you’ve learned.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to make a cold call to a prospect at one of your top prioritized accounts. Now if the concept of a cold call scares you, you're not alone. It is one of the most feared things in sales, especially for a new salesperson, but don't worry, I'm going to walk you through every step now, the first thing to understand is the difference between a cold call and a warm call. A cold call means you are calling someone that has no idea about your solution. They did not ask to be contacted. You are reaching out to them. You are interrupting their day, and ultimately, you are trying to quickly show them why your solution can bring value and why they should be talking to you a warm call. Is someone who is more familiar with your solution. Maybe they are a current user of your product, or they've engaged with you through your marketing material in some way. And a warm call is pretty straightforward. And in a lot of cases, you will be making warm calls to people to talk to them about your solution. But a warm call is straightforward. When you call somebody who is current user, you can introduce yourself, let them know that you're handling the relationship for that, that solution, and ask them how things are going, ask them if they've had the chance to use your product recently, how they're liking it. And then you can kind of go into discovery on how they're using it. You can talk about referrals. I mean, the whole conversation opens up from there. The other thing is, if they're not a user and they're just engaging with your marketing content, that's still a warm call, you can reach out and say, Hey, I noticed that you attended our webinar, or I noticed that you left a comment on our blog post, or I noticed that you reached out through our contact form. I'd love to talk to you about your interest in our solution. What was it that caught your eye, right? Or if they straight up asked to be contacted, you can reach out and say, Hey, I saw that you had asked to be contacted by a member of sales. My name is Nick. I'm an account executive, and I'd love to talk with you. Did you have a specific question in mind, or would you like for me to give you a brief overview of our solution, right? So when you're warm calling, it's pretty straightforward, and normally those are not as nerve wracking. A cold call is a little different, because you're reaching out, and they don't know who you are or why you're calling, and naturally, everyone's pretty much immediate reaction when they get a cold call is to kind of close down and look for reasons to get off the phone, which is why they can feel so tense. But you have to remember that you're calling them for a reason. You're calling to do something helpful for them. You're calling because you genuinely feel that your solution can provide value. And if you're confident in that, and you approach it in the right way, you're really doing them a favor by calling them and letting them know about something that they might not know about. So let's think about it from that perspective. When you're reaching out to someone, it is ridiculously important that you have your value hypothesis airtight. What I mean by that is, if you remember our previous lesson where we talked about the research, the value ladder and the value hypothesis, the value hypothesis was a one to two sentence statement that talked about the problems that you know they have, the way that your solution ties to those problems and the value it will bring if they were to implement your solution. To solve those problems, it's so fast and it's so valuable that that is what you should be using when you are cold calling. So you're reaching out on a cold call, the goal is to confidently introduce yourself, let them know you know who you're calling from, and then immediately talk to them about the value hypothesis and ask for their permission to discuss more. So you know, I love my Sprout Social example, if I'm calling someone for Sprout Social, let me actually pull my notes up here. So if I'm reaching out to Maria, she's the digital she's the Director of Digital Marketing at a retail firm called trendy threads. The second Maria answers the phone, she's gonna say, Hi, this is Maria, and I'm gonna say, Hi, Maria, you know. Actually, not going to say, you know, but I would say, hey, Maria. Full disclosure, you and I have not had the chance to meet. My name is Nick. I'm an account executive calling from Sprout Social, and I'm calling you because I saw yesterday that trendy threads announced your new FY 26 initiatives, and one of them. Was to expand your market reach through digital customer engagement. I wanted to reach out right away, because Sprout Social is actually helping your peers over at ecoware to do the exact same thing. And specifically, we were able to help them streamline the way that they're posting social media across multiple platforms at once, which ended up saving them both money and time. I'm curious, are you the right person to talk to about this initiative? Now notice that I've kind of dominated the first 40 seconds of the conversation, and I'm doing that by design. It it can seem a little luxury, but ultimately, I want to at least get across my value pitch before giving Maria a chance to get off the phone. Right now, there are multiple ways to do cold calls, and plenty of sales leaders will listen to what I just said and say, no, no, no, no, that's way too much to say at the beginning. Another tactic you can take is to call and say, Hi, Maria. My name is Nick. I'm an account executive calling from Sprout Social. Do you have a few minutes to chat today and then allow her to either get off the phone or say, you know? Yeah, I have a minute. Okay, well, Maria, I'd love to talk to you a little bit about Sprout Social, because I noticed that one of your FY 26 initiatives was to expand your market reach through digital customer engagement. I'm curious, are you the right person to speak to about this? And again, I give her a moment. I give her a second to allow me to either continue speaking or get off the phone with me, directly, honestly. I would encourage you to try out both of those approaches. You can reach out and you can speed run through your value hypothesis, which is the first one that I did, or you can reach out. You can deliver pauses. You can allow for your prospect to give you permission to keep going. I would try both approaches and see which one makes more sense for your style, which one makes you feel more comfortable. But ultimately, the key to a cold call is confidence, confidence in what you're selling, confidence in why you're there, confidence that if they continue speaking to you, it's going to benefit their life, it is going to benefit their professional career, it is going to benefit their organization. You are reaching out as a favor. You're reaching out as a favor to talk to them about something that they might not know exists, and ultimately to provide value. So that's an example of something that I might say. If I'm reaching out, I go through my value hypothesis, and that's a very common way to do it. So before you do a cold call, streamline your value hypothesis. Practice it a few times in your head. Make sure that you have that dialed in. The other thing is, if you can bring a proof point, that's great. You'll notice that I gave a proof point with her peers over at ecoware Whenever I made my call. But that's also the dream scenario, right? You call, they pick up the phone. You talk about your value, they say, Oh, that actually does sound good. I am the right person to talk to about that initiative. And we know that that is rarely the case. A lot of times you call and you don't get them right away. A lot of times you will get a front desk or receptionist or secretary or assistant, and they're going to reach out and say, Yeah, you know, they're not here right now, or, Oh, they're a little busy right now. Gatekeepers, right gatekeeper is a likely scenario, and you should never think of a gatekeeper as an obstacle. They're a valuable source of information, if you build a friendly rapport with the gatekeeper that can help you eventually get to the person that you're looking into. They can be your ally in securing a conversation with the decision maker. So when you get a gatekeeper, Be respectful. Be super clear about your intentions. Don't hide who you are, don't hide why you're calling and for example, if a gatekeeper named Mark were to answer the phone, I would say, Hi, Mark. My name is Nick. I'm an account executive calling from Sprout Social, and I saw that Maria was just put in charge of a new digital marketing campaign. I think that our team can help her. Would it be okay to speak with her today? So letting Mark know, hey, I'm not here to bug your boss. I'm here because I saw something that makes me think we have something of value to share with her. Now, the second thing, if the if the gatekeeper puts boundaries in place, respect them, right? Make sure. Make sure that you're asking if it's all right, can I leave a voicemail? Okay? I'll follow up with an email. Et cetera. Not every call is going to lead to a conversation. I mean, think about it. When was the last time you actually answered a call from a number? You don't know. It's pretty rare these days. I don't answer calls from numbers. I don't know. Period, so chances are your first interaction is going to be. Leaving a voicemail. And when you leave a voicemail, make sure that you are doing the exact same thing. Who I am, why I'm calling, leading with the value hypothesis. So for the above scenario, my voicemail might be Hi Martha or Hi Maria. This is Nick calling from Sprout Social. I noticed that trendy threads announcement, I noticed trendy threads announcement about your FY 26 initiatives, particularly your goal to expand market reach through digital customer engagement. We've successfully helped your peers over at ecoware to do the same thing by streamlining their social media management across multiple platforms, which save significant time and cost. I'd love to discuss how we might assist trendy threads and achieving similar results. I'll send a follow up email with more details, and you can reach me directly at 512-398-7200, I'm looking forward to connecting with you. Thanks. Now we also know that cold calls will come with an inherent amount of rejection. You're going to reach out. They're going to say, I'm not interested. Please don't call me again. Please take me off your list. Don't bother me anymore. I've heard everything under the book. I've made probably 1000s at this point of cold calls myself, and you will inevitably get some rejection. The thing to remember here is that it's not personal. Nobody's rejecting you as a human being. They're rejecting the idea of talking about a solution that they don't currently see value in because they've never heard of it until they picked up the phone and heard you say it. So stay positive. Lead with confidence. Act as if every interaction is your first that it's going to go, well, make sure you have your value hypothesis handy every time. And at the end of the day, the best way to get over a fear of cold calling is to make some cold calls. You'll start to see that it's not the end of the world, even in the worst case scenarios that you've dreamed up in your head, right? And that's pretty much it. Now it's your turn. Choose a contact from one of your top priority organizations before you make the call, write down why are you calling this specific individual? What is the value hypothesis where you're going to bring them value today, make sure that's tailored to their specific business needs, and write down the voicemail that you're going to leave if they don't answer at that point. Practice your intro. Wait until you can say it in a cool, calm, collected way. Take breaks. Slow down. It will come across as desperate or needy. If someone answers the phone and you say, hey, Maria, this is Nick from Sprout Social. I'm an account executive, and I just wanted a quick second of your time. Is that okay? She's gonna say, whoa. I was literally just sitting down for a cup of coffee. Now someone's yelling at me through the phone. It's much better to say, Hi. Hi. My name is Nick. I'm an account executive with Sprout Social. I was calling to reach Maria to talk to you because I just noticed this initiative, right? Be confident, be collected. Once you feel good about what you're going to say, make the call. It's always good to kind of check through your value hypothesis and your intro with your manager, your mentor, your new hire buddy, but make the call and write down what happened, what was the result, what did you learn? And if the call goes badly, make another one. One of the best things I've learned is that if something goes badly, just get right back on the horse. Make another phone call. And I always love to collect the bad call stories so that I can talk to them to other account executives. It's always fun. Everybody has has some more stories there. Your study guide will walk you through all of this, and that's it for today's lesson. Thank you for listening to the daily quota, and we'll see you next time. Bye. You.