Be Brief. Be Bright. Be Gone; A Recipe for Cold Calling.
I was talking with a friend about personality types the other day. He summed up his as “Be Brief. Be Bright. Be Gone,” which is fabulously self-aware! I thought of his motto again later in the day when I cold-called a list of people who expressed interest in new construction home lotteries, and I realized it’s the perfect motto for a successful cold call.
Get to the point. Everyone knows it’s a sales call, so value the person’s time and don’t carry on about the weather. The “how’s your day so far” questions are eye-rolling when you have no relationship with the caller.
Take a breath. It’s a conversation, not a proclamation. As a public person and sales professional, I receive sales calls All. The. Time. I have a rule. If the caller doesn’t let me reply in the first five seconds, I hang up.
Know your message. What are the top three things you want the recipient of your call to know? Write them down and make sure these are expressed in every call. In my recent call session it was:
I’m a Realtor®. (Now you know why I’m calling.)
You contacted me first. (You gave me permission.)
There’s a new home lottery coming up. (I have information you may need.)
Stick to elaborating on these points in the interest of getting to your goal.
Set your goal or intention in advance. What do you expect to gain from the call? In this case, I wanted to know:
Does the client want to enter the lottery? (Act now?)
Is the client still interested in hearing about any new homes or resales? (Still looking or has the need been met?)
Be Bright
No scripts. Scripts are JV league. They’re good for training noobs, but knowing your message and being conversant is far superior. Drafting potential conversations to get psyched up for cold calling makes us prepared and is always a good idea. But everyone knows when you’re reading from a script and no one likes it. And we tend to write many more words than we should actually say out loud.
Make it personal. It’s ok to sound friendly. It’s ok fumble a little or laugh when you do. And it’s ok to get off topic if that’s where the client leads. I ended up talking about the state policy on school vaccines during that set of calls because that’s the route the call took.
Being personal makes you real. People don’t want to talk to robots. Remember how much you hate calling a business’s phone tree? No one wants to hear your decision tree script. They want to make a connection with a competent human who has relevant information.
In my past life in commercial furniture sales, I always asked people on my cold call list if they could ”help me find the person who ______.” People like to be helpful. Humans need help. Auto-dialers and script readers don’t.
Be Gone
Add value. Or quit when you can’t comfortably do so. If you receive an objection and think you haven’t communicated well, admit it and add value by adding another brief point. When I was calling people on my new construction list, one woman said her family is working on their income. While it wasn’t directly related to my call, I told her about a community near hers selling designated Affordable Homes and offered to send her the details. I took her objection and gave her something valuable in return that addressed her concern. Note I did not say I “overcame her objection.” My objective was not to take the enemy position by any means necessary. It was to acknowledge a very real problem and provide a meaningful solution.
Go away. Old school sales training tells callers to persist through the third “no” before wrapping up. When I receive a sales call that doesn’t interest me, I have a hard time holding back from saying, “No. No. NO. That’s three nos.” Ignoring the cues and wishes of the person you’re calling is the fastest way to alienate someone. You’re telling them what you want to say is much more important than what they want to hear, and no matter what you say, ears close once they’ve received that message.
Say thank you. This person took your call today and afforded you the opportunity to present your information. What you did with that time was entirely up to you.