Make just one small change to your cold call opener and get a big result.
☎️ I’ve changed the way I open the initial part of my calls, not by very much, but it’s setting me up for a better call so I wanted to share it with all of you…
So as you know, I’m both a Sales Trainer for B2B companies and the founder of Sales Development Aust, which is an Outsourced SDR agency.
🧐 Why is this tip important?
I know from making calls myself that the first few seconds of your cold call has an outsized impact on how the rest of your call goes.
🧠 Think about it this way.
When someone answers their phone they’re trying to determine if you’re a friend or foe as quickly as possible.
When they answer the phone they start at a neutral level – let’s call that level ZERO.
Whatever they hear first will move them into either a positive or negative state. Will they want to engage in a chat or will they want to try and get you off the phone?
If they answer their phone and experience that telltale delay of a parallel dialer slowly connecting them to a call agent or perhaps they hear lots of call centre background noise they will automatically drop to a more negative state.
If this is the case, you the caller, now have to be good enough to pull them out of that negative state in order to have a reasonable conversation with them.
If, on the other hand, one of the first things they hear is the name of a person they know and like they’ll start the conversation in a positive state.
For example: “Hey Gary., your neighbour Bob said I should give you a call?”
Obviously, a positive state is better for us. because.. a good conversation… is the outcome we really want.
Booking a meeting can only happen if you first have a great conversation.
Let’s face facts, it’s very unlikely you’ll have a terrible conversation and still book a meeting.
And if you do, It’s likely they won’t be a great fit, and they’re more likely to cancel or be a no show..
So we want to give ourselves the best chance of a great conversation right off the bat.
🚨 OK, on to my mico-change that’s made a big difference.
So what typically happens now is when calling a business out of your CRM we look to reference their organisation in the call.
For this example lets say we are calling a business called ANZ insurance brokers…
My opening is usually, ‘Name, I wanted to chat to you about… company.. Is that OK?” – that sounds like this…
“I wanted to chat to you about ANZ insurance brokers, is that OK?”
The micro change I’ve made is to de-formalise the name of the company so it sounds much more casual. … ”I wanted to chat about the insurance business you have there, is that OK?”
This works because most salespeople simply read the name of the business as it comes out of their CRM… and …it sounds like it’s being read from the CRM.
So this gives the prospect the impression that it’s a sales call and they move to that negative state we spoke about.
If you use the more casual introduction, It’s much closer to what an enquiring call would sound like and position your prospect in a more positive position.
I honestly believe this small change has made it much easier for me to get deeper into the call over the last two weeks.
So there you go -a small but mighty change for your calling routine.
Give it a try.
Let me know what you think and how you get on.
