How To 101: Cold Calling and Emailing.

[Jrjohnny]

I know the title of this thread might be a little confusing but I dont see a thread about the ropes of cold calling and emailing.

Now I don’t know anything but I’m creating this thread for beginners.

If anyone can share any basic advice on cold calling and emailing, please drop a comment.

 

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[Wizza134]

Well there's this great thread by @Tiago for cold calling

MINDSET - From 0 To 30K Dials - 9 Principles That Helped Me Get Unstuck And Generate $500K In Sales

If you're anything like me, that moment before you're about to make a cold call, your body tenses up, the phone weighs 500 pounds, the fear's kicked in and you're frozen. You've experienced the FREEZE. You're literally paralyzed, and suddenly you have to watch another YouTube video on how to...

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[RicardoGrande]

Wizza linked Tiago's thread which is good, but he was also working for a company and was being fed prospects to call, if not allotted time at his job to do prospecting. Thing is, this won't be the case for everyone, and definitely wasn't the case for me working a Web Design side hustle around a dayjob.

I don't know what your situation is, but here's my experience juggling a dayjob, building sites, and building lists and making calls in the spare moments in-between:

1) Build your lists
- A lot of people are so afraid of the phone call itself they forget they need to build lists, you can either do this yourself by finding your niche and doing some googling or checking online services, or you can also hire someone off of fiverr/upwork to do the list building and validation for you.
2) Taking the plunge and habits
- Considering it can be scary, you want to set yourself up to succeed. I'd say to not expect much from your first hundred calls, just jump in and dial and talk to people. Your hands might be shaking and your heart pounding, but as you relax and gain experience and confidence, you can move on from the basic action to the selling process. You'll also want to make this a habit so you stay on top of your pipeline and also keep your nerve up.
3) Eating dirt
- Like I mentioned in 2, unless you have provable and attractive results or know what you're doing, don't expect much in the first 100-300 calls. Standard ratios that are touted are 100/10/3 for calls-warms-ready to go's but I've personally seen the ratio change from 100/3/0 to 100/20/10.
4) Hold your ground
- Many people will want to be "nice", and if you don't convey value and probe their current pains and pique their interest, they'll probably say something like "I'll keep you in mind" or "sure, call me in a month"- then they never pick up the phone for you again. It happens, it's painful, don't take it personally. Just work on your script and offer and keep on moving.
5) Don't lose sight, don't lose heart
- I've been sneaking out calls for roughly a year now, and at about 3,000 calls- the only large sprint I did was 50 calls in one day which also happened to be one of my worst days in not getting a single warm lead. In the U.S. right now we have a huge cost of living crisis and imminent recession that in my experience is scaring a lot of business owners- especially smaller scale operations that you may feel are easier to call up in the beginning.
- This doesn't negate that there are probably still businesses that NEED your services, but if you just give up or don't stay on top of calling every single weekday, you'll never run into them

I've left a couple other posts on cold calling around the forum you can find. Never give up and build something while everyone else is hiding behind e-mails or giving up on their dreams.

 

[TheFrancophile]

I know the title of this thread might be a little confusing but I dont see a thread about the ropes of cold calling and emailing.

Now I don’t know anything but I’m creating this thread for beginners.

If anyone can share any basic advice on cold calling and emailing, please drop a comment.

Now that's a broad subject, and if you really want to learn, go get Art Sobczak's book "Smart Calling".

On top of that, although it's late here in France, I'll give you a few bits of advice, based on my own experience:

1. Get in a good mood before calling. You're not going to succeed if you're in a bad mood.
2. Do research (esp. on social media) on every prospect you call before dialing. You may very well find what's the latest news, what they're doing right now, what they've just bought/started showcasing, etc.
3. Do research on business owners' names.
4. Prepare your replies to all the typical brush-off objections salespeople hear, including "I don't have time", "I'm not interested", "We have everything we need", and "We're happy with our current supplier.
5. And last, but certainly not least, to prepare such replies, you need to know, and BE ABLE TO STATE IMMEDIATELY, how your product/service is superior to that of any competitor. You need to learn that by heart, so much so that if I woke you up at night, you'd be able to tell me immediately.

 

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[Two Dog]

Use an autodialer.

Although certainly not my favorite marketing activity, I've done enough outbound cold calling to find it tolerable. I'm far less convinced that it's worthwhile vs. basic marketing and promotional activities. Marketing really should be doing the heavy lifting of prospecting, educating, screening and establishing trust before ever connecting with a live person.

Standard cold calling problems include:

• Trust factor is nil. You're literally interrupting a complete stranger with an offer from a complete stranger. In today's environment with every one screaming to be careful about getting scammed, that's pretty difficult to overcome.
• Timing factor is almost nil. Someone might very well be a good prospect and even interested, but unlikely to have the time at THAT EXACT MOMENT to hear a scripted pitch. Good luck scheduling a FU call that actually happens.
• No leave behind collateral material. The second the call ends, you have disappeared from the prospect's mind never to be considered again.
• Younger people don't talk on the phone. Ever.

Probably the best offer you can make in this channel is offering to send them something of value. That allows you to get contact information, get off the phone quickly and still have an opportunity for future follow up activities. Pitching and closing on the same initial call is basically miraculous, hence the God awful ratios. Offering to send something is significantly better even from people who say YES just to get you off the phone politely without wasting too much time.

I haven't sent a single cold email, but will giving it a try next month for selling consulting services.