Your sales are down and your blood pressure is up. You check your voicemail for some referrals or “easy money” you like to call it. Zilch. Nothing. You check your calendar in Outlook for appointments and you have nothing scheduled for the rest of the week. Sad part is its only Tuesday. What are you going to do?
Before you cancel your club membership and you tell the kids that vacationing over Labor Day weekend is overrated and moving back to the smaller house is “more cozy” do this. Turn yourself into a “Cold Calling Killing Machine.” This is the frame of mind of calling up prospects that you would never consider when times are good and the economy is booming.
The following action steps will get you ready to get out of the slump. Good times and bad habits have made you a prisoner of your own success. Now is the time for a breakout month but before this happens…. Jail Break!
Refuse to be taken alive
To get in the right frame of mind for cold calling you have to view yourself as a fugitive. You have been wrongly accused, on the run and you want your life back. Financial pressures are mounting and the only refuge you have is to get people that don’t know you to believe in you, trust you and most importantly buy into you.
The more prospects you talk to the more you keep your “would be captures” at bay. It’s either them or you! Before they get to you they will have to pry the phone out of your cold, dead hand!
Get desperate
We all know telesales is a number game. It’s also an activity based game which requires urgency. Now is the time to acquire a “Manageable Obsessive Compulsion Disorder.” Besides family time, you should be thinking about calling a prospect.
Whether you’re in a meeting or in traffic you should be wishing that you were cold calling. You should be thinking about it now as your reading this article. Brushing your teeth, in the shower, you get the idea.
Go long and strong and don’t go home
Placing business calls is a tedious, monotonous process. Unfortunately cold calling, if done correctly, is also very time consuming. Once you get this emotionally reconciled with yourself (this will take some time) you need to have a family sit down.
Golfing, fishing and hunting trips need to go by the wayside before you cut into family time. It’s the personal extra-curricular items that tend to be the culprit anyways. Why else are your sales suffering?
Now that you have squeezed extra hours out of your schedule for prospecting it has to get put to good use. If you can make 50 calls an hour and you’re working and additional 20 hours a week you should expect an extra thousand calls a week.
If you are working longer your amount of work has to be in proportion to that. It will take a week or two to get used to the extra work load. Get your hours of calling in when the office is at low activity. Generally early mornings and late evenings work best but it depends on your sales territory.
When you’re laying in bed thinking about hitting snooze imagine the search teams with dogs out sniffing for your scent. Helicopters with spotlights are searching for you in the marshes. Now get out of the bed! At night when you don’t feel like making an extra 30 calls just tell yourself the place is surrounded and the coast isn’t clear until you do!
Get emotional and kill them with kindness
Your mind is in the right place and your time is set now comes the killing. (For any sociopaths lurking by killing we mean cold calling.) You will test your emotional maturity at this stage because you’re more tired and irritable; you’re not having as much fun, now it’s time to take it out on the customer.
You take it out on the customer by killing them with kindness. Every time you pick up the phone you smile. Every time you get resistance by a prospect you say “Thank you for your time.” This ability separates “the Sales professional” from “the Rookies”.
To practice this skill wait until you are so angry that you are seething. Then pick up the phone and call a prospect. Do this at every opportunity. A sales manager told me this and then showed me after disciplining an employee.
When you can talk calmly and project a professional demeanor while you are livid. You are becoming cold blooded calling machine. Infrared and Thermos won’t be able to detect you!
Imagine and Improvise
There will come a time when all the extra hours won’t complement your lifestyle. After three months you should see a significant increase in your leads and your closes. After fattening your pipeline it is time to wind it down.
When you slow the tempo it is time to substitute quantity for quality. You will have to use your imagination and improvisational skills to accomplish this trick. For example:
Call your next potential customer before you leave at night and then hang up! So when you come through the doors in the morning all you have to do is hit redial. That’s 25 extra calls a month.
Take a list of 20 people with for the road. Also bring a tape recorder. As soon as you hit the road use your voice activated caller to start prospecting. These are still prospecting calls so they shouldn’t be too in depth. You can record any information and remain hands-free. Another 400 calls a month.
Cut your lunches shorter and work on better scripts and more effective rebuttals and you can go from 4000 additional calls a month to 1000 without working any more hours than before your “Cold Call Killing Spree”.
Heed this advice and happy hunting!
© Copyright 2010 by Curtis Dilworth