I've Made 30,000 Cold Calls, Here's Everything you Need

Over the past 10 years, my orgs have driven well over $50 million in revenue, selling everything from basic software all the way to complex enterprise programs for massive businesses as sold for companies like MongoDB, Qualtrics and launched Arcly, where I'm currently running our global mid market org, SDR Org and North America Enterprise Acquisition. Across all these segments, I attribute the vast majority of our success to cold calling. It's one of the most reliable ways to turn strangers into qualified prospects and then into clients. But the sad thing is, almost every single video I've seen on YouTube on this topic absolutely sucks. They just give terrible advice which isn't really applicable for most people and they don't really help you sell, especially if you're targeting medium or large businesses. So that's why in this video I'm going to show you why so many people struggle to cold call and the most important lessons I've learned after building entire sales orgs on the foundation of cold calling. Now it doesn't matter if you're an sdr, an AE or or someone who's just getting started in sales, everything I'm going to share in this video is going to help you become more competent. I'll start with a mindset shift that completely changed my cold calling career and then teach you my top five tactics for effective cold calling. The reality of cold calling is that it's incredibly discouraging. If you've never faced rejection before, and even after you kind of get used to it, it's still pretty discouraging. For every no you receive, you can almost feel your confidence leaving your body and slowly draining your energy. I know this feeling because I've been there to make it even wor an introvert. So talking to people literally drains my social battery and makes me incredibly uncomfortable. As an sdr, this combination made me really struggle. I would dread cold calling because it was combining two things I hated talking to strangers and rejection. But then I noticed a pattern. There were some prospects. I was actually excited to call. It might have been a note on their lead like they previously requested contact or something on their LinkedIn profile that made them seem like a good fit for our solution. When my call list was full of prospects like this, I didn't mind calling at all and my conversion rate skyrocketed. I built on this learning. When I reviewed my call list, I simply removed people I wasn't excited to call. There were a couple of main reasons I wouldn't be excited to call someone. First, if I wasn't confident that we were a fit for them. So if they weren't part of our ICP or ideal customer profile, there's no reason to call. The second one was if I didn't have enough information about them to be prepared for an intelligent conversation. If either of those were the case, I would take them off my list. My number of calls went down, but my meeting set went up. This simple rule Call people you were excited to talk to set me up for massive success. And that is before I learned these five additional tactics to get really good Tip 1 bucket your buyers I recently helped one of our SDRs go from hitting 60% a quota to 120% or more with the stupid simple advice of bucketing their buyers. Before we met for coaching, they were uploading all of their prospects into a call list and just cranking out massive amounts of dials. They'd call a VP of Engineering, then a Product Manager, then an engineering ic. All across different industries they were making it nearly impossible for themselves to be audible ready for conversations because they were creating their own massive context switching problem. After we spoke, they started bucketing their prospects into lists based on level title and industry. Then they would spend their entire call blocks on the same level title in the industry, making it incredibly easy to nail the talk track. When someone answered, their conversion rates jumped along with their quota attainment and commission checks. They also learned how to get incredible value from conversations with non decision makers calling lower titles. Which leads into tip 2, which is dig for gold nuggets. The best calls to an executive start with I spoke with Jenna on your team and learned that you are currently working towards that specific goal you learned about, but getting stuck with a challenge you heard they were trying to deal with. The only way you can start a cold call with that level of valuable specificity is by having multiple conversations across their org to get those gold nuggets. When I started approaching my call blocks with multiple ways to win, my winning increased. Not every call has to result in a meeting set to be a win, but if I can learn a gold nugget from a prospect that gives me a reason to be excited to call someone else, then I'm heading the right direction. Tip number three is the best Cold callers are master storytellers because the human brain is wired for storytelling. Even on a quick call. If you've managed to get their attention enough past the first couple of seconds, you can catch their attention even more with stories that address their pains and lead them to an ideal outcome. Like if you're selling an automation software instead of saying something boring like our customers save 40% of their time with their software. You could say one of our clients used to spend hours manually updating spreadsheets. Now they leave work at 5 instead of 7 and get dinner with their kids instead of digging through Excel, have you tracked how much time your team is spending on spreadsheet updates? Not to mention the cost of mistakes from manual edits? Now real quick effective storytelling and understanding Buyer psychology is one of the most critical elements to cold calling in all of selling. To help you master this skill, I've built out one of the most powerful programs on sales psychology that I've used to personally generate millions of dollars in sales. You can click on the link in the description to get free access. Tip 4 your opener matters less than you think Think about what goes through your mind when you're called by someone that you don't know. You're thinking, who is this? Why are they calling me and what do they want? You're not actually processing the exact words they say to decide if you're going to listen or not. Your brain is just scrambling to figure out those three points. Regardless of what opener you use, the conversation doesn't really begin until the prospect knows why you are calling them and they decide that that reason for calling them is a good enough reason to listen to you. So pick an opener that's comfortable for you based on your personality. Maybe it's direct like I prefer. I'd say this is a cold call, but it's a well researched one. Can I have 30 seconds to tell you why I called you specifically? Maybe it's funny this is going to ruin your day as a cold call. Can I have 27 seconds tell you why I called and then you can choose to hang up or listen. All I care about for my sellers is that it's authentic and honest. The real magic of the cold call is having a great reason to call. Which leads to tip 5 cold calling is easy when you have a good reason to call. At the beginning of this video, I talked about how my cold calling took off when I only called people I was excited to talk to. The common denominator for everyone I was excited to call is I had a great reason to call them. The best reason to call someone is because you know from your research, either online or through conversations with people at their company, that you have a great solution for one of their biggest problems. It makes for an incredibly easy transition from your opener. I'm reaching out because I learned about the challenge they're experiencing, the we helped tell a customer story about how you helped solve that challenge. And then can I ask you a couple of questions about how you are handling that challenge to see if it's worth a deeper conversation? When you have a great reason to call someone, they'll often have at least a good reason to spend more time with you. When you don't, you'll dial for hours with limited results and massive frustration. These are some of the five most relevant tips that I've personally learned in the last 10 years doing and teaching cold calls. They are fairly simple to understand, but not easy at all to master. The more reps you put in, the faster you're going to master these concepts. And don't sweat the screw ups. The great thing about cold calling is you can completely screw up a call and try the same person back. A month or two later, they'll completely have forgotten you. You get a whole new shot. So don't worry about live Practice burning your territory. While cold calling is the critical foundation, you still need to master your territory, dis, discovery, demos, negotiation, and many other skills to maximize your earnings and sales. I'm helping more than 16,000 motivated sellers to do just that. You can join our free newsletter to get the best of my content in your inbox every week with the link in the description.