Megan Killion teaches cold calling as problem-solving, not pressure. Skip the hard pitch. Focus on discovery calls that confirm whether someone has a real need or if you've reached the right person.
Sales is changing, and it has been for a while now, but I think COVID really ramped up something that was already happening, which is that I do not think of sales as pressuring people to buy from me. As harassing people, chasing people down. That is not how I think of myself at all. I think of myself as someone who solves your problem. And when you call somebody to solve their problem, you don't get pushy. You don't just start pitching. I call it being pitch slapped when somebody just like hits you up out of nowhere and hits you with a pitch and you're like, hi, excuse me, do I know you? Have we ever engaged about anything in my life? No. Okay, cool. Then don't try to pitch your product or solution to me because you don't even know if I have a problem. So more and more, I think cold calling is about genuine connection. And it is polite and professional and friendly. And if you can kind of capture that essence in how you call, you're gonna have a lot more success than kind of the stereotypical Burning the phone out dialing. So if I'm calling you and I want to sell you a pen, first of all, I'm going to find out if you even need a pen. Because if you're 100% digital and you don't write anything down, I'm wasting my time with you, aren't I? So my goal when I call somebody is just to get them to either confirm that they have a need and I could solve it. Or to confirm that they're the wrong person for me to be talking to. Obviously, like, we want to set meetings, we want to move things forward, we want to keep the ball rolling. But if you go into every call being like, either I set a meeting or I lost, you are going to get beaten down and dejected so much faster than if your only outcome— like, your only goal is just to find out whether or not there's an opportunity. Yeah. Like, it's just, it's just discovery, essentially.
