It’s About Strategy

Cold calling may date back a century or more, but it’s a long way from the graveyard. That’s right. Rumors of its demise aside, author, speaker, and sales coach Sharon Drew Morgen (newsalespara digm.com) says it’s a matter of using the cold call strategically.

One common cold-calling assumption ought to hit the dumpster, according to Morgen.“If you call maybe a hundred people to tell them you have a new product, maybe ten will say, ‘Come out and show it to us.’ You usually close about two of those people, so our business has grown to accept a 2 percent success rate, which is lunacy.”

But don’t throw your phone away yet. Morgen says the telephone can be an effective sales tool if you shift your thinking. “Salespeople have primarily used the phone as a way to get a face-to-face appointment,” she says. “But even if you do [secure an appointment], rest assured you won’t be the only person who’s showing up. Any company that’s making appointments over the phone is early in the decision-making process and talking to your competitors, too. Even worse, the person you’re talking to on that first visit probably isn’t a decision maker, but is there to vet you before you even get to the buying team.”

Morgen, as she explains in her book Dirty Little Secrets: Why Buyers Can’t Buy and Sellers Can’t Sell and What You Can Do About It (Morgen Publishing, 2009), thinks this is the wrong way to go about making a sale. “Why use your body as a prospecting tool?” she asks. “Companies throw lots of money at presentations, but often they’re not even in front of the people who have the authority to sign off on the sale. Your early phone conversations – and for a big sale there will be many – should help the company start the process that will ultimately lead you to the buying team.”

Rather than rush to set up the face-to-face appointment, which many salespeople see as the holy grail of cold calling, Morgen suggests you focus your first contact calls on a single question: “What is your pressing problem, and what are you doing now to solve it?” 

“Most companies don’t even try to solve a problem the first time it occurs,” she says. “So if prospects are talking to you, the odds are they’ve had this problem for a while and have learned to work around it. Ask them, ‘What’s the work around? Why are you unable to create a solution on your own? What have you tried in the past?’”

Morgen recalls a time when she was on a conference call with six people, including a high-ranking VP. “He brought up something they’d tried three years earlier that had failed and wasted a lot of time and money,” Morgen says. “Without that knowledge, I might have gone in and offered things that were too similar. He would have shot me down immediately.”

But that’s not the only reason that going for the quick presentation can backfire. Morgen recalls another situation, when she was working with a bank that used an Internet site to generate leads. “It was obvious that a lot of potential customers were going to the site, but the qualifying questions were so long and complicated that people stopped before they were finished,” she said. “The bank was following up by calling these people, who presumably had interest in the service or they wouldn’t have visited the site in the first place, and saying, ‘We saw you were looking at our site. Do you have any questions?’ Of course, the visitors would say no, and then the bank employee would say, ‘Well, here’s my name and number. If you have any questions in the future, call me.’” 

Not surprisingly, this sales model wasn’t working. “The bank had spent a lot of time and money creating a site, but once the bank drew people to the site, the bank punted,” Morgen says. “It would have been better to have asked, ‘What stopped you from completing the form?’ That would have allowed sales reps to begin a conversation that could lead back to the key issue: What is the customer’s need, and what is he or she presently doing to solve it? Only then can you offer a better solution.” 

These preliminary phone calls have one final function: to determine where the client is in the sales process. “The length of time it takes a company to realize that the old way isn’t working, admit that it can’t handle the problem on its own, and begin to look for new solutions is the sales cycle,” Morgen says.

She didn’t get that job for which she was brought in on the six-person conference call with the VP. “I knew they weren’t serious,” she says, “when I realized their head tech guy wasn’t on the call. They were still trying to solve the problem internally. There’s nothing you can do about a situation like that, but at least I didn’t waste months on a presentation.”

Morgen believes that being overly focused on a face-to-face meeting blinds salespeople to a deeper truth: Even the best presentation won’t close the sale if you’re talking to people who don’t have the authority to buy or addressing a company that isn’t yet at the point where it recognizes the need to buy.

“The question isn’t whether or not cold calling is dead,” says Morgen. “Because the truth is it was never alive in the first place. But the era in which salespeople use the phone to facilitate the process is just beginning. The phone can help you determine what the problem is, what prospects have tried in the past and why it hasn’t worked, how discontented they are with this old solution, and who needs to be on the buying team to create the new solution. If you help them put together the buying team, it’s guaranteed that you’ll be on it.”  –