Cold Calling – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

Call Reluctance Doesn’t End When You Pick Up The Phone

How many times do you let the phone ring when you make a cold call?

I’ve made a lot of outbound sales calls in my career, and have no idea what my answer to that question would be. Here’s why it’s a metric to follow:

Mark Smith, VP of Sales at the English CRM company Womply, recently conducted an experiment involving 60 outbound sales reps and 8,000 calls.

52 of the reps followed their usual phone sales routine. The others got this instruction: they were to let the phone ring at least 8 times before hanging up.

8,000 calls later, here’s what the data showed:

The group that let the phone ring 8 times reached a live human 59.3% more often than the “control group.”
The “8 times” group reached a decision-maker 30.9% more often than the control group.

In his email newsletter, phone sales expert Art Sobczak had the same initial thought I did:

My first reaction was, what voice mail system allows the phone to ring eight times?

Apparently, enough voice mails systems do this that it made a a 59.3% difference in response.

My take on this:

Call reluctance doesn’t end when the AE picks up the phone. A substantial number of salespeople may be hanging up quickly to avoid an uncomfortable conversation.
If voice mail picks up, you might as well leave a message. Some salespeople prefer to hang up and call back… but your target may be sitting right next to the phone, looking at your name on Caller ID. It may take seven rings for them to decide what to do with your call.
In his book High Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results, Mark Hunter said there are three possible outcomes to your call if you stick around long enough: your target answers, you get a gatekeeper, or voice mail picks up. You can prepare in advance for all three. Don’t wing it.

I wrote a post last year about how to beat call reluctance. My advice focused on how to get yourself to pick up the phone and dial it. Here’s Part 2:

Give it 8 rings before you hang up.

[reminder][/reminder]

Another Hotel Story, With a Quick Sales Lesson

There’s one sales approach more effective than a phone call.

Sales lesson: a human body gets attention — Photo by Viacheslav Iakobchuk

Not long ago I told the story of my attempts to book a hotel room near the airport in Lexington, Kentucky. You can read the full tale here, and you should.

The sales lesson of the story was that a phone call is often much more effective than an online effort when you want to get a target’s attention and compel action.

After I put up the post, I heard from fellow road warrior and consultant Don Davis of Gabriel Media. Don is Senior Market Manager at Gabriel and a subscriber to this blog.

He pointed out that when a phone call fails, there’s an even more effective option:

Many years ago I was stuck in a small airport in Alexandria, LA after delays then cancellation of a flight. This was before being able to book a room via internet.

I made some calls to the few local hotels and was told they were full. I decided I might have a better shot if I stood in front of them asking for a room.

I took a taxi to the biggest hotel and went in and told them of my plight and asked if they had anything available. Somehow they found me a room even though they were “full” when I called.

In each case, there’s a trade-off: efficiency for effectiveness.

It’s faster and easier to look up hotel vacancies online than it is to call each hotel on the phone. But my phone call got results when online attempts failed.

It’s faster and easier to make phone calls than it is to take a taxi to one hotel. Don Davis found that an in-person attempt got him the room.

When you consider your prospecting options, you’ve got the same choices: the efficiency of a social media post versus the enhanced effectiveness of a series of phone calls.

And when the phone and keyboard aren’t getting it done, remember this:

There’s nothing more effective in getting a target’s attention than a human body on the other side of the desk.

5 Awesome Must-Read Blogs For Ambitious Media Salespeople

The best salespeople read constantly. Books, newspapers, newsletters, online courses… and blogs. We live in an age where there is an enormous amount of great information available for free about business, marketing, advertising, and sales.

Here is some required smartphone reading for anyone who works in media sales or advertising:

Photo courtesy Hubspot

Great Advertising, Marketing and Sales Blogs

Dan O’Day Talks about Radio — The ostensible subject is radio, but about 50% of the time he is talking about advertising, and what he says can apply to television, Internet, and other media just as well as radio. His Commercial Smackdowns, in which he gleefully dismantles a radio ad, are both instructive and a great deal of fun.
Jeffrey Gitomer’s Sales Caffeine — not technically a blog (he has one of those, too but rarely posts). You have to subscribe by email to get this. Gitomer, the author of dozens of sales books including Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness, has been sending out these emails since 2001. He has been known to repeat himself, which is not surprising when you think about having to write 52 of these a year for 15 years. But he lives and breathes sales, has strong opinions, and knows what the heck he’s talking about.
The Jim Doyle & Associates Blog: In the interest of full disclosure, let me point out that my day job is as a consultant and sales trainer for Jim Doyle & Associates. But I was a paying customer of this company before they hired me – when I was a radio account executive, I paid out of my pocket to be part of Jim’s sales coaching program. Jim himself wrote Don’t Just Make A Sale… Make A Difference: How Top Achievers Approach Advertising Sales. He, Tom Ray, Pat Norris and John Hannon all provide content to the blog. If you sell radio, television, print, online, billboards, or any other media, this stuff works.
Monday Morning Memo Every Monday, Roy Williams (the Wizard of Ads, not the basketball coach) pontificates about advertising, marketing, persuasion, and anything else that he wants the world to know. Sometimes, he wants the world to know how smart he is, so his blog does occasionally go off in the weeds. But more often than not, he has excellent advice on how to enter somebody’s mind and convince them to do or think something. His book Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads: Turning Paupers into Princes and Lead into Gold is required reading for anyone who works in advertising, or wants to.
Sam Richter’s Know More Blog Richter is the author of Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling, a terrific book on how to research prospects online. He offers a variety resources, some for free and some for money. He is a blog tackles a variety of topics, from sales techniques to to search for information to the value of social media.

[reminder]What’s your favorite advertising, marketing, or sales blog?[/reminder]

Are You Making This Embarrassing Mistake With LinkedIn?

Ani DiFranco once said that every tool is a weapon if you hold it right. LinkedIn can be a very powerful sales weapon — but it will backfire if you don’t use it correctly.

the wrong way to use a radio advertising sales tool — Photo by apops/dpc

LinkedIn has become a powerful tool for researching and making contact with new prospects. But like any other tool, there’s a right way and a wrong way to use it. I’ve received a couple of egregious “wrong way” examples in the past couple of weeks.

Both came from members of LinkedIn Groups I’m also part of. The writers have figured out that being part of these groups gives them the ability to contact complete strangers who are also members. They have not figured out how to use that ability.

The first one started like this:

Hi Doctor

Hope you’re doing well.

I wanted to take a few minutes from you today to mention how “hosted” video conferencing is changing real time collaboration. Although most of us know what video conferencing is, the only difference here is the word “Hosted”. Like every technology, now video conferencing is available on demand on cloud.

Here is a whitepaper that will tell you why this technology is spreading like a wildfire.

She wanted to “take a few minutes from me today”, but she offered no reason to give her those precious minutes. It would have been helpful if she’d “taken” a few minutes of her own to learn something about me before sending the message out.

The other one went like this:

Hi,

I saw your profile and felt you might fit the profile of what we look for in our company (Elite Sales experience to the SME/Enterprise Space)

Can you please review this YouTube video of our company and what we offer, and then give me your feedback on interest level?

No, I can’t. Or, more accurately, I can, but I won’t.

Any time you attempt to communicate — on the phone, in an email, or a LinkedIn message — with a client or prospect, you are in the “attention-rental” business. You offer information to the recipient, who “pays” for that information with a very scarce resource: his or her attention.

You must offer a compelling reason for your target to give you that attention. It starts with giving some indication that you know something about them.

I suspect that the folks who sent me those messages were attracted by the ability to blast out hundreds of them with the click of a button. It’s fast, it’s easy, and requires very little thought.

It’s also spam, and they’re running the risk of having their LinkedIn accounts suspended.

With great power there must also come great responsibility. — Spiderman’s Uncle Ben

Membership in a LinkedIn Group gives you the ability to find common ground with complete strangers and build relationships with them. But it’s only an effective weapon if you hold it right.

The Best Cold Call I Ever Got

“Hi, could I speak to Phil Bernstein?” I braced myself for the sales pitch.

The caller identified himself as Dan from Oregon Premier Real Estate*, and the call took a quick left turn:

Phil, I’m kind of embarrassed here. I have your name and phone number written on a sheet of paper. I know I’m supposed to call you, but I don’t know why.”

Photo by Thomas Leuthard. Creative commons.

This threw me. It was 2006, at the height of the real estate boom, but I didn’t know him or his company. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t recognize your name.”

Dan: That’s okay, we’ll figure it out. Are you selling your house?
Me: No…
Dan: Okay, so that’s not it. Are you looking around for a new home?
Me: No, we’re happy where we are.
Dan: Wow… what else could it be? Are you shopping for investment property, maybe?
Me: Nope, that’s not it.
Dan: Is someone in your family selling, or looking?
Me: Wow, Dan. I’m drawing a complete blank here. I don’t think so.
Dan: Refinancing your mortgage?
Me: Already did that.
Dan: Well, gee, Phil. I’ve hit a brick wall. Sorry to bother you. Here’s my number — if you think of something later, give me a call.

We hung up, and I spent the next few minutes trying to figure out how I could help the poor guy. Then the light bulb went on.

I’d been cold called by a pro. As I sat on my couch, I gave him a golf clap.

I can’t justify the dishonesty — once I realized that he’d misled me, it disqualified him from ever representing me in a transaction. But there’s a lot to be learned from the way he politely qualified me with a series of questions, determined that I wasn’t a prospect — I wasn’t buying, selling, or refinancing, and didn’t know anyone who was — and politely ended the call so that he could move on to the next call.

*Names have been changed.

Question: What’s the best cold call you’ve ever made, or received? Who impressed you with professionalism, good questions, or sheer chutzpah?

Leave your answer in the Comments below.