7 Tips for Cold Calling

Here are my top 7 tips for cold calling:

1) Research 1 piece of information about the person you are calling and use this in your opener . The only goal of the first 10 seconds is to find a thread that will enable you to continue the conversation. Here is an example we use:

"Jeff, this is Michael from Growth Genie. We've never spoken before but I noticed you're hiring SDRs. Do you have 30 seconds to ask you a couple of questions about the hires?"

2) Go after a niche ideal customer profile. For example, in our case, rather than just targeting any old sales leader, I can use tools like Apollo, Cognism or ZoomInfo to find a list of Chief Revenue Officers at SaaS companies that are hiring SDRs. A different segment if I was a marketing agency may be VPs Marketing which are using HubSpot, which I can also find on these tools

3) Mention a specific pain point related to the person you are speaking to. For example:

"Jeff, as a CRO of a well funded company, you must be getting hundreds of automated sales pitches a week on LinkedIn and email, so you can imagine how difficult it is for your SDR team to break through this automation."

4) Ask a probing question to get them to open up about a pain. Probing questions should be open-ended questions that can't be answered with yes or no. For example:

"How are you coaching your SDRs to stand out from all the automation?"

5) Tell a customer story relevant to their job title, company and pains before using your call to action to book a meeting:

"Jeff, your situation reminds me of Dan Hebert. Like you, he was a VP Sales at Proposify a fast growing SaaS company that was completely reliant on inbound but knew they needed to leverage outbound to increase their average deal size. After implementing our playbooks, they were able to go from 0% to 50% outbound generated pipeline in just 9 months. Interested in seeing the playbook they used to do it?"

6) Understand VS overcome objections. When you hear an objection, acknowledge it and ask a question about it. Do not fight with your prospect and say he or she is wrong. For example, if they tell you they are happy with a competitor, say:

"Great to hear you're using Joe Bloggs inc. What made you leverage them in the first place?"

Don't say "We have much better features and customer service than Joe Bloggs inc."

7) Invite other stakeholders if you manage to book a meeting. It can be thrilling when you have a good conversation and they agree to a follow up call. However, your job is not done. If you work in B2B sales, you want as many stakeholders as possible on that meeting as possible so ask a question like:

"Is there anyone else from your team that could benefit from this discussion?"