Cold Calling

Platinum Equity, Tom Gores’ 40-company empire, became one of the globe's largest investment firms through the cold call. Today, Gores is one of the richest people in the world and is perhaps best known for his ownership of the Detroit Pistons.

But way back when, Tom was right there with his team getting his teeth kicked in on the phones. They were dialing companies far above their weight class, armed with a straightforward question: "Are you considering divesting any divisions?"

In his coverage of Platinum, Forbes journalist Steven Bertoni describes the near absurdity of the situation:

“He had six people working the phone all day long, as if Platinum were some vendor of penny stocks or vacation time-shares,” he says. “It's such an odd and opulent thing to hear Tom Gores, founder and chief executive, talk about getting his hands dirty.”

Contrary what you may see splattered across your LinkedIn feed, cold calling works — and not just for penny stock salesmen or investment behemoths. Proprietary Apollo data reveals that, in addition to sending an auto-email, simply picking up the phone (call connected or not!) results in a 6% increase in meeting booked rate.

Michael Oelbaum, founder and CEO at Jobs Connected, increased meetings booked by 3x when they added the cold call in addition to email outreach.

He lists a few reasons why cold calls worked:

1. It forces a prospect to give you their attention. You get your prospect’s ear in real time.
2. It humanizes you — a lot. You have more control over how you present yourself, from the words you choose to your tone. “When I’m on the phone, I’m able to have a lot more dimension,” says Michael.
3. It protects your domain. An overreliance on mass emails can hurt you far more than it can help you.

“No matter who you are,” he concludes. “You can’t replace the cold call.”

Cold calling is a mental game and it can take its toll on even the most seasoned dial jockey. Salespeople consistently report that picking up the phone is one of the most daunting aspects of generating pipeline, with 63% stating that it's the worst part of their jobs.

“It’s hard for reps to push the button…because at that moment, it can feel like they are about to ambush somebody, and [they] aren’t going to like it,” says 30-year sales vet and CEO of ConnectAndSell Chris Beall.

There are three key things you can do to change the mentality around the cold call, mitigate anxiety, and turn cold calling into a profitable outbound channel.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more accustomed you are to cold calling, the more confident and prepared you’ll be (and the more confident and prepared you’ll sound!).

When I was a sales leader, I’d ask my reps to follow this simple seven-day process (see figure 4.2) for getting comfortable on the phones and perfecting their pitch.

To make cold calling a legitimate stream of revenue for your business, you need to prioritize picking up the phone every single day.

Anthony Balestras became Orum’s top SDR and cold caller, not by making 300 dials seven days a week, but by consistently blocking out time in his calendar dedicated to making cold calls.

“Week-to-week, some days you might put in 60%, some days you might put in 100% — but as long as you’re showing up every day, that’s consistency,” says Anthony.

In sales, time is money and you can cover far more opportunities, qualify more prospects, and jumpstart more relationships in one dedicated hour on the phone than an entire day of dumping leads into a generic email campaign.

The reality is, your results are going to vary day-by-day. Some days you might make 200 dials and only book one meeting. And other days, you’ll book five calls from your first five dials.

Case in point: figure 4.4 shows a comparison of two dial blocks Anthony did. One lasted two hours and 33 minutes and led to five booked meetings. The other lasted 30 minutes and also led to two booked meetings.

On any given day, you never know what you’re going to get. That’s just part of the game.

If there’s one thing you need to believe before ever making a cold call, it’s that you’re not a stranger looking to make a quick buck. Instead, you are a knowledgeable potential partner seeking a mutually beneficial relationship with whoever you’re calling. So, just like any other prospect interaction: it’s important to do thorough preparation and research before picking up the phone.

Use personalization and intent signals to show your prospects that you did your homework and have specific context on their business. It will instantly warm up the call and set yourself apart from 99.99% of the sales calls they’ve ever received.

Warm calling also happens through strategic targeting. You can have much more effective conversations with folks you’ve previously reached out to through a LinkedIn connection request, message, or a friendly email. Some level of familiarity here goes a long way.

You’re 45 calls deep. The line clicks and you finally hear a voice on the other end: “Hello?”

Don’t panic — here’s what to do.

Humans are conditioned to respond to questions. This is an opening line that prompts the prospect to engage within seconds. You can also use your first line, or the one immediately following, as an opportunity to ask for consent.

Charlotte Lloyd, renowned cold calling expert, generated $1.5M in revenue for her business using a permission-based question in her opener:

Let’s assume the prospect says “yes” and lets you continue. Now, show them what you know, using your research on who they are and what they do, and then launch into your qualifying questions.

If you’re reaching out to a marketing executive, this might sound something like:

These lines accomplish a lot in a few short sentences:

• It shows them you’ve done your research — you know their role, their industry, and the pain points they face

• It presents them with potential inadequacies in their current solution (or lack thereof)

• It ends with an open-ended, relevant question that keeps the conversation moving while helping you qualify whether or not they are even a good fit

This last piece is an important one because great cold calls are a two-way street.

The goal of the conversation is to uncover whether or not a relationship is beneficial for both parties.

After, and only after, you’ve laid the groundwork, put your detective hat on, and qualified the prospect (which realistically takes no longer than 20-30 seconds), you can move into your pitch.

You probably have an elevator pitch for your product that looks something like this:

But rattling off your company’s boilerplate is impersonal and it immediately sets off the “I’m being sold to” alarms. So, think on your feet and adjust your pitch around what you learned in the opening conversation. Let’s say you learned they are a sales agency struggling to access quality leads. Using the above example, a more relevant, human pitch would sound something like this:

A personalized pitch shows the prospect that:

• You were actively listening

• Your product has value for their unique needs

• And people similar to them have seen success

You will inevitably face objections from a prospect, reservations about your price, value, relevance, or even their purchasing ability. And a big sales misconception is these objections are a negative thing — that they are a sign of a bad-fit prospect and a dead end.

But it’s actually quite the opposite.

“An objection is not a rejection. It is simply a request for more information,” says sales coach and psychologist Dr. Bo Bennett.

When we spoke to Florin Tatulea from Common Room, he echoed the same sentiment. ”Handling objections is about empathizing and seeking to understand your prospects' world and, through curiosity, trying to figure out if there is a gap between their current state and the ideal state with your solution,” he says.

To make this more actionable, there’s a three-step process for responding to a prospect’s objection. I call it “The 3 Rs.”

1. Recognize their objection

Make the prospect feel seen and heard. This can be done really effectively through “mirroring” (as coined by Chris Voss in “Never Split the Difference”) which is when you repeat back the last few words a prospect said.

For example, if a prospect lobs the classic objection, “I’m not interested,” you could respond with, “You’re not interested?”. Seems simple, maybe even silly, but this often results in the prospects digging deeper into their reasoning, giving you a better understanding of their true concern.

2. Restate their objection

Next, build on this recognition by restating their objection. According to Chris Voss’s objection-handling methodology, “labeling” is a helpful tool in which you give a verbal observation of a prospect’s feelings. For example, if a prospect says, “Yes, I’m not interested because we already have a solution in place,” you could recognize their objection and label their feelings by responding with, “Okay, I’m hearing you’re currently happy with your vendor.”

3. Redirect by proposing an alternative solution

Finally, comes the redirect. The goal here is to pivot to a solution-oriented approach and, hopefully, uncover more information in the process.

• Do they already have a solution in place? Redirect with: “What are you currently using? How long have you been using your current system?”
• Are they facing budget constraints? Redirect with: “Do you currently use [tool or service] to [overcome challenge]?”
• Do they not have the time today? Redirect with: “When would be the most convenient time for me to reach out to you?”

Just like the primary goal for the cold email is to get a response, the primary goal of the cold call is to set up a next step. Very few cold calls end in a closed deal. So instead of pushing for a close, look for the next call, meeting, or future time to connect to give more value.

From his near two decades of sales experience, James O’Sullivan recommends you do this by making the ask and bundling it with a quick rundown of what the meeting would cover. For example:

“I did a lot of this at Uber when dealing with the C-Suite,” he says. “I’d tie back the five-second rundown to whatever they were interested in or had questions about. Ideally, I’d generate some curiosity as well.”

No answer? Leave a voicemail

What if the prospect doesn’t pick up the phone?

Research shows that it takes an average of eight calls to get in touch with a prospect. Realistically, you’re going to encounter the voicemail box more often than a person to pitch to.

But don’t hang up.

Take the extra 30 seconds to leave a voicemail, particularly on the first time that you call someone. How else would they know that the unknown number that tried to call them wasn’t a scammy robo-call, but a real human seeking to share value?

At nearly every company I’ve ever worked at, 17-25% of meetings came from voicemail callbacks. It’s one thing you can do right now to increase the effectiveness of your cold calling program.

The voicemail box isn’t a place for you to rattle off your script. After the tone, keep it short, keep it sweet, and use it as an opportunity to quickly introduce yourself and warm up your other touchpoints. For example, if you’ve already sent them an email, reference it in your voicemail, and vice versa (see figure 4.5).

It’s as simple as:

Finding the specific talk track that works is one big dance of trial and error. Not every pitch will work for every salesperson. Two reps can follow the same script, and one might come up with a handful of meetings while the other strikes out.

But you have to start somewhere, so we went to the experts. Here are a few cold-calling scripts to try on your next call.

Florin Tatulea, Head of Sales at Common Room and former Director of Sales at Barley, attributes 10% of his team’s entire cold call meeting booked rate at his former company to “The Mic Drop Method” from Belal Batrawy at Death to Fluff (see figure 4.7).

It starts with a permission-based opener, which the Barley team has found gets “more than 95% of people open to at least hearing you out.” From there, the structure leads you to clearly framing the problem by provoking the cost of inaction, asking disqualifying questions, and setting next steps.

Use (and adjust) this “Mic Drop Method” script (shown in figure 4.8) in your next call to try it out.

“I don’t have time to chat right now.”

If you’ve only cold called for 30 minutes in your entire sales career, chances are you’ve heard this one.

Our friend from Orum, Anthony Balestras, uses this script as a “Hail Mary,” an attempt to keep the prospects on the phone just long enough to get out a value statement with one simple question:

It harkens back to the idea that humans are naturally curious and conditioned to respond to questions. The interest in seeing what you have to say next will often outweigh the time commitment of just a few more seconds on the phone.

“So ask something intriguing,” says Anthony. “Ask a question where you know the answer will be ‘yes’ or something positive.”

Prospects will throw lots of different objections your way to try and get you off the phone. This objection-handling maneuver comes from the one and only Sarah Brazier, and you use it when the prospect says they will review your pitch over email.

She calls this “lobbing a shallow objection.” It’s not a firm “no” — but it might as well be.

Use this script to subtly counter and salvage your opportunity to have a meaningful conversation, right then and there (because there is never any guarantee you’ll get their attention again).

At the end of the day, these are all just words on a page. You’ll find that how you say something is often more important than what you say. According to a study by Gong, a salesperson’s tone of voice can positively affect the outcome of a cold call by up to 38%. By comparison, what you actually say can improve outcomes by a much more modest 7%.

Great cold callers aren’t born; they’re made.

Selling over the phone requires sellers to think on their feet, read prospects sight unseen, and push through the rejection. It’s a skill that’s developed over time. As a sales leader, it’s your job to nurture those skills by effectively coaching and continually training.

“Training and continued development is a lost art,” says Lars Nilsson, CEO at SalesSource and former VP of Global Sales Development at Snowflake. “There are too many systems, processes, and things managers need to do to have underdeveloped frontline reps. You need to develop them.”

According to Lars, and anyone else who has built and scaled successful businesses, the best coaches in the world lead by example.

Too often sales leaders, and even CEOs, are under the impression that they don’t have to dial anymore, that they are past that point in their career, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Everything you say as a coach hits harder when your team watches you do it. They have to see you walk the walk — pick up the phone, get your teeth kicked in, then pick up the phone again.

Kelsey MacKay, former AE and now sales manager at HubSpot, explains why she’s grown so much over her seven-year tenure at the world’s leader in marketing automation:

Walking the walk not only boosts morale, but has a direct impact on your bottom line. Our data found that, of the sales leaders who hit or exceeded quota in 2022, 90% reported that they frequently participate in and join sales calls.

When sales leaders put themselves on the front lines, they get a clear picture of not only who their prospects are and how they understand the product, but what their team is doing on the phones that works (and doesn’t).

To start a cycle of improvement across each individual on your team, there are three steps you can take.

For every cold caller on your team, choose one call recording and play it back, taking careful notes on what went right and where they can improve.

Pay careful attention to:

• Their tone and professionalism

• Timing and delivery of their pitch

• Objection handling and questioning

• Their closing technique

After listening to a call, there might be 10, even 20, things that they could have done better. But giving too much feedback isn’t productive, for both application and a rep’s confidence.

Consider your rep’s experience and tenure as you deliver feedback.

If a rep is in their first month on the job, a coach should only give one actionable and constructive piece of feedback. If they haven’t implemented it next time you meet — deliver the same advice until they master it.

In the second month as their confidence increases, you can scale to two pieces of feedback. For month three and beyond, three pieces of feedback can be given — but never more.

Keep in mind that cold calling is a mindset and the feedback you give to reps should instill confidence, not anxiety.

Nick Ross, Senior Manager, Sales Development at Klue, reminds us that, at the end of the day, the best cold calls are just good conversations. If your SDRs are too stressed, they won’t succeed.

“At Klue, I tell SDRs to imagine they’re kicked back in a chair, feet up on their desk, having a conversation with a friend,” he says. “I’ve gone so far as drawing a stick figure doing just that to give the team a visualization of what to strive for.”