Cold Calling: Use this intro to book 3x more meetings

Jason Bay (0:12)

3X, that is how many more meetings you will book over a cold call if you use problem-based language versus buzzwords. So speaking to the prospect in their language, their problems, their priorities, their goals, et cetera, versus talking about things in our language, like TCO, total cost of ownership if you've never heard that term. When we use all of these terms, it doesn't resonate with the prospect because we're speaking in a language that they don't understand. They don't understand our product, solution, lingo, et cetera. The mutual language that we have between buyer and seller is the stuff going on in their world. And that's what this episode's all about. I'm going to give you some cold calling tips and some examples that are going to help you outperform average reps by three times. Before we get into that, thanks for checking out Outbound Squad. My name's Jason Bay. We're all about helping you turn complete strangers into paying customers. So if you're doing cold outreach as an account executive SDR, you're a sales leader leading these types of folks, and maybe you're moving up markets, you're trying to make an outbound pivot, or you're just trying to break into more accounts, you're definitely in the right place. So being someone that posts quite a bit of sales content on LinkedIn, there's a lot of talk on cold calling being dead, it not working anymore, it being harder than ever, all of this kind of stuff. And we work with a lot of cool companies. And one of the first things we do is we ask them for recordings so we can hear their reps doing cold calls. And we'll hear this. Cold calling, it just doesn't really work the way that it used to. And I shit you not, almost every call that we listen to will start with a 30 second product pitch. And what I always think in that case is no shit, yeah, that's never really worked that well. And during times of economic uncertainty, especially right now, it's never going to work for you. The idea here, the key strategy that we need to think about is don't sell your solution, sell the problem. This is the basic thing that when you go into a sales org, like we do, and you say this, every rep kind of looks at you like, yeah, no shit, dude, I get we should, we should sell the problem. But rarely do I hear that reflected in how we do outbound. So I'm going to give you some examples so you can hear what that sounds like and hopefully take this and use it for your own calls or for your team's calls. So when cold calling, you have one job. It's not to sell the meeting, it's not to sell your solution, it is to sell the problem by proving you know the buyer's world.

In sales, skepticism is our number one objection. It's the biggest hurdle we have to overcome on a cold call. So you reduce skepticism by showing the prospect that you speak with your peers and you have to show them that a conversation with you rather won't be a complete waste of time. So let's say that you sell a contact center solution. A really bad way to open that call would be, hey, is this Dave? Yeah, it's Jason with So and So Company. I'm calling you because we sell a contact center solution to a lot of other companies. I'm just gonna make up some, like Amazon and Microsoft. I wanted to see if it makes sense to talk about how we might both help you. This intro doesn't do anything to show the prospect that you know their world, that you understand their problems, or anything like that. And it's immediately because you're talking about the solution, getting them to think, do we have one of these? And almost everyone you call, especially if you're selling contact center solutions, already has a contact center solution. So you never get a chance to sell even a meeting with an intro like that. A much better way to open is using a strategy we call a reverse pitch. So instead of pitching your product, you're essentially going to pitch your expertise. And the way that you pitch your expertise is by speaking the language through customer voice. And this is really just sharing a very short customer story. That's going to sound something like this. Yeah, you know, the reason I was giving you a call is that I speak with a lot of contact center leaders at companies like Nordstrom and Bloomingdale's. And their number one goal is to reduce cost to serve. They want less inbound call volume, but they're not really able to diagnose the reasons why customers are calling in. There's no way to address the root cause. And I'm curious, I was reaching out to you guys to see how that compares to your world. And when we have some of that really rich language in there around the problem, that's going to really build some credibility and get them talking. The thing I could have added to that too, to upgrade it, is I could have said, hey, I'm calling because I speak with a lot of contact center leaders at similar companies like Nordstrom and Bloomingdale's. One thing that stuck out to me on your site is it looks like you were intentionally trying to get people to call into the contact center and when I picked up the phone and called, I actually went through a call tree and it was really hard to get to the place that I wanted to get. I don't know if that's happening to similar customers, but a lot of folks are looking to reduce inbound call volume and help customers self-serve. How does that compare to your world? So I kind of wing that one a little bit, but I'm adding in something that's very specific to their company. So that type of intro is going to build a lot of credibility because it really articulates the prospect's status quo, their current state, the problem. It builds credibility, and that credibility is what earns you time. So I want to demonstrate social proof. I'm going to drop similar companies that we've worked with. I'm going to talk about the problem, and then I'm going to end my reverse pitch with an open-ended question. If you make this shift in your cold call approach, you will increase the number of meetings that you land from a connected cold call by up to 3X. That's all I got for you today. Hope the episode was valuable. One thing that you could do for us that would really mean a lot if you get value from Outbound Squad is like or subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and Apple podcasts and leave an honest reading review of what you think so that other people exactly like you can find it.