Cold Calls & Calm Nerves: A Starter Kit for the Terrified
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Brooke Greening: Terrified in Tahiti asks, how do people who do cold calls do it? Utterly terrifying. But seriously, I want to know. Never done it, but I gotta start help. Well, terrified in Tahiti. Thank you for your question. I've got my matcha, so let's go. You see, I used to do cold calling a while back ago at Wells Fargo Financial, and that was in the day when you were like tied to your computer.
You had your headset on and it would just dial in and it would go, go, go, go, go. Now, I was super fortunate because I was getting my master's at that time, so I was doing cold calling at night. So the only thing worse than cold calling during the day is cold calling at night because I was talking to them after they had been contacted probably five or six times.
At that point, that helped me to know that's not what I wanna do with the rest of my life. But it taught me a lot of different things. And a lot of times they would get angry at me, they would be cursing at me, they would be questioning. My education abilities, all of those things. And the good news is none of that is actually going to be happening for you. In the B2B world,
we're a lot more cordial than that, and so you don't have to worry about that. I know you said that you're terrified, but it's really not going to be that bad. But today I'm gonna talk about two things to help you get started in your cold calling. The first one is intentionality. See, a lot of times people feel cold calling is just like, I'm just gonna call them and see if they want me to do business with them.
Well, that doesn't really work. You have no rapport set up with them. There's no trust set up with them. That is, it's just not the way to be doing business. But you can be intentional in your cold calling. So you're gonna sit down and you're gonna ask yourself, what is the goal of me wanting to call these people?
Is there an event that you wanna invite them to? Is there a resource? That you wanna share with them is, are you wanting to talk to them to do a demo? Are you wanting to set up another time to be able to talk more about their business? You want to be really intentional and you want to give them a way to have an easy yes.
Instead of it seem like it's this huge jump and they're, they don't even know you and they don't trust you. So that's the very first thing you wanna do. Look at your business and think to yourself, what is it that I actually want to accomplish in this cold call? The second piece is you want to do pre-call planning, because if it's just you, then I'm going to assume you might not necessarily have a big team getting ready to do this.
So if it's just you, I would rather you have 10 intentional cold calls as opposed to a hundred, just random ones. So when I say talk about pre-call planning, you want to be able to do your homework. So you're gonna look at who are the people that you actually wanna be doing business with. You're gonna look at what's going on with them.
This is where you start looking in their social media. If they're blogging about things, they're doing videos, whatever it is, you're gonna look and be able to see how could you be able to build rapport in those first 10, 20 seconds when they pick up the phone. That's what you wanna be able to do for your homework, and then ask yourself, is what I'm going to be asking them to do?
Does that make sense? Would that be a clear next step for them? Now if you have a team and you're wanting to help with that, you still wanna be intentional, but you'd probably be able to scale that even more. And if you wanna talk more in regards to, what do I say on these cold calls, feel free to ask questions and we can talk about that.
'cause there's a difference in regards to a massive cold call list. And if you're actually talking to the business owner, if you're trying to get ahold of the business owner and you're trying to find them and their company, that's gonna be a different cold call than if you're actually gonna get ahold of them directly.
Okay. And then the third piece is just as a friendly reminder, you do need resilience. Now, they're probably not gonna yell at you. They're probably not gonna curse at you. But being told no multiple times does not feel good hearing when people are trying to figure like, who are you? Why are you calling me?
That feels uncomfortable sometimes. So you wanna make sure that you build resilience because if you don't, you are gonna stop about day two. But I promise you, if you stick with it, if you're intentional and you're doing your homework, it can make a really big difference in your business. All right, so there you go.
Terrified in Tahiti. Let me know what other questions you have.
