Ask Aleks Vitkin Show Episode 2: Best Way To Start Cold Sales, How To Get Past The Secretary

In this series I will be answering all of your questions about marketing, sales and entrepreneurship. I will also bring in experts to help answer these questions. Here with me today is Sabby who is in the daily business hustle and does cold calls.

What is the best way to start with cold sales?

Sabby: There’s a bunch of different ways to be honest. The way I did it was I developed a product that I actually wanted to sell and then I found a clientele list that I wanted to contact and actually made the calls too. Initially I didn’t know what to say. It was pretty much me calling up a company asking them if they wanted to buy a website, that was the breath of my actual conversation. After that I learned how to actually do sales calls online. There’s numerous amounts of literature out there, books like pitch anything and Dvd’s, that give you the overall structure of how to do a general sales call. So if you wanna get stuck into cold calls I would suggest reading some of those books as well. They give you a very good overview as to how sales calls actually go, especially if you don’t have a sales back round yourself. So when you do make the calls, you’ll be a lot more familiar with it. Apart from that it’s literally just keep on making those calls, become a lot more fluid with them, and the more you do the better you get. Simple as that.

Aleks: yeah I actually started with sales calls in 2009. I had zero training with sales calls. I just used a little bit of common sense and found companies, from the yellow pages, with a bad website and called all of them. One out of every 20 or so would say, yeah sure we need a new website. I was selling them quite cheaply back then so there was no reason not to. I got a few clients like that and that’s with almost zero sales experience and zero cold calling experience. So if I could have done it right after college with zero experience then anyone can do it right now.

I made ten sales calls last week and the issue I keep encountering is that I cant get past the secretary what should I do

Aleks: Good job on getting those sales calls done man, it takes some balls to get started on that (to Sabby) what is your opinion on that one?

Sabby: Once again there’s no real definite way to do it. I mean one of the ways in which I get past secretary’s is by establishing who I am,what my company is and what i’m doing very very quickly and enthusiastically. Sometimes that’s enough to get past the secretary but ideally what you want to do is get to the decision maker. The secretary is not the decision maker so prior to your phone call, if you can, try to get the name of the person who actually does do that. So if i’m selling websites for example, I want to find who’s in charge of doing the website or who’s in charge of employing someone to do the website. I will try to quickly establish who that is if I don’t know on the call or prior to the call. if i’m on the phone call itself, I would just literally ask them who is responsible with doing the sites and they can either tell me or not. Usually they are pretty good at telling you. Once you’ve established who you are and what you’re company is, you can simply ask them to put you through to john who deals with the websites in the company. That’s probably the best case scenario to be honest. Sometimes they’re more difficult they may even ask who you are and what the call is regarding. You just have to maintain your frame. Sometimes they’ll go as far as saying they don’t need a website being done for the company. This is the receptionist not the decision maker themselves. In this case try to not to lose face. Maintain that you are delivering a quality service and product. You can even say that you’ve spoken to the person before, as long as you know who the person who deals with the decision is. For example you can say that you spoke to John last week in regards of developing the website, so I would like it if you could you put me through please. Say this very very politely. It doesn’t have to be abrupt! Manners do go a long way, especially in the UK, we really depend on that. You just reciprocate If someone is nice to you. So try not to come off as too stand off-ish if they’re not complying to your needs straight away. Just give them a little bit of patience and within time they should come around.

Aleks: Okay awesome advice there. Anything Sabby tells you by the way, only works if you do your phone calls. For example how many phone calls do you do on an average week Sabby?

Sabby: An average week would be about 100-150.

Aleks: That’s in a week, and that’s on top of having a regular contract freelance gig you’re going to right? So its not a full time thing you’re doing?

Sabby: No no this is part time. What I do is personally make my lists the weekend before for the week to come or the day before so by the time I get home I already have a list of people that I want to call up. That completely saves time for me in that respect. All I have to do is literally pick up the phone, make the call and carry the sales process out. Simple as that. That’s all that that needs to be done. You don’t need to make it any more difficult on yourself by looking for people on the day you’re making the sales call. Doing this allows you to have better time management.

Aleks: Okay so yeah thanks Sabby that’s really solid advice there. This is actually a mistake I see a lot of people making. They’re not preparing enough! They’re Just trying to do everything last minute and they’re not scheduling ahead of time during the week when they’re doing sales calls. They’re also not doing nearly enough sales calls. 5-10 is good for beginners to get a feel, but for anyone who actually closes sales, they know they need those 5-10 to warm up, and that’s the advanced guys. I’m talking about people who close $40,000 in sales per month . 5-10 phone calls is great but that’s just a warm up for them. After that they are actually closing sales. The first 5-10 they call the worst leads just to warm up. Not that it won’t necessarily generate sales, just slightly less likely.

I’m calling the companies and just from the conversations i’m having it feels like they’ve been called 10-20 times per day. It feels like there’s an over abundance for this product on the market.

Sabby: Yeah that’s right they are having 10-20 calls about the same product. What salesmen need to do is differentiate themselves from the rest of the people out there who are offering the same service. Usually the main way to do that is to develop a product that caters to the specific client themselves. A lot of sales people actually forget this and they don’t actually pay attention to it as well. Most people who get called are actually thinking that what they are being offered is a blanket service, meaning everyone is getting the same exact thing. So they end up thinking why they should do it all? These people aren’t in my best interest, they’re out to get money from me. These sales people need to come from a place where they are offering tremendous value to their clients. Something that is beneficial for both parties, while making it clear that they are not there to just take their money, but they’re going to be there for the long term. They need to know that you ate going to be with the client every step along the way. Even in the future, you know past just this one sale. They’re just going to be there for them to be honest. A lot of people who get called up have these beliefs that’s sales people are here to take their money and you need to establish very very quickly that this is not the case and you are there to help them and the only way to do that is to get results for them as well. Ultimately if you’re in the cold calling business, your business is referrals so you need to be doing the best for your clients anyway. Through language you can establish this very, very quickly and build a particular amount of trust within the call. mean there’s only a certain amount you can achieve in a 10-30 minute call, but try your best and build rapport and if you are able to do this then you are going to go a long way beyond any normal sales call and you are going to establish yourself from the pack very, very quickly.

Aleks: I have something to add to that as well , back in 2009 when I was doing calls I was doing lead generation services. Before going into the pitch I would first qualify the leads by saying well okay are you actually looking for more leads? What do you want those leads to make you? How much money would these leads make you? And then I would guide them through the process, which I used for other clients in the past. Then I would have said well would you be interested in doing something for yourself? And at this point in the conversation, if they stayed on this long, almost invariably they would have said yes. By this point you then go into your sales call and this would be 30 minute into the sales call. If you get past the 20 minute mark in the sales call the sale is very, very likely. You go from very low close rate to maybe around 20-30 % close rate if you are dealing with extremely qualified leads. I’m not talking about completely cold here, but guys who clearly needed more leads and were clearly investing in advertisement. So I looked up the guys who were clearly investing in advertising and it was much easier to actually close them. Maybe they’re advertising but they don’t have a website yet so they were advertising just a phone number. That’s the kind of stuff I used and yea thanks a lot Sabby for your input very, very valuable

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