Cold calling can be an effective sales technique to reach potential customers who haven’t contacted you and probably doesn’t know about your product or service.

There are multiple different ways to reach out to a cold prospect; in person or through an email or telephone call. However, this particular article will discuss techniques on how to be a more effective cold caller using a telephone.

It can be very intimidating as well as challenging to pitch to someone who doesn’t know you and certainly wasn’t expecting a phone call from you.

Although many people claim “cold calling is dead. It’s a thing of the past.” The truth is that it can be a highly effective weapon in your marketing arsenal to get new customers.

So after staring at the phone for 10 minutes and trying to get the courage to make your first call, let me remind you that there are plenty of sales people are laughing their way to the bank. Sometimes it just takes putting yourself in a peak state of energy to conquer your fears and get some momentum. You will definitely gain momentum once you start seeing the dollars coming in.

The fact that the fear of rejection and negativity scares many other sales people away from cold calling, could make you the highest paid sales person at your company if you can master this skill. Not to mention, many cold callers are just not very good at it.

With that said, here are a few tips to help you become a master cold caller that brings in the big paychecks.

Learn to not let rejection bother you

It doesn’t matter if you are taking inbound calls, outbound calls, appointment setting, or cold calling; Rejection happens to everyone that does sales. So how can you let rejection become a thing of the past?

1. Make a game out of it. Create a board with your coworkers where you post the funniest rejections; the winner takes home a prize for the week (all team members put money in a pot).

2. Find out why someone isn’t interested. If they aren’t hanging the phone up in your face, take a moment to find out why specifically they aren’t interested with a question like “thanks for taking the time to speak with me. Would you mind helping me out by telling me why you aren’t interested and what I can do better in the future?” In this case, you are just looking for feedback to improve your sales process.

3. Put yourself in a peak state before making a call. Try listening to your favorite song and pump yourself up with motion. The quickest way to break your state from fear or depression is to change your physiology by putting a smile on your face and moving your body to some music that really makes you feel good. You can also shake a negative feeling that you have of your product by reading testimonials from happy customers. Also, try doing a practice call with one of your colleagues and have them reject you in the rudest and funniest way possible. If you both aren’t cracking up than your partner didn’t do a good enough job of being rude to you. The next time you get a slap-happy prospect that isn’t lucky enough to get to buy from you, remember your rude rejection from your co-worker and you can instantly smile at this belligerent Betty.

Focus on constant and never-ending improvement in your sales abilities.

Cold calling is a difficult skill to master and is probably not something that you will instantly be good at. There are repeatable tasks that you should be doing so that you are consistently growing.

1. Take the time to write out a sales script. 

2. Try it many times until you have clear insight into how to improve it; focus on areas in the script where people are pretty consistently shutting you down.

3. Re-write and try this process again. This should continue until you can easily sail through objections with your script on a consistent basis.

4. Take the time to analyze your sales calls by focusing on what prospects are saying in response to your questions. If your questions are stimulating good conversation than they are effective; if not, try to rewrite your questions.

Once you start implementing these tips with a mindset dedicated to constant and never ending improvement, you should start seeing success in your cold calling efforts. Remember to make rejection fun instead of something that affects you in a negative way. Keep practicing your sales scripts and looking for ways to improve areas where you get shut down, as well as improve on questions that stimulate conversation from your prospect. When you are prepared with the right mindset, and armed with the right tools, success is something that will happen for you!