8 Cold Calling Tips for Building Rapport with Clients
In recent years we have heard complaints that cold calling is a thing of the past. Across various sales training forums and articles on selling, we have heard assertions such as “cold calling no longer works” and “cold calling is dead”.
This simply isn’t true. Cold calling is still a fundamental part of selling.
If you ask almost any successful sales person how they made their fortune, they will tell you that it all started from cold calling and building rapport with clients over the telephone. Indeed, for many high earning sales professionals, building rapport through cold calling remains a vital part of their business development strategy.
Take Will Mundy, for example, a top financial advisor and sales professional. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Mundy has built the majority of his business around cold calling. In his early years he would make around 450 cold calls every day. Today he manages funds for 135 families worth over $65 million and still fits around 150 cold calls into each day! According to Mundy, things are looking up in the world of cold calling. Since the financial crisis of 2008-2009, he states, “people are a lot more willing to take my phone call now than 12 months ago.”
Building rapport is essential
The thing about cold calling is that it’s all about building rapport with the client. Building rapport is an essential part of any sales call. After all, a senior decision maker is not going to buy from you if they don’t like you. Here we provide 8 cold calling tips to help you when building rapport with clients.
1. Research the client’s firm
Researching and understanding your client’s business will give you a head start to building rapport before making the call. On the one hand, having a good knowledge of the client’s firm will prevent you from having to ask any awkward questions that will simply frustrate them. It will also help ensure that you target the right clients who have a specific need for your product or services. On the other hand, it will enable you to demonstrate greater insight into, and a deeper understanding of, the client’s world during the call. This will gain you much credibility and impress your prospects when cold calling and building rapport with clients.
2. Be polite
From the first second of the call you need to be polite and show the client respect. If you fail to do this you will most likely fail to make any sales at all when cold calling. Remember, building rapport is all about making the client like you. Being impolite and discourteous is a quick way to destroy your likability and credibility as a sales person and will have negative implications when building rapport.
3. Be adaptable
A significant part of building rapport when cold calling involves being a ‘people person’. To do this, you need to be adaptable to the multiple types of personalities out there waiting to pick up the phone. You need to learn the key personality types that everybody fits into and learn how to deal with these personalities in different ways.
If somebody has an analytical and problem-solving personality, you need to be able demonstrate a willingness to understand the numbers game and be upfront about how their solution will solve existing problems. If somebody has a caring and creative personality, you need to be able to demonstrate a caring side yourself, while communicating the benefits that drive your client to make a difference in their organisation.
4. Be relaxed and confident
It may be difficult to master when starting out at cold calling, but senior decision makers are more likely to buy from sales people who demonstrate a relaxed and confident demeanour. After all, if you are relaxed and confident, this will instil confidence in the buyer that you are capable of successfully implementing a solution for them. If you struggle to do this you will struggle when cold calling. Either practice until you are confident in your own abilities and selling skills or book a
5. Learn to listen
Learning to listen is crucial. Clients don’t like being talked at and they certainly don’t like having the ‘latest and greatest’ features, advantages and benefits of your solution being thrust upon them before they can get a word in. This has coined the term amongst various sales experts and sales training providers “selling isn’t telling”.
When cold calling, it is important to remember that while you are talking you are not learning about your client’s pressures, needs and desires – which are critical points of knowledge to making any sale. To build a good rapport when cold calling most salespeople therefore have to do more listening and less talking.
6. Encourage dialogue and an adult-to-adult conversation
When cold calling it’s important to get the client to open up and talk about themselves and their business. Many senior decision makers have big egos, so doing this you will not only find out more about the client’s world but will actually make yourself more likable from the client’s perspective. It will also enable you to show your human side and that you are not a stereotypically pushy sales person who is only interested in their money. This is essential to building rapport. By showing the client respect, encouraging them to talk about themselves and holding an adult-to-adult conversation with clients when cold calling, you will gain their own respect and find making sales much easier.
7. Ask open questions
Learn to ask the client open-ended questions early on in the call. This will encourage the client not only to do the talking, but to talk about themselves and their business. This will help you achieve some of the earlier cold calling tips discussed above, such as listening and encouraging dialogue with the customer. In turn, asking open questions will help you to learn more about the client’s pressures and needs, which you can later use to persuade them that they have an urgent need for your solution.
It is important to remember that closed questions can be ‘conversation killers’ as they result in a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answer. Start off by using open questions to encourage the client to talk, before using closed questions only when you are confident of closing the sale or moving onto the next stage of the sales process.
8. Communicate insight, value and credibility to create interest and trust
By researching your clients and getting them to open up when cold calling, creating interest and trust should be a much easier mountain to climb. To achieve this, you ultimately need to communicate insight, value and credibility on every sales call.
To communicate insight, you need to show a clear understanding of the client’s world (i.e. the internal and external pressures they face). This can be achieved through researching clients and adapting to their personality types, as previously explained. To communicate value, you must demonstrate how you are going to improve the client’s performance. This should be achieved by creating a compelling event and using the insight you have already developed to demonstrate how your solution aligns with the client’s most pressing and urgent needs. To communicate credibility, you need to not only be polite but convince the client of successful solutions you have implemented for similar organisations in the past. By following these steps you will develop much interest and create trust on the buyer’s behalf when cold calling, another vital stage to building rapport with clients.
If you can learn and follow up on each of these cold calling tips and techniques we assure that you will see vast improvements in your cold calling success rate. These cold calling tips will help you when building rapport with clients and will go a long way in helping you to create real business value and developing trust during sales calls.
Written by: Steve Eungblut, Managing Director of Sterling Chase
