Let’s face it: your salespeople are getting their asses kicked over the phone when cold calling, and you don’t know what to do about it. Your calls are falling on deaf ears, and your sales team is exhausted. You spend hours every day calling leads just to get shut down before you can even introduce yourself.
If this sounds like a situation you’re facing, you must start taking immediate, aggressive steps to snap out of your cold calling slump and get back to effective prospecting. In most cases, getting your ass kicked in cold calling happens for three reasons:
- You don’t know what your sales team is doing.
- Your salespeople are getting shut down in the first seconds of the call.
- Your people are afraid to be honest about their failures.
In this guide, we’ll be giving you three killer strategies that you can use to stop getting your ass kicked on the phones.
Track Your Metrics
If you don’t know what your team is doing, you can’t figure out why your salespeople are getting their asses kicked. Being aware of your sales team’s metrics is the first step to identifying, analyzing, and solving the problems your people are having.
How well are you tracking your sales performance metrics? Do you know how many dials each of your salespeople are making daily? Cold calling is a numbers game – it only works as a prospecting strategy if your salespeople are having enough live conversations each day, or more importantly turning those conversations into completions. Unfortunately, sales teams that get their asses kicked on the phones won’t be very motivated to keep making phone calls. In that case, it’s up to you to keep your teammates accountable for their performance. Tracking their number-of-completions and other crucial metrics is the first step to stopping your team from getting its ass kicked.
Make a Killer First Impression
If you’ve been in the sales game for any amount of time, you’ve undoubtedly heard someone say, “We’re not interested. We don’t take cold calls,” before hanging up the phone. Here’s the painful truth: nobody “doesn’t take cold calls.” They just don’t find you and your salespeople worth talking with, and they’re trying to let you down nicely.
If you want to stop getting your ass kicked on the phone, you must make a killer first impression. The fate of most sales calls is determined within the first 7 seconds of the client picking up the phone. If your reps are immediately getting shut down by disinterested clients, your salespeople are doing something wrong.
If one lead “isn’t interested” in your call, they’re a crappy prospect. But if every lead isn’t interested in your calls, you have a crappy sales call strategy.
If your salespeople want to start making a killer first impression, they need to show the lead three things:
- They are calm and confident
- They are enthusiastic about the call
- They are intelligent
If your salespeople can show all three of these things within the first 60 seconds of the call, they’ll instantly start having more success engaging leads and getting sales opportunities.
Encourage Open Communication
If your salespeople are getting their asses kicked within their workplace, it could be the reason that they are getting their asses kicked on calls as well. Have you surrounded yourself with “yes men/women?” Are your salespeople comfortable coming to you with their struggles at work? Or are they worried that their concerns will get shot down?
When your people aren’t coming to you with advice on overcoming their sales obstacles, you can’t coach them effectively and help them succeed. If you value your “morale and company culture” over getting honest feedback about your sales team’s performance, you are missing sales opportunities and leaving money on the table.
Make it your responsibility to touch base 1-on-1 with all of your salespeople weekly. Talk about how they’re doing on both a personal and professional level. Make it acceptable and normal for your salespeople to come to you with their concerns. Facilitating an open, communicative culture in your organization will not only help your sales team get the mentorship they need to perform. It has also been shown to improve mental health and make salespeople significantly more motivated at work!
Are you tired of getting your ass kicked on the phone? Following the strategies in this brief guide is a great place to start, but they only scratch the surface of improving your sales call performance. If you want to ensure that you supercharge your sales team’s effectiveness, look no further than our Phone Ready Leads® program! With Phone Ready Leads®, you’ll learn everything from the technical aspects of cold calling to the proven hacks and strategies for closing killer sales! This five-day program will equip your sales team with the tools and tactics they desperately need to become more efficient and effective on the phones.
Don’t let your people get their asses kicked any longer. Click here to visit the Phone Ready Leads® page and supercharge your team’s performance!
About the Author: Shawn Sease, Founder of 5bynoon, believes that, to get different results, you must do things differently. He helps companies get more meetings and thinks your goal should be to get 5 meetings by noon too. Connect with him here.
