Making a Solid Cold Call (Part II: The Body of the Call)

Monday, November 13, 2006 at 09:16am by William Quisenberry in Presentation

This is Part II of “Making a Solid Cold Call” where I’m striving to identify main points relating to making cold calls by giving an example of an actual mock call. You can review the introduction portion of making the cold call by reviewing Part I of this series.

Picking up where we left off on Friday, I had just introduced myself and my company’s name to Tina in the beginning stages of our phone call. I ask her for confirmation to continue with our talk by asking, “I didn’t catch you at a bad time did I?”

Now Tina is answering that question and if it’s with a no, that’s when you move into the body of the cold call, which is presented below.

Tina: No I’m fine.

Well Tina the reason for my call this morning is that I really would just like to very briefly get acquainted with you.

You see my company provides unique financial consulting solutions for large corporations just like yours and one of our major areas of focus is providing equipment financing services.

Now I know your firm is a major dealer of construction equipment in the south eastern portion of the U.S., my question for you is are you currently using a primary bank or financial firm for your equipment sales?

Tina: Yes, we have normally used T.G. Financial Equip. and John Doe Banking.

Great, well Tina I’m sure you know just how competitive the financial industry is these days and it’s good for companies like yours to have as many possible banks and financial firms competing for your deals, simply because you can shop for the lowest rates and also increase your chances of closing deals.

What’s your average sales ticket at this present time?

Tina: Oh, around 85,000, we mainly do bulk orders many times to other vendors who are involved in reselling efforts.

O K, well approximately how many deals are you guys closing per week.

Tina: During our strong season, we are getting 35 to 40 deals written up per week and we’ll close and deliver maybe a little more than half of those.

Now you have gathered the pertinent information very quickly from the prospect all while taking detailed notes on the conversation. You still haven’t revealed too much information about yourself, so the potential client should still be fairly curious about your company and the services that you truly have to offer.

When you’re carrying an in depth conversation with a prospect it’s up to you to use your own personal judgment on how long the call should be.

I’ve experienced cold calls that were straight to the point and lasted all of three minutes, but beneficial information was exchanged and I was able to get an appointment set up for a sales presentation, so the mission was accomplished.

On the other extreme I’ve also experienced calls where I was on the phone for thirty minutes, but these calls are very unlikely obviously because business professionals are busy and don’t have a lot of time to spend on one phone call.

Also be careful about engaging in extremely long conversations, because before you know it the call can shift from an initial prospecting call to a sales call. If this is the case you might not have enough selling and negotiating leverage, you may be unprepared or not in the right state of mind to make a proper sales close, so your presentation will suffer severely.

Now all that is left is wrapping up the phone call, sending literature and setting up a sales appointment. I will cover this information tomorrow in the third and final portion of this three part series.

(Now that you viewed the second portion of this series you can also check out the final section: Part III-Wrapping Up the Call).

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