"It's all about me and what I am selling." With both telesales and email marketing the majority of sales messages are about the company trying to sell to you. “Good morning, this is Sam from General Company Ltd., I’d like to talk to you today about...” If you place yourself first you are not thinking from your customers' perspective - it shouldn't be about you and what you are selling, but about them and what they require.
"[Cough], Er, Um, hello?" A surefire way of getting someone to hang up on you before you've barely begun is to sound nervous, timid, shy or simply afraid. You need to present yourself as confident, competent and in control. Your voice is all you’ve got when you're using the phone, so it’s got to sound powerful and strong, commanding respect whilst encouraging conversation.
"Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying." Of course you think you're listening to your prospect, but are you really hearing what they are telling you? If you are asked a question, such as "do they come in any other colours?" but then you barrel right on through, onto the point that you feel is important, you'll miss this sale. Talking over a prospect is one of the worst of all cold-calling mistakes. He or she wants to be heard, above all, and when you disregard or diminish their concern by talking over them, you lose.
"Technobabble spoken in Jargonese." Sorry, what? It's easy for salespeople to flaunt industry jargon and buzzwords, but it often alienates and confuses prospects. We can all get caught up in the specific terminology and technical terms of our own market sector and can forget that not everybody will understand those terms of phrases. So unless you're calling an IT director, and you yourself are fluent in computing terminology, keep technical terms to a minimum.
"I just picked random numbers from my LinkedIn contacts." NO! NO! And NO again! Without doubt the number one cold calling mistake that you can make, above and beyond all the points above and any other advice you have ever been given about selling and sales techniques is to call from an un-verified database. The law in England is extremely stringent regarding making sales calls and YOU MUST ensure that the prospects that you are calling are not registered on the Telephone Preference Service (TPS*).
Effective cold calling requires an engaging opening statement, a conversational style, good questions and listening skill as well as permission to deliver key statements, and to call in the first place It requires you to think in terms of a permission-based approach - both in regards your customer as a person and in terms of being legally compliant to call them in the first instance.
*TalkMarketing make stringent checks on all of their databases and are fully TPS compliant.
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