19: Cold Calls and Phones

john barrows make it happen mondays happy monday to everybody here i'm uh switching up the format a little bit i got some feedback from people saying hey john love the the content and all that other stuff and like the back black background or the white background with the logo but it's just not as interesting um so a lot of you millennials out there like dude we like things to look at which cracks me up because you all got add just like i do hopefully i'll be paying attention to this and not looking at all the cool stuff that my daughter put up on my wall and those type of things my goals back there all that stuff my calendar right there but anyways figured out i'd make this a little bit more interesting for everybody and uh and go this route so needless to say um you know again and the idea here is just playing around with different mediums different ways to engage and try new things out actually i just saw something this morning which is stay tuned for this because this might be something i do in the not so distant future it says facebook brings live broadcasting to its spaces virtual reality app so the oculus goggles it's going to be out now where you can put those on and we can go to a virtual spot on facebook and keep rolling with this so um i got those oculus goggles and those things are bananas um so i might be playing around with that see what happens anyways uh today's topic is phone i get a lot of executives calling me up these days and saying hey john you know love your you know can't wait for your training doing the prep and you know messaging all that stuff but could you do me a favor and you know could you really highlight phone because my reps are just not on the phones and i get it i understand why um obviously you know so i'm a gen xer right i grew up on the phones there was when i was first in sales it was here's my phone there's a number you know list of names start making some phone calls and if i was on email i was getting in trouble and so i grew up just hey you know recco that whole boiler room style thing and you know i'm not saying it was super successful but what it what it did was it forced me to get good on the phones which i think is actually a really important skill to develop these days i wrote a blog post a little while back you can go take a look at it says i think the phone's going to make a raging comeback and the reason is is because you've heard me talk if you haven't been paying attention to these or my posts then please do especially about this artificial intelligence stuff right the shakespeare ai i've mentioned that before go download shakespeare ai and watch that thing write an email for you and i promise you that it'll write it almost as good if not better than you can and so if artificial intelligence is getting that close and that good this are like right now i promise you in the next two years or so you're not going to trust a single email that's in your inbox for instance i mean you know i got this email i had them send me an email and i was like all right well you know let's see what this thing looks like and when i saw it i was just like holy shit okay um crap so with that being in its infancy right now but that's just going to explode i promise you in two like i said in two years you're going to get an email in your inbox and you're going to think wow look at this rep or whoever it is so this really thoughtful you know really well researched email to me and then when you find out it was a robot like i said you're not going to trust a single thing that's in your inbox and i don't know if some of y'all getting caught these days from those chat bots i've gotten i've gotten caught with those chat bots thinking that they were actual human being where i flip onto a website and say hey john thanks for joining on the website and you know and then i get into this chat conversation and they're full-on having legit conversations until you realize at a certain point wait a minute this isn't this isn't a human being so my point is is that i think email is going to be challenging get get more challenging to differentiate uh for how people to trust it in any way shape or form and i always ask the question now for sales reps that have to be paying attention again what can we do that a computer can't because if a computer can do it you got to ask yourself how much longer they're going to pay me to do this and so that's why i think phone when done right is a really effective way of of well an effective piece of the puzzle let's put it that way i'm not going to sit here and say let's make hundred dials a day and drop email altogether don't do social just do cold calling because i actually think that phone when sprinkled throughout the day is a waste of time i think you know make two or three phone calls send a couple of emails make some phone calls i think phone is a drastic waste of time where i know phone can be effective is when we hyper focus for an hour and we i call them power hours so and by the way you don't just make calls for an hour you make calls into one very specific persona for an hour so for instance my favorite way of running a call blitz is to reverse engineer a case study now look at the bottom of the case study and come up with my message right which is my i called it my attention grabber and the easiest way to come up with messaging right and avoid hey we're the leading provider of or whatever is to look at the bottom of a case study and look at the result that you drove for a client of yours so we showed this company in your industry how to drive these type of results and i want to talk to you about it well that's a very specific result that you drove for a company that you have some backup for right and so that's the the best way in my opinion for us to differentiate ourselves from all the other competitors out there is to talk about the results that we drive for our customers not just their logos but the results we drive for our clients so that becomes my attention grabber now because that fits a very specific persona now i can come up with two or three questions that are relevant to that persona so for instance and saying instead of saying stuff like go tell me about your priorities if my message speaks to vps of sales in the sas industry that use sales force for instance i can come up with two or three really quick qualifying questions that show i know what i'm talking about a little bit with that persona and then i could probably also assume what the objections are going to be now i do objection handling training and my biggest recommendation on objection handling training is be proactive about it versus reactive about it too many people are reactive with objections flipped over to the blue jeans one um but uh i'm you know needless to say you know i lost my train of thought there uh objections that's what it is objection handling um too many people just wait for them to come and then kind of deal with them as they come whereas i'm now very thoughtful with hey i'm probably going to get this objection when i call this type of person so let me practice what my response should be to that okay so now i got a message i got two or three questions that i can ask from a qualifying standpoint that are more directed to that persona i have my objections that i'm prepared for and i have a story to tell like a case study or something like that so i now i got this nice tight little package and now i'm going to run a list of everybody in my territory that fits that persona and i'm going to call them all up and i'm going to say the same thing so i'm going to say hey you know what the reason for my call today is we show vps of sales in the sas industry how to drive these type of results would love to have some time in your account and have that conversation you know rinse repeat rinse repeat rinse repeat and then you know you know the first two or three phone calls are going to be a little rough but then that fourth fifth sixth call is going to start to you know start to catch that groove get that momentum going a little bit and so you'll get better and then if somebody picks up the phone holy shit you know you'll you'll have a chance to jump into a conversation to be more targeted and direct with your questions to show you know what you're talking about because i don't know about y'all i am not good enough to call vp of sales in the sas industry and then a director of it in the manufacturing industry and then a cfo in the health care industry and have relevant good conversations with each of them i'm just not so with that approach by calling just running through my list for instance of all sorts of different personas and different names i have to be generic with my approach i have to say tell me about your business i have to say stuff like that so but by being very targeted i can get in that mindset and i can have some fun with this and i can also learn something so i usually do like a half hour prep for a one hour call blitz and uh during that half hour i'm getting my names i'm getting my list i'm getting my numbers uh i'm doing my homework and so that when that hour hits i'm just hitting the phone i'm not sending information i'm not doing home i'm not doing research i'm literally just mowing through phone calls and with that approach i can get through 20 25 hours no problem all right so if you're out there and you're making 50 dials or even if you just have to make some dials as part of your contact strategy that's how you can do it really efficiently without having to waste a ton of time and you can get like i said you can get really efficient in it and you can learn something you've heard before me talk about the number one thing i recommend anybody do at any stage of the sales process and at any stage of their career is a b split test everything you do right so now say if you're calling cios in the health care industry well come up with two different messages to cios in the health care industry for an hour make these phone calls for an hour make those phone calls and then just track to see which one yielded a higher response rate so what do you think is a hey what's up uh khalid uh what do you think is a good target for the number of dials uh on a daily basis you know i think 50 is a reasonable amount if you're in inside sales now you know you have to segment this out for different types of audiences here if you're you know if you're inside sales and you sell something that's a little bit less of a complex sale um and the volumes there then you know i guess you could probably go up to a hundred um if you're selling a little bit more of a complex sale and you're you know you're going after executives and larger organizations then i would probably tailor that back a little bit to because what you don't want to do is just do the numbers for numbers sake you know i used to work with a lot of companies i'm not going to name one but this one company i used to work with they're not really not in business while they are but they're a fraction of their self is they used to have this 75 dials a day for their reps and i remember going in in their office and doing coaching calls and you know i would do the training and then the afternoon we'd do a call blitz and i saw i used to see all these numbers on like right pinned up on their cube and i at first i thought they were just you know uh sorry um at first i thought they were um you know just internal dial numbers or something like that whatever but then i started noticing them all all of them were different for everybody and so i finally asked a kid i'm like hey just out of curiosity what are these numbers here and he's like oh those are my dead dial numbers those are the numbers that i um that i you know if i say i get to like 50 60 dials by the end of the day and i gotta fill it up with like 15 or so those are the numbers i call because i know they won't pick up or they'll just go straight to voicemail and i'm like what so i actually told i i didn't rat any other reps out but i made that observation to the managers i was like do you do know your reps are just making calls just to make calls right just to hit that numbers and they're like yeah we know but that's the number we want to hit them at i'm like that's such a ridiculous old school mentality in my opinion like i said i think phone when done right is a really useful part of the contact strategy but if you're just doing dials to make dials i think it's you're kind of going back to boiler room old school style which really didn't work there i mean i used to make 400 dials a week right um and and and that was a pure volume game all i was doing was trying to trip over an opportunity i wasn't thoughtful with my approach i wasn't learning anything it was just a pure numbers game for me and man if you want to make your ears bleed go ahead you know it was barely effective back then i had a 0.5 conversion ratio when i was doing it back then i can't imagine it's going to get any better now so you know i think 50 is decent but again i'm going to caveat that with it depends on what you're selling and who you're selling to if you're smb and you're selling something that's a pretty quick close something like that and i don't want to say it's a commodity but it's a pretty you know one call two call close 10 15 day sales cycle at most you know sub five thousand dollar um annual contract value thing then yeah you're probably going to want to be in the 100 range uh if you're selling something to mid market or enterprise and it's a relatively complex sale of your average deal size is 20 grand or above um you're probably going to want to do more of the 40 to 50 and have it complement part of your contact strategy all right so one of the uh and actually that that falls into another recommendation i have here which is if you want to get volume up okay again be targeted because then you could get 20 25 in an hour no problem but you can also make sure that it's part of a contact strategy i am hyper focused these days on on the story that we're telling customers the cadence if you will you know not the blind template cadence that everybody's sending out go take a look at my last blog post on this one because i have a love-hate relationship with the cadence approach but you know a thoughtful targeted cadence no problem but you know but a lot of these ones are just emails these kids you know they send out five or six emails and they're on an automated drip campaign well let's let's take an approach where what you could do is take a persona vp's of sales sass energy u salesforce for instance run that list say that list is 50 accounts in your territory well now sit down and come up with five six seven different things to say to that persona think through what their priorities are that type of thing and put together some some some emails and templates messaging that but that speak to that persona and then kick off a campaign for those 50 accounts and go email email and then make one of those a call and that call now that's 50 dials that you can make and now now that can be your call blitz power hour right so you can stay focused again and it can complement what your contact strategy is all about okay the more you do that the more you stay focused on a persona um you kind of get in that mindset you do a little bit of research beforehand about what these people care about what their typical challenges are you know bring some case studies to the table that that uh of companies that you're working with that that do stuff that they need help with or they might need help with now you can start to make phone a really effective way of of of again a part of the contact strategy all right because it's not one or the other these days it's not email it's not phone it's not social it's not any one of those individually it's all of it it's all of it it's and it and it really is depending on where your audience is too so if you think about it you know your audience like i'm a this is an example i'm a 41 year old man on snapchat like i don't know what the hell i'm doing on snapchat but i'm on snapchat and the main reason is is because last year gary vaynerchuk and if you don't watch gary please light it up i'll go find him um but he talked about how snapchat and you should be using it and all this other stuff and i'm like that's kind of weird all right snapchat i thought it was just for sending inappropriate pictures to people and so we didn't get in trouble for it but um regardless um i looked into it and last year and this is before instagram took over with the stories and stuff but last year the number one social channel for kids under the age of uh of 26 years or 28 years old was snapchat and by the way there wasn't even a close second it was like snapchat instagram everybody else uh kalita it's uh john m barrows so m as in michael barrows all one word uh that's my snapchat handle that's instagram too whatever so with that um so i looked into that and and that's a huge demographic for me kids between the ages of 22 and 26 years old that's um or 22 and 28 years old that's a huge demographic inside sales organizations that type of thing so my number one audience is on snapchat we're gonna be be on snapchat right so it's the same thing like is it in mail i don't know if it's in mail as as the person you're going after have a really plus profile and and post a lot on linkedin and have 500 plus connections and absolutely right but um if it's uh you know if somebody's got a super weak profile nothing really on there and hasn't posted anything and has like 50 connections then no i'm probably not gonna engage with you on in mail same thing with twitter right that type of thing if you have the egghead logo and five tweets in three years probably not going to engage with you on twitter so it's about all this stuff it's about surrounding people and phone is a critical part of that because like it or not gen xers like me are now the decision makers right we're the ones in most organizations that are making decisions and so we grew up with the phone i mean it's just let's put it simply here we grew up with the phone so i don't mind getting on the i like talking on the phone and so millennials if you don't like talking on the phone well then you're not gonna you're you're limiting your chances of engaging with me i was actually on a uh at a conference a little while back and there was a bunch of executives up on stage and one kid raised his hand and said hey you know what's the newest coolest app to get in touch with executives these days and all of them in unison by the way didn't practice this all said phone because nobody's using it anymore so and i think there's this you know chicken and the egg thing it's like you're not good at phone so your results suck so you don't like the phone more so the results suck more right you go into a mentality of a phone call blitz of oh this is gonna suck and yeah it's gonna suck i promise you but if you go in saying you know what let me learn something let me get after this you know you could start to have some fun with it and have it be effective and that's why by the way i hate full like call days you know what i mean like uh hey this is our cold call day like company i want when i walk into companies and they say that we're having a call blitz day i almost lose my mind because i'm sorry there's just not enough red bull out there for me to get hyped up for a day's worth of training you know what i mean i mean an hour no problem i i can get hyped hyped up for an hour no matter how bad my day is going i'm like all right i can get in the right mindset i can kind of get things going here and have some fun with this but for a day come on so power hours and ideally do them with a group of people like two or three people around you at least so that you all can kind of learn from each other and and and pick up on what's working and what's not working all with a very specific approach to a very specific persona you guys do that as a team and you start to learn things a lot faster so those are some tips on phone um some other stuff was um so nice what's up nick um another stuff just on the structure of your phone calls okay here's my favorite tip out of all the training that i do one of the favorite tips is to start first of all never touch base or check in hopefully you've heard me see that a million times before is the most meaningless phrase in sales or both those are two of the most meaningless phrases in sales that means there's no reason for me to talk to you so therefore there's a reason for me to talk to you um or there's no reason for your call so therefore there's no reason for me to talk to you so to replace touching base and checking in use this phrase the reason for my call is because if you can't finish that sentence you should not be making the phone call all right and it better be something better than i want to sell you something all right so the reason for my call today is it was on your website i know you're doing some really cool stuff i want to talk to you about how you're managing xyz whatever it is the reason for my call today is we're working with other cfos in the health care industry showing how to drive these type of results i'd love to see if i could get about 10 to 15 minutes on your account to have a conversation with you about it the reason for my call the reason for my call fill that blank and i promise you by the way when you when you use the reason for your call your confidence will go through the roof because if you're calling to just touch base or check in i promise you you're going to be very passive with your approach there when you're calling to with a reason you get a lot more confidence um so have a reason be direct and make sure you know what you're asking for when when you get on the phone i think on the email we can be a little bit more a little less direct with what we're asking for because i think we can kind of butter people up say hey you know you're interested in some information or whatever it is as part of a cadence there when you get somebody on the phone you got to be crystal clear what you want from them when they're on the phone so for instance i usually want either you know schedule time on their calendar have a conversation or you know a referral to somebody else so for instance you know i i introduce myself like this hey thanks for taking my call do you have a couple of minutes well yeah sure who is this what do you want well this is john with j barrows consulting and the reason for my call today is i saw on your website you're scaling hiring a whole bunch of people and i want to talk to you about how you're onboarding them and what your ramp time is from a sales standpoint and see if i could talk about some of the stuff i'm doing other companies in your industry what's the best way to get about 10 to 15 minutes of your account to have that conversation uh i got time now well you know i know i probably caught you off guard i know you weren't expecting this call so i'll be brief here um you know a few quick questions what do you do for this what do you do for that whatever it is again let's prepare questions that i have interesting because you know another company i was working with had exact same problems and we were able to reduce their onboarding from you know 60 days to 45 using some of these techniques is that worth taking a deeper dive into cool schedule some time right so that cadence right there thanks for taking my call so instead of hey how you doing today which is weak you don't give a shit how i'm doing um thanks for taking my call just as polite but now let's get to the point right and the reason for my call today is so take that for what it's worth pay attention to how you introduce yourself it makes a difference right sometimes it dictates where the conversation goes so that's why i pay very close attention to how i entered on intro to myself what's the reason for my call what's my call to action and then you know making sure that i'm very succinct in what i do all right yeah rob never never please never touch base or check in it drives me absolutely batshit crazy so um hopefully that helped a little bit i i would practice phone all day every day by the way also stand up when you're making your phone calls um there's something about energy uh the way that we communicate as human beings there's studies on this um that talk about it's broken down by uh the words that we use the tonality and the body language and words is actually the smallest one words is like eight percent of the way that we communicate is through the words that we use 35 is the tonality and 57 is body language so really the phone is give or take about 43 to 50 percent of the way that we communicate so when you're using the phone make it worth it stand up you know stand up when you're making your phone calls because that way your voice resonates way better this way it um there's a far more confident position than this right so uh you know and just have some fun with it realize that the worst thing as long as you're not doing anything offensive the worst thing that anybody can do on the phone is hang up on you all right so have some fun with it if you go in with a bad mindset i promise the results are going to suck if you go in with a good mindset you stay focused you have a message you have a reason for your call and you're trying something new and you stand up and have some fun with it i promise you the results will get better and last before we get off here unless anybody has any questions um when leaving voicemails people ask john why should i even leave voicemails people don't even call me back that's true i don't leave voicemails because i expect callbacks i leave voicemails for one very specific reason it's because when i leave voicemails my email responses go up all right that's really the only reason i do it and i love the call email approach where you're calling and sending an email at the same time so you go hey the reason for my call today is blah blah blah and by the way i'm going to send you an email right after this so if you want to um hit me up on email you know feel free to email or call me back or vice versa you send them an email and then right after it's hey it's 255 on wednesday afternoon i just sent you an email um feel free to call or email me back either way all right that approach is a pretty effective approach i've seen so in summary focus have a reason for your call uh do power hours instead of full days and um and know what you want to ask for all right know what you want have some fun with it all right hit me up anytime i got a whole bunch of resources on my resource library you guys can go into check out for phone and and how to come up with messaging those type of things so feel free to dive into that and and as always hit me up on facebook hit me up on snapchat uh any of those i'm always happy to talk sales so do not hesitate to hit me up anytime you guys not all right so with that i gotta bounce a little bit early here today apologize i got a webinar coming up for a client um at one o'clock so um i will see y'all i'll see you all soon all right let's make it happen later so We'll see you next time.

We'll see you next time.