Cold calling requires lot of skills and perseverance. Not everyone has them. Sales Development Reps who mask their shortcomings by claiming that “cold calling is dead” need not read further.
On the other hand, if you believe that cold call is an indispensable part of B2B sales, and are looking for a way to improve your cold calling success rate, you have come to the right place.
Years ago, the bar on cold calling was low: You could generate leads and set appointments merely by rattling off a boilerplate script about your company, products and services.
But those days are gone. As more and more sales people followed the same tactic, prospects got inundated with spam calls. Most of them have turned off. Cold calling in its plain-vanilla form has stopped working.
In response, we recommend raising the sophistication of cold calls to the next level. In our approach, SDRs go to market with offerings packaged in such a way that they resonate with the pain areas and hot topics of your target market. Depending upon the local business culture, size of market and seniority of target audience, our GTM approach based on Marketable Items, as we call these packaged offerings, is very effective in reaching out to your target audience and creating awareness for your company among potential buyers at the Top of Funnel who have otherwise never heard of you (“strangers”).
In recent times, there’s another approach that’s helping spark off conversations at the TOFU: “Account Specific Point Offering”.
An ASPO creates a link between what you’re selling on the one side and a specific strategic initiative of your prospect on the other. A strategic initiative is a concerted action taken by a company’s top management in response to trigger events. Trigger events comprise of internal or external factors that impact a business such as new product launch, big contract win, loss of a major customer, hike in office rental and new regulation, to name a few.
Let me take an example to illustrate how ASPO works.
Vendor X sells an advanced accounts receivable software product. One of its leading prospects (Prospect Y) recently announced a new government contract win. It might face many challenges in executing this contract profitably for reasons highlighted in our blog post entitled 3 Ways To Execute Government Technology Contracts Profitably.
A traditional cold call would begin with “I’m calling to tell you more about our advanced accounts receivable software product that helps you to manage your outstandings better”. For reasons explained earlier, this won’t work anymore.
In our ASPO approach, the pitch would change to the following:
“Congratulations on bagging the large government contract. From our experience with other customers, you might face a delay in receiving your payments. I’m calling since I thought you may be looking for a way to tighten your collection process so that you can avoid these delays.”
This pitch does two things that a plain-vanilla product-centered pitch does not:
It resonates with the prospect company’s strategic initiative to execute the contract profitably
It gives a concrete way for the prospect on the other side of the call to support their C-Suite agenda.
As a result, the second pitch will drive more conversations. Mission accomplished!
It also has a collateral benefit: It makes no mention of your product or service. So, when secretaries and other gatekeepers screen your calls and ask you “Is this a sales call?”, you can cross your heart and say, “No”:)
In a future blog post, I’ll describe ASPOs in greater detail and outline a methodology for developing them. Watch this space.