Cold Call Courage

Cold Call Courage

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome to episode 31 of the Business Development Podcast, and today we are chatting cold calls. Are you struggling with them? Then stay tuned.

Intro: The great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal, and we couldn't agree more.

This is the Business Development Podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and broadcasting to the world. You'll get expert business development advice, tips, and experiences, and you'll hear interviews with business owners. CEOs and business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business.

Brought to you by Capital Business Development Capitalbd.ca. Let's do it. Welcome to the The Business Development Podcast, and now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy: Hello, welcome back to the Business Development Podcast. This is episode 31. My gosh, is time ever flying? But man, holy moly, I can't believe how lucky we've been here at the Business Development Podcast.

First off, lucky to have such amazing listeners such as yourself, and then obviously to have such amazing guests such as our last week's guest, Fatima Zaidi of Quill Inc. and CoHost we had an absolutely amazing show with her called Your Business Needs a Podcast. It was such an amazing show to have Fatima on.

She's such an accomplished woman. She's done so much, and frankly, to kind of come on and just give us some tips and let us know kind of. What it takes to be successful at a podcast? Give us some crazy statistics as to why your business needs a podcast. If you missed that show, you need to go back and check it out.

And once again, Fatima, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking podcast with me. It was amazing to have you. And last week too. My gosh, guys, I nearly fell out of my chair. On Wednesday. I was at a client's office doing work, and I got an email from Quill Inc. Letting us know that the Business Development Podcast won the Best Business Podcast 2023 from Quill Inc.

What an honor, what an amazing honor to win such a sweet award. It blew my mind. It blew my mind. And we could not have done it without, without you, without our lovely listeners who not only submitted us, but have, have stuck by us and have promoted us and told your friends and family about us and left us reviews and.

You guys are amazing. Thank you so much. I, I could have never thought that in 31 episodes that we would've made it to where we've made it so far, and you know what I mean? I'm well aware that we could not do this without our listenership. We could not do this without you. And so thank you. Thank you, my friends, family, my lovely business development podcast listeners, because it wouldn't be, I wouldn't be able to do this show without your support.

And without just the lovely, kind words, without submitting us to amazing awards shows like that. And it truly is, it truly is a show for you. So thank you so much. Thank you for submitting us. Thank you for your continued support. Thank you for your ratings reviews, and most of all, just thank you for listening.

Thank you for being here. And thank you for implementing hopefully some of the lessons that we teach you on this podcast. Yeah, it's just been, it's been such a crazy week. I, I don't even, sometimes, I don't even know where to start after a week like this. It's just been so, so amazing and yeah.

Thank you so much for the support just getting into the show today. I, I, I'll be honest, I had a tough time doing this particular show. This show is very much on are you struggling with cold calls and you know, you'd think that after you've made as many cold calls as I've made in my time, that this would be an easy show to do.

And it truly isn't. It truly isn't. I want you to know that if you are struggling with cold calls, I'm, I'm right there with you. I struggled with cold calls for a very long time. I still have days today where I sit down and it's like, okay, today's the day. Like we, you know, I'm working for a client and today's I need, I need to make my cold calls, and it takes me a minute to get those first few calls off because, You know, cold calls are a little bit tough.

And I'm not sure that I even understand why. To be honest. I'm not sure that I understand the, the underlying fears or the underlying I don't know, I don't know, whatever you wanna call it. Just the underlying that happens to all of us when we have to do podcasts, whether we're in business development, entrepreneurship, whatever it may be, there's always just that slight reluctance to make those calls.

But I'll tell you what, the one thing that I've learned in time is they're never as bad as you think they're going to be. And the benefits far outweigh the negatives. The benefits of cold calls are numerous. They are just incredibly effective, and frankly, they're the best way to get you in front of the people that you want to get in front of.

Okay. Businesses that do active marketing tend to have faster results and active marketing also provides a higher ROI over time. It's just more effective than a passive marketing strategy. At Capital, I like to implement what I like to call an 80 20 rule. So we do 80% active marketing, which which is gonna be that direct contact, phone calls, direct emails.

And this is obviously assuming that I have the right contact people. This isn't just random phone calls, this is active marketing is calls to the right people. Okay? We've already done the legwork to make sure that we have the right contacts within the company. I, yeah, obviously, I just wanted to kind of get over it, is that I.

I used to really hate cold calls. You know, I'm, I'm a business development expert. I've been doing this an incredibly long time, and I used to incredibly hate it when I started doing this. I remember just struggling with fear over them. I was reluctant to make them, and I totally understand your reluctance to make them.

Today. What I hope to impart with you today is some strategies to use. That make you more effective, that help you make those initial few phone calls, and hopefully over time allow you to close a lot more business than you were closing right now. If you're relying primarily on a passive strategy it's not going to be very effective for you.

The challenge with passive marketing alone is, first off, it's too many hoops to make your customer jump through, right. They have to first off either find your ad or see it somewhere. Then they have to click that ad. Then they have to call or email the contact number, wait for you to get ahold of them.

You know, explain your product or service to them better. Like you're asking your customer to do a lot of things with a passive only strategy. And yeah, it works really well if you're just selling a T-shirt to a customer, sure, they can look online, they can say, yeah, I like that T-shirt. Okay, here's the size guide.

All right, whatever. I'll, I'll take that. I'll take that jump. But if you're selling an expensive service, an expensive product It's gonna take a little bit more for you to do that. That's why a passive marketing strategy really doesn't work that well in business to business or, or any type of product that has a true value.

You really need a person to get in there and, and, and introduce that product and make that strategy right. The other side of it is you have too much competition. If you're using strictly a passive strategy, okay, sure. Okay, fine. And, but the problem is you have customers out there, or sorry, not customers.

You have competitors out there that are also marketing. And if they're using an active strategy, they're frankly beating you. They just are they're making the, the face-to-face introductions. They're making the personal connections. They're not making their customers jump through too many hoops or heck, even if they're using a passive strategy, great.

That's another company now that you're competing against. And the reality is you just get spammed with ads, right? You know, you can hop on your LinkedIn right now. Scroll down, I bet you like the first four or five, five posts you come across are ads. Like it just, it is what it is. There's lots of ads out there.

So if you're just competing in that passive marketing space, you're competing for attention with a thousand other ads competing for attention. You need to stand out. You stand out with active marketing and cold calls, okay? It's very hard to communicate your value with a passive marketing strategy. It's very hard to address customer concerns with an with a passive strategy, right?

You're relying on, you know, your website or whatever your ad is that you're promoting to them. To be able to explain why they should buy your product, what the value proposition of your product truly is, and that value proposition might be a different pitch depending on who you're pitching it to, right?

The value to a food manufacturer might be different than the value to a warehousing company like you have to think about. The fact is your company may be able to provide lots of value to different industry, but sometimes that value proposition is different depending on industry to industry. And so if you just have this blanket value proposition in a passive marketing strategy.

You're probably not getting it to the right people, or you know, if you are, it's like maybe 5% of the people who you could get it to if you could just change your pitch a little bit more. Right? So the reality is a passive strategy is required because you do need brand awareness, which is where a passive strategy makes a lot of sense, right?

We want to definitely have our, our brand pop up on social media. We definitely want to have our brand show up in these passive ways so that people are like, oh, that's interesting. But you don't sell over your passive marketing. You sell with active marketing. So we have to incorporate active marketing and cold calls is a gigantic part of a good active marketing strategy.

So we have to get good at cold calls even if we hate them. We have to get good at them. The other side is we close deals in person, right? Any type of b2b, any type of high value product, you likely are not selling that thing over your website. And even if you are, you're selling it over your website after you've already had a good conversation with someone.

And gave them some really good reasons why they should buy your product or why it provides a tremendous value to their organization or to them personally, right? We need to be able to demonstrate the value we need to be able to build a connection, a trust. With that customer and we build a connection and trust in person.

It's an in-person job, everyone. And you don't get that in-person through a passive strategy. You need to utilize an active strategy. Ask for the meeting, ask for the video call, ask for the phone call. You need to be able to, you need to be able to speak to people, right? And so we're gonna do that with an active strategy.

The other side with a passive strategy is your customer has to be actively in need of your product or service to really search you out. That's the other problem is that at least with an active strategy, yeah, you might get a customer six months before they need your product. Sure. But now they know who you are.

They've met you, they've talked to you, you've created a rapport with that person. You've created a human to human relationship. And so when the need comes up for your product or service, they are far more likely to reach out to you directly, right? Which is ultimately what we want. We want our customers to have trust in us, to like us enough to say, you know what?

I'm gonna call Jill at ABC Company. I'm gonna call John at ABC company cuz I've talked to them, they're trustworthy. They've got a product or service I need and now I need it. If you use a passive strategy, you basically have to get them on their worst day, is what I like to say, right? Like you, you pretty much gotta get them on their worst day where they are in, they're in such need of your product or service that they are searching you out on the internet, or they're gonna click your ad and they're gonna jump through all those hoops to talk to you.

It's just too much to ask. It's just too much to ask everyone. Like we have to, we have to help our customer by finding them, by introducing ourselves to them, by using an active marketing strategy. We are just going to be more effective. We are just gonna drive better ROIs for our companies if we don't wait around for people to come find us.

But instead, we go out there and we search them out. Okay. Cold calls allow you to communicate your value and personality in a way that email and passive ads struggle to do. Right? Our voices. Our voices are powerful. They are incredibly powerful people. Our voices. They allow us to convey happiness, sadness, anger, whatever, whatever we wanna convey, we can really convey that with our messages, right?

And I, I always like to say, when you're making cold calls, when you're making calls in general to a customer, do it with a smile. Cuz guess what? You can hear a smile. You really can, you can hear happiness, you can hear genuine. Smiles over the phone, you really can. And I think if you can convey that in all of your cold calls when you're talking to somebody, you create that, like you laugh with them, you create a little relationship with them, you know, you, you make their day.

I think that as a business development person, as somebody marketing, we should always strive to be one of the best calls that our customers get. We really should, because the reality is we wanna leave an impression and we leave an impression by creating a positive feeling in that other person. Right.

And so if we can make cold calls and we can say, Hey John, it's Kelly with ABC company. You know, love, thanks so much for picking up the phone. It's great to connect with you. We're marketing this, this product or service, I think it's something you might need. Could we potentially line up an introduction meeting or can I send a formal introduction email.

Great. Thanks John. I'll send that soon and I'll follow up next week, right? Like we wanna really create that positive, happy vibe when we're making these cold calls. It'll really, really improve your game, everyone, if right now, if you are making cold calls and you are not doing it with a smile on your face, I need you to change that.

I need you to change that attitude. You need to change your attitude. With the regard, with the way that you handle cold calls, don't look at it as this horrible thing you have to do today. Try to look forward to it. Try to get into a cadence, and that's what happens, right? Like, sure, the first, maybe couple cold calls are a little bit challenging, but what you'll find is that if you just keep going with them, if you just do them over and over again, by about the fourth or fifth call, you'll have hit a cold call cadence, and it's kind of like a runner's high, right?

Runners have to run to get the runners high, you have to make cold calls to hit a cold call. Cadence, right? But I think what you'll find is once you hit that, once you hit that point, you could make a hundred cold calls that day and it wouldn't, it would be no different than if you had to make eight, like, but you have to get to that cadence where you're just in a flow and you got it figured out.

But once you do that, you'll find that you'll be leaving 20, 30 cold calls a day and it won't be bothering you at all. It's just the first five are tough. Get past those first five and you'll find it gets easier and easier and easier as you go. Not to mention, you'll start to refine your message, so like if this is, yeah, day one of cold calls and you're selling for a new company.

Or you're selling for your company and you're still refining your message. Yeah. Okay. The first ones are gonna struggle. Maybe that first week is gonna feel like a struggle, but at some point you're gonna refine your message enough. You're gonna figure out what worked, what didn't work. What the customers wanted to know more about, what they didn't want to know more about.

And you're gonna refine your message. And what you're gonna find is in time that refinement is gonna get so good that you could just make, like I said, you could make 50 phone, 50 phone calls, it wouldn't bug you at all, and you don't even have to think about it. As you go through it, it almost becomes automatic, it becomes second nature.

You'll get so good at introducing your company and, and driving interest in the customer because ultimately that's our job, right? With cold calls, it's our job to generate interest in a product or service. We are gonna get so good at that with repetition that you're gonna find it doesn't bug you anymore.

Not to mention, keep in mind that like only I would say 80% of phone calls, probably 20% get picked up, 80% go to voicemail. You're gonna get damn good at leaving voicemails. And the reality is if you can leave a voicemail too with a big smile on your face and you got that, you got that delivery pitch just refined.

Just right. You're gonna find, you're getting a lot of calls back. Why? Because people wanna find out who that happy guy was that left them or girl, that happy guy or girl who left them an amazing message, right? They wanna know if you can, if you can generate some interest on that side, leave your message in a nice positive tone.

You're going to get results. There's no question you're going to get results. So I want you guys to not be afraid of cold calls. Don't be afraid to pick up the phone in a, in a in a day of AI and robo calls. Be a human, pick up that phone, make those calls, you're going to find it effective. And if you are part of a sales team, you are quickly gonna become number one in that sales team.

Because I'll tell you what, if you are, if the other people you're working with are not doing this, they're not doing an active strategy, they're not setting themselves the cadence, they're not saying, committing to a number and saying, yeah, I'm gonna commit to say 10, 10 cold calls every day. Even if, even if I, even if I don't want to.

I think what you'll find is you'll start making way more than 10 because the reality is by the time you get to 10 cold calls, You're in a rhythm. You're in a cadence making twenties pretty flip and easy, like, trust me on this, if you are not making consistent cold calls, let's start changing that. Let's start adding that into our business development and marketing strategies.

You are going to find it incredibly effective. Okay. BD is about you and your personality, right? Let yourself stand out by calling and connecting and leaving a kind, happy message, right? 80% of calls go to voicemail anyways, so if we can just get really good at leaving really great voicemails, really happy, positive voicemails with a pitch that's really great and compelling and generates interest, you are going to get calls back.

And what, what starts to happen is, is that. Y Yeah, you'll, you'll be doing this every day. You'll be, say, making 10 cold calls every day. And then what you'll notice is your phone's gonna start ringing and people are gonna call back and say, yeah, I'm interested. Send me that formal email. Yeah, let's line up a meeting.

You are going to quickly become incredibly effective, and all you did is the one thing that people are afraid to do. Make the cold call. Make the cold call. It's going to make you stand out. So cold calls and cold emails must be personal. This is another way, right? I'm obviously talking to you about using your personality, using your voice.

Don't send mass sales emails, okay? I know. I know. We live in a world where we can auto-generate and auto-populate these gigantic emails. Please don't do that. Please don't do that. Your customers deserve better, okay? I know. I know. It's gonna take you an extra of five minutes, an email, whatever it's gonna take you, but.

You're going to get much better results if you communicate your personality through that email, right? So what you always want to do is you always want address the customer, my name right. Dear John, dear Jill, dear Jackie, hi, I'm John with A B, C company. We have this service. I think it's something you might find really compelling.

I'm really looking forward to meeting you. Yeah, please check out the brochure I attach. Right? Like try to make it very personable, very addressed to them. Try to articulate it in a way that you are, you're addressing why your product or service would help their company. Utilize their company's name in the email, if you can.

Right. Try to make it as personable as as possible. Cause people will read that email. The email they're not reading is the one that they can automatically look at and say, yep, he sent that to a thousand other people. Those are the ones that get automatically deleted. If those hit my inbox, they're just gone.

I don't even look at them. I can tell the moment I look at it if it's personable to me, Kelly Kennedy, or if it's just this gigantic mass email and if it's a gigantic mass email, I don't even care what company it comes from. I don't wanna look at it. I wanna look at personable emails that are addressed to me that I can tell only went to me that were addressed and created just for me.

And if you can do that for your customer, if you can do that for all of your emails that you're sending out, you're only going to be more effective. Try to communicate your personality, your humanness in every interaction, right? Every interaction. You need to communicate that, hey, in a world of AI and robots and garbage auto-generated messages, Chat G P T, right?

I took the time to write you this email. I. And I'm conveying my personality through it. If you can do that, you're going to get a lot more responses. People are gonna be a lot more interested in your product or service. Find a way to communicate who you are in every interaction, and that's whether that's a phone, a voicemail, an email.

Try to convey your personality and who you are as a human. It's only gonna make you better at what you do. Okay. On average, it takes six contact attempts to reach a prospect. If you never make that call, you're never gonna get there. And then 50% of leads never get a second phone call. So you guys know that I talk about this in in the podcast all the time, that we always wanna put people on a weekly follow up cadence once we've made that initial contact.

Right? Why? Well, the stats say that only 50% of of leads get a call back. So a lot of BD people are getting out there, making one call saying, oh, they didn't answer onto the next, and they never call that person back. They never give them another opportunity. Those people are not selling. Why? Because it takes on average.

Six. And remember guys, that's the average at Capital. I do at least 10. At least 10. And in some cases I've done 20. Because I understand that some of these contacts, some of these high level SCM contacts are going to just take 20. It's just gonna take that long because why they get solicited from every company in Alberta.

It's gonna take a minute to get to these people or to generate enough interest where they're like, okay, yeah, this Kelly Guy, he's constantly leaving me these super kind messages and I think it's time to maybe give him a call back. I've had, I've had situations where it's took me 25, it's taken 25 contacts to get to the right scm people in high level oil and gas companies, it just is what it is.

That's sometimes that just is what it is. And no, I'm not advocating that you give every, every person 25 chances. I think that's a gigantic waste of time. I think you need to pick and choose who deserves 25 follow-ups. But I think on average you should give all of your potential customers at least 10. At least 10.

Cuz remember the average is six. And you know, that's just an average, you know? Yeah, sure. Maybe some. It's one. Maybe some is three, but maybe some. It's 14. Okay. So give them at least 10 and then pick and choose what you think is worth following up on, or what you think might be worth giving a little bit extra time to.

But remember, the average is six. So if you're only doing one and you're quitting, Your, your odds of success are just too low. They're just too low. You gotta give your customers a little bit more opportunity. If you got them on that weekly follow up, make sure that you're weekly following up at least 10 times.

Okay? You can make your call passed then if you want to do a little more, but give them at least 10 chances before you give up on them. And that means, yeah, that, that might mean 10 formal emails. That might mean 10 voicemails. That might mean. Eight voicemails and two, two contacts or whatever, right. But give them the fair shot to say, yeah, this isn't really what we need or to say, yeah, sorry, I've been incredibly busy.

And you know what, some people are incredibly busy. I know it can sound like a coppout. But let's get real, some of these SCM people. Are incredibly busy. Like I said, they might be getting solicited from 150 other companies, so your voicemail might not be that critical. So when they finally do get back to you, use that.

Use that make your pitch, book the meeting. Don't waste it. Right. When you get these people on the phone, the goal is always to move them to a face-to-face and yeah, I get it. We live in the days of Zoom and teams and whatever else. Yeah, maybe that is a teams meeting, but you want to get them in a position where you can build a compelling rapport with them, where you can introduce your product or service properly and you can ask for an opportunity.

You do that in person, you do that. In person, so we want to utilize all these phone calls, emails. The goal at the end of all of these is always to ask for a face-to-face meeting where we can build a rapport, where we can build trust, and we can truly communicate the value of our product or service. Okay?

We definitely want to be working to get these people to a face to face meeting. So in a world saturated with passive marketing, you stand out by picking up the phone. Okay? So if your company or yourself, you're not, and you know, you know if you're making enough cold calls, right? You know this, you know this.

And I. You know, I'm not knocking you because I was you. I totally get it. I totally get it. I still get anxious sometimes making cold calls. I still put 'em off just like the rest of you. But the reality is, is that I don't put 'em off too long and I get them done. And by getting them done and by being consistent with them week in and week out by committing to making my cold calls.

I am incredibly effective in what I do in my business development services, and you too can be incredibly effective. But you need to hold yourself accountable. You need to hold yourself accountable if you decide that, yep, I'm gonna commit to 10 or 15 cold calls every day, hold yourself accountable. Make those cold calls.

Just get 'em over with. Do them first thing in the morning if you need to do them whenever you need to to get them done, just make sure. That you're doing them in an effective manner and that you're committing and you're holding yourself accountable to making them. And then also make sure that once we do make those calls, that we are keeping track of it.

We're entering them into our crm, we're entering the results. Did we leave a message? What did we do? And then set yourself up for an appropriate follow up the next week. Okay. So a good cold call. How do we be effective at cold calls? It's really six steps. Okay. It's not that hard. There's six. There's six steps really to being effective at our cold calls.

Okay, so number one. To be effective at our cold calls, what do we have to do? We have to pick up the phone and start. Okay, and I get it. This can be actually the hardest step. Really. It, it truly is. I get it. Picking up the phone and actually making the call is totally one of the hardest things to do. I get it.

I totally get it. And I know that it's getting harder because the world is just slamming you to say, oh no, you need to post on social media, or you need to buy this LinkedIn ad, or buy this Facebook Ad. Trust me, your voice is 10 times a hundred times more effective than any of these ads. It really is.

You just have to make them. Okay, so how do we be effective at cold calls? Step number one. We're gonna pick up the phone and we're gonna start. Okay. Step number two, we're gonna commit to a number of calls per day, okay? My recommendation for you to get started. Commit to 10. Just commit to 10. Tell yourself, okay, I'm at work today.

I'm gonna make at least 10 calls, okay? I'm gonna make 10 calls. I hope you make more. I really do. I hope you start to get to a cadence where you're making 15, 20 a day, but let's just start with something easy. Let's make 10. Why 10? Why did I pick 10? I picked 10 Because your first five are just to get in the swing of it.

It's just to create that cadence I was talking to you about. We have to. We can't get runners high unless we run. Right? We can't get. We can't get cold call high unless we make cold calls. Okay? And it's gonna take at least five to get us into that swing of things to feel like our mouth is moving correctly.

We're saying the right things. We know the pitch. Okay? Commit to 10. I think what you're gonna find is you're gonna hit 10 and you're gonna make 11. And then when you make 11, heck, you might even make 12. And then the next thing you know, you're gonna start making 15, 20 cold calls a day and your sales and marketing is gonna go through the roof.

The amount of meetings you're booking is gonna start to go through the roof because this is how you get them. You get them by making these cold calls. You get them by talking to a person, having a human to human interaction, hopefully making them smile, hopefully making them laugh, and hopefully, By creating a value proposition for your product as to why they would wanna chat further about it.

Okay? But if you can get them on the phone, you can get them laughing, you can create a value proposition. Let me tell you, you can get a meeting and from that meeting you can get on a bid list, you can get an rfi, and heck, you might even get an order. Okay? Number three, we're gonna refine our pitch over time.

So, like I said, you know, I work with a lot of companies, like the reality is I've done business development for a lot of companies and every single time I have to learn their product or service, then I have to refine a good pitch for it. And yeah, they always start out shitty. I'm sorry, like and, and it's my future customers who are listening to this.

Yeah. That's just the way it is. It's the way it is. All initial pitches. They're probably not great. They take some work, they take learning and understanding of your product or service. But guess what? That happens in time. And typically, by the time I've marketed your product or service for about a month, my pitch has gotten real damn good because why?

Cause I've made a whole ton of cold calls on behalf of your company, and I'm really learning what your customers are asking for. I'm learning what your product or service really can deliver, what the true value of your product or service is. And I get better and better and better over time. And you will too.

You will too. If you're marketing your product or service. Yeah, your initial pitch probably gonna suck, but it's gonna get better and better and better. Each time that you make a cold call. It's gonna get better each time that you introduce your product. And next thing you know, your pitch is gonna be so refined and so well done that you're gonna be able to make it without even thinking about it, and you are gonna convince people to.

To book that meeting with you cuz they're gonna wanna learn just a little bit more. So number three, we need to refine our pitch over time. Okay. Number four. We need to enter all of our data in our CRM and we need to follow up weekly. Okay, so you guys know, you guys know I pitched the crap outta this crm.

You have to have one. If you do not have a crm, a customer relationship management system, you need to implement one in your business immediately. I have a podcast in the past that explain what, what is a crm? What stages should you set it up in? How to utilize it effectively? Okay. I got lots of stuff in the past on this.

If you wanna go through my back catalog, you'll find a few. I believe it's somewhere in the first 10. So if you just kind of go through the back catalog, I think you'll find some information on crm, implement a CRM in your business, and then make sure that we are tracking all of these calls. Okay? So, you know, obviously by the time we're at that cold call stage, there's a lot of assumptions being made.

The assumption is, is that you have. You have created your target list. You've figured out what industry and what companies you wanna work with. You've then tracked down, hopefully, the right person within that industry or company to talk to. And we're also assuming now that we, we've either called the mainline and gotten patched in directly to them, or somehow we've gotten their phone number and we are, we know we are leaving messages for the right person and that we are contacting the right person.

So these are the assumptions that I've made by the time we are at this, at this cold call stage. Okay. But we definitely wanna make sure that we are at this stage also before this cold call stage. I, hopefully, hopefully you have also implemented the soft introduction, which I talked to, which is your LinkedIn introductions, right?

We want to have hopefully connected with this contact we're reaching out to you made an initial quick four or five line pitch. We've attached our brochure so that hopefully, even though this is a cold call, we aren't necessarily coming in cold. We're kind of coming in lukewarm because hopefully they've already read your brochure.

They've already looked at your introduction message. They probably looked at your LinkedIn profile. So they might already have an idea of who you are, which gives us just a slight edge over people that are directly coming in cold. Cuz if they have a slight idea of who you are, you do just have this ever so slight advantage when you are coming in cold.

That I like to utilize with all my customers and I hope that you utilize as well. And I also talk about this, the soft introduction in previous episodes. Okay. So we've used our C R M, we've entered the data. When we have the conversation with them, we put in the C R M. Yep. Had a phone call with A B C customer.

John said this, I'm gonna follow up in a week for a meeting. Save then reset reset your C R M to let you know in one week's time to follow back up with John. And that's how we do this, how we get this on this weekly cadence. Right. We get our reminders from our CRM that it's time to make that follow up call Okay.

When we do get them on the phone. Right. If this is an initial initial contact if this is the initial phone call where we've got them on the phone, we haven't really made a formal introduction. What I like to do is just make a brief introduction of who I am and then I just say, Hey, do you mind if I send you a, a formal email introduction on our products and service?

That's where you make your formal pitch, so you have a well-written, well outlined email that's really articulating who you are, who your company is, what the value of your products or service is for their company, and why it's beneficial to them. Attach your brochure and just say, Hey, I'll follow up in a couple weeks.

That's just a great way, once again, to prime that customer. Once we've done that, we've made the formal introduction. We've sent that email. Every contact call after this point is just to get a meeting, okay? Our whole job after this is to get them in person where we can further pitch our product further, better understand.

What their product or service need is, and then hopefully ask for that. Ask for that order. Ask for the next steps, right? Ask, can we get on the crm? Do you have any upcoming opportunities? Is this a product that you could maybe use today? Would you like to place an order? We definitely want to do that in person and hopefully we can get them to that meeting, but we want to, if it's just an initial pitch, we made a soft introduction.

And we just got him on the phone for the first time. A good avenue to take maybe isn't to push initially for the meeting, even though that's obviously the outcome we want. You can read it out however you like. I have asked for a meeting in this stage, found it very effective. I've also asked for a meeting in this stage.

The customer wasn't primed enough and I got, I got told. Yeah, I, I think maybe just send an email or something for now. A good way. If this is just your first interaction with them. A great thing to do is just say, Hey, do you mind if I just send you a formal introduction email on our company, and we can go from there.

That's a great step to take in that first interaction. It also primes them, gives them some time to kind of review who your company is, learn a little bit more about you, and then when you call back and just say, Hey, yeah, just following up to that email I sent, would love to line up a introduction meeting with you.

When are you available? That's just a great next avenue, but it does give you a little bit of an advantage to getting that meeting as well. Okay, so CRM follow up weekly. And then we want to ask for our email. In step five, ask for our email to send a formal introduction. And then obviously we've touched on this multiple times now, number six, we want to ask for that meeting, right?

Real relationships are built in person, real relationships are built in person, and that's what you ultimately would like to do. Okay? I hope that this has answered a lot of questions. I've had quite a few on cold calls. If you have any more questions, we now have a segment of the show. I'm gonna try and do it once a month, as long as I have enough questions.

It's gonna be called Community Questions. Please send any community questions to podcast@capitalbd.ca . Just put in the subject line community questions. And I, once I get to say like eight or nine community questions, which I feel like is enough for a show, I will create an entire show on it. And I will recognize you.

I will answer the question directly for you, and I hope that I will be able to answer it. If, if it is a really challenging question or I don't have a good answer, I will let you know. And hopefully at some point down the line we can get a guest that will be able to answer that. There are certain situations that I just haven't ended up in, like we actually got one a while back from Department of Defense just asking if we've dealt with Department of Defense.

That's not something that I personally have dealt with, but I did give maybe my opinion on how I would go about doing that if I had to. So like I said, if, if I do not have an answer to your question, I will maybe outline what I would try. And then hopefully we can get somebody in the future who has more experience in that avenue and and they can answer your question at that time.

Okay. So once again there will be a new segment of the show called Community Questions. This is where all you lovely listeners get to send me whatever questions you want with regards to business development or business. And if I have a good answer for you or can find a good answer for you, I will do my best and hopefully we'll be able to answer a lot of questions on the show that way.

And I think right now the way it is, just depending on how many questions we get, it'll likely be a monthly show. I think I'll likely just do one a month. But who knows if we start to get. Hundreds of questions, maybe it does become a big part of the show, but for now, I think community questions will likely be one show a month, and that's depending on whether or not we have enough questions.

So once again, if you have questions for the show podcast@capitalbd.ca, that's podcast@capitalbd.ca, just put in the subject line community questions and I will do my best to address it. Once again, if you are enjoying this show, please do like and follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcast. If you can leave us a rating and review.

It really helps us to grow this segment of the show. Our show is definitely growing. It's growing by leaps and bounds all the time, but that doesn't mean we don't need the support. So please tell your friends, tell your family, tell your coworkers, and please do you rate, like, follow the show, leave us a review.

I read them all. Guys, I look at them all and I'm incredibly grateful for each and every one of them. And just on that subject, I have some shout outs to just some amazing people. This last week has been crazy with people just. Complimenting us on winning business podcast of the year, just giving us such great kind comments, kind, kind feedback.

And I'm just gonna name some of the great people who did that for us. Shout outs. Laurie Bauer. Aaron Haberman, Kevin Pydde, Jayson Chakkalakal, Jon Sheeran, Alexander Javier, and Michael Thompson. All of these people left us just amazing kind comments, kind messages, and thank you so much. Thank you so much for just being so supportive, for being such an amazing, supportive audience.

I could really could not do this show without the support of my audience and I'd really hope that the Business Development podcast is bringing value to your business. And if it is, I would love to know how. If you have had a direct benefit from the Business Development Podcast, please, please let me know.

Let me know if this podcast has benefited your business in any way. I would love to know how. Feel free to get me once again, podcast capitalbd.ca , or if you got me on LinkedIn, shoot me a message. Always love to connect on LinkedIn. But I would love to know how this podcast has affected your life. So if you are enjoying this show, if our 31 episodes have impacted your life, let me know.

I would love to hear some of it. Maybe we can read some of it on the show. I think it'd be really cool to let other listeners know maybe what impacts this show has had on the world. Once again, this is episode 31 of the Business Development Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and we will catch you on the flip side.

Outro: This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy. Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry, and founded his own business development firm in 2020. His passion and his specialization. Is in customer relationship generation and business development.

The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists. For more, we invite you to the website @ www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.