Ask HN: Cold Calling. How the heck do I do that?

I would start with the many great books on sales. There’s really a lot of human psychology that goes into it. A lot of that psychology is fear driven.

That said, cold calling is a pretty low value marketing tactic. Any kind of warm lead will be massively more responsive to a call.

what services do you offer?

Imagine yourself a hideous quasimodo with nothing to lose. Proceed to proposition every woman you encounter with promises of happy matrimony. You will eventually convert someone dumb and desperate enough. And if you do it long enough, you'll even snag an Esmeralda or two.

My favorite sales blog is gong.io - they ran hundreds of thousands of sales calls through voice recognition to see what really works, and there are a ton of gold nuggets there, just search cold calling. Some of the my favorite cold calling advice: Opening with "How have you been?", followed by "the REASON for my call..."

Also, from my own experience, even when you get a hard No, you can buy one last question with "Out of curiosity..."

There's no replacement for just diving into the dials though. Set yourself a solid target like 300 dials a week and focus on building relationships with individuals and partnerships with companies. Learn the difference between a transactional and consultative sales approach.

Cold calling is a numbers game - better suited for larger orgs with a defined process for driving prospects down the funnel. Not ideal if you are independent.

Your best bet is referrals - from family, friends and especially colleagues in the industry. Make a list of folks you know who may be in some position to advocate for you, then call those folks up and ask them for help. Make sure you are able to clearly articulate the services you are willing and able to offer in a way that makes it easy for them both to understand and share with their contacts.

In the meantime, do some thought leadership - start a blog or do a series of videos helping folks in your area of interest while demonstrating your expertise. Post links to them on LinkedIn and anywhere else your prospective customers are. Don't be afraid to give away "secrets" - most are more willing to hire someone who knows what they're talking about rather than trying it themselves.

Make sure everything you put out there - emails, blog posts, videos, etc. - show how folks can get a hold of you. It can be as simple as including your URL prominently.

Is cold calling still a thing people do? I would have assumed with all those "marketplace" websites out there now, that a company looking for IT consulting would just go and find them by themselves.

On the very practical side:

- Separate clearly preparation time from execution time. Prepare your pitch. Prepare a nice long list of targets with the relevant information (why you picked them) + contact info. Make it so you don't have to go back to this while executing.

- Block off a 1-2 of hours to do the calling. No distractions, no over-thinking. If you are doing phone calls: it is you, a phone, your list of contacts, pitch help, and note-taking material in a room. You will be making back to back calls. Execution time is not the time to think of why you are getting rejected so much, or you will be making 2 calls when you should have made 20. This assumes you have a long enough list of targets to be able to just go through them.

- Start with lower stakes targets. Keep more important, more strategic, bigger, targets for a little later. In particular if you think you have a better chance of landing them for some reason. Preferably not for the first session. There is a warm up period for each session, and you should also be getting better after the first session. The first session is definitely a test more than anything else.

- Note down everything you can. Verbatim as much as possible.

- Make it conversational. The opening sentences are going to be scripted, and you can use a more scripted version of the rest of the pitch for the first few calls of a session, but as you warm up, let things be more conversational. This will be a more pleasant experience for you and the persons you call.

- Sales calls are all about asking questions and making a connection. Be curious about the persons you are talking to and use the time they give you to satisfy your curiosity. Ask follow-up questions. Chime in with an opinion or a sentiment now and then. Use what they give you (any answer or info) to dig deeper to understand their problem. You are typically better off selling a solution to a problem they actually have than selling a product/features. The difficult part is to get them to tell about their problem - because people who like to open up about their problems to strangers are pretty rare.

- Immediately after you are done with a session, look at your notes, organize them, complete them as needed from memory, and list all the follow up you have to do. You will be following up in a timely fashion. The people who did not pickup the phone are on the list for next time.

- Now is also a good time to reflect on how the next round can go better: What worked? Did you repeatedly hear a theme when they were pushing back? Do you need better proof? Handling objections is a key part of selling, so having notes of all the objections and devising ways to handle them is crucial. Were you targeting the right people, the right title? Was it the right time of day/week/quarter/year (budgeting cycles)? When things went better, was there a pattern you can identify?

- If you are working in a team of people conducting the same effort in parallel, share this feedback with them. Are they doing something that works? What are you guys learning about your customers? If one of you is having more success, them letting the others listen in on some of their calls can be gold.

- Rinse and repeat.

The thing is even when you are being rejected, you want to build knowledge about the market. That is an added value of this approach vs just listing your services on some marketplace and having a website.

And yes, like others have commented, any warm lead or referral will have 50x better success rate. BTW, if you can score a referral (even weak) from one of the people you are cold calling, that counts the same: "I spoke with xxx and she indicated you would be a better person to have this conversation".

Also, I am not implying cold calling is the right approach for your company and product, just giving a few practical tips if you are going to be doing it.

How do you even find the number to call? I remember, many years ago, as a recent grad, getting a directory of local businesses to try cold-calling in search of a job, and it was just hundreds of pages of completely opaque defunct businesses, shell companies, one-person businesses, that either didn't have a working phone number or just never picked up.

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Don’t listen to anyone telling you that cold calling doesn’t work. It works!

You want to get a step-by-step book that you can relate to. I had to read five or six of them before I found one that really spoke to me. It was an uphill battle. But, eventually even I, a gruffy nerd, started landing appointments.

Cold calling is a little bit like getting up in the morning to do a hard work out. You have to motivate yourself. You can do it.

I got my first customer cold calling. It was hard work but in the end we went to Bill the movers office (which has trash everywhere and a bat). Bill paid us a few hundred dollars to build a new website. We ran ads for his site and he paid us per lead. I expanded that business until I stumbled over a product we could sell more efficiently- call tracking. We no longer had to get into the weeds of the business design and ads instead we were augmenting their analytics- providing a kind of google analytics for phone calls. Continuing down this path talking to customers - people wanted to just use our phone and we became contact center software… we’ll see where we go from here still love talking to customers… my way of seeing the world is always be solving problems and always be talking to people with problems… using the phone to call someone is not a bad thing but maybe if you have a neighbor or aunt/uncle - father in law or the likes that needs help start there … but definitely have away for people to call you. And email like a lot… that’s my advice… because bills bat had the name of the last guy who sold him a website and ads…

Is cold calling legal? Don't you need marketing consent before contacting someone with the purpose of selling a product/service?

ex-cold caller here:

it sucks...but - it taught me (no surprise) - how to talk on the phone. I work with colleagues who arch up in fright when their phone rings...and this is an internal call from a colleague.

It takes time to learn to do it well. The most effective cold calling is done once your product, its market fit, its ideal customer and general understanding of the competition, as well as your value proposition is well understood.

In the best place i worked which i saw successful cold calling - the CEO's had the script incredibly fine tuned. Yes - scripts. You learn it like the back of your hand. Every sales rep who had a dip in numbers did so because they veered off the script.

For consulting - you're ideally looking to simply meet with a decision maker. I'd probably start small, pick up the phone and ask if you can visit and have a chat, shout the decision maker lunch.

Unrelated to cold-calling - but related to phones. I've been cold calling businesses lately asking about trainee opportunities, and have been blown away at the response. I've had the owners of small companies call me back and spend 30-40 minutes of the phone discussing my situation. Sounding good, and being confident on the phone opens doors.

If you cant do it well yourself - hire someone who can speak well. There's a reason why engineering sales often times have a sales person, and an engineer in every meeting with a client...one does the shmoozing, one does the correcting :)

Read Fanatical Prospecting. I hired a salesperson recently and found that book very interesting as someone who has no sales background myself.

Really the gist of it is twofold:

1. Somebody who just picks up the phone and dials prospects for an hour is going to do much better than someone who makes excuses and finds reasons to not dial. Even bad prospecting is generally better than no prospecting.

2. Cold calling is rarer than most people (even most salespeople) think. The numbers come from somewhere. Unless you’re dialing straight from the phone book, then the prospect is likely somewhat warm. Did they request info on your website at some point? Give you their card at a tradeshow? Those aren’t cold calls.