#489 - How to Turn 3 Cold Calls into 1 Meeting Every Time (Steal this script!)

Intro and Sam McKenna's social selling course

00:00Sellers, cold outbound sucks for both you and your prospect. It takes an insane amount of effort, reply rates are in the tank, and you are fishing in the same pond as everybody else. I literally wrote a book on cold calling, but Sam McKenna, who's the CEO of Hashtag Sam Sales, completely changed my mind about what I thought social selling and great outbound prospecting is. Sam literally has broken 13 national sales records. She was recruited by LinkedIn because she was so good at LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and she built her business from scratch into a multimillion-dollar business using exactly what she teaches in her social selling course that she built in partnership with 30MPC. Go to 30MPC.com forward slash Sam.

00:46Her new course teaches you how to use relationship data and your network's network to get warm introductions into your dream accounts that would never answer your cold call, respond to your cold email, or open the gift that you sent to their office. If you go to 30MPC.com forward slash Sam, we are giving away all of Sam's favorite LinkedIn Sales Now reports, alerts, and scripts that you can use to break into more accounts with less effort. Today, I wanted to walk through the cold call script that I used when I was selling and continue to coach teams on that consistently can get top reps to book one in three cold call connects. That literally means if you talk to three people, you can get one person to agree to a meeting.

01:27It is literally the best feeling in the world in sales to know that you can go into a one-hour dial session and you can leave with a meeting on the books. And a lot of people are really, really struggling to generate pipeline book meetings. Cold email is basically broken nowadays because of all these AI spam bots. And you see a lot of teams that are going back to the phones. And the key here, folks, is the vast majority of the advice that I give you today is going to basically be doing the exact opposite of what most telemarketers do when they ask you, how's your day going? Or when they hurl a pitch at you or when they try to like handle an objection. So there are three parts to nailing the cold call and we'll walk through them one by one.

Why cold calling still works

02:07Part number one is the opener where we'll use what I call the heard the name tossed around cold call opener. Part number two is the pitch. And that's where we use something called a problem proposition. And then part number three is when you handle objections. The way we're going to do that is with what I call the Mr. Miyagi method to handling objections. And by the way if you read our cold calling book it called Cold Calling Sucks and that why it works We break all this stuff down inside of that It sold 50 copies in a year It was the number one prospecting book last year And so this is really pulling from a lot of the stuff there but you also hear some more voiceovers from me. And the last thing is I'll be using an example for a company that I consult

The opener: heard the name tossed around

02:39for their name is Covey. And the reason I'm using them is because it's really, really simple. What their product does is if you have like a million resumes that you need to screen, it's an AI bot that screens all of those resumes very quickly so that you don't have to review all 1 million In resumes, you can review the 100 best profiles that actually are qualified to work for your company. All righty, so let's turn that into cold call terms. So step number one is let's talk about the opener. There are two banned cold call openers that you should never use. Today's show is brought to you by Responsive, which helps sales teams respond to RFPs, security questionnaires, and buyer requests faster so deals don't die at the last mile.

03:15One great way to drive your deals faster is to run parallel processes instead of linear processes. For example, in vendor review, work with your buyer to kick off legal, security, and procurement review simultaneously instead of doing them one by one sequentially. We built a playbook with our friends at Responsive on different proposal accelerators that you can use to close deals faster. Grab it in the show notes. In your life. And they're the two most common ones that you'll see. The first one is how's your day going? So whenever you pick up the phone and you ask a prospect, how's your day going? you know that you don't give a shit how their day is going, and they know you don't give a shit how

03:52their day is going. And so nine times out of ten, what you will hear is something that sounds like, fine, how can I help you? And that exasperated sigh is code word for, hey, I know you're a telemarketer, just get on with it, and I'm just waiting to reject you. A lot of times, you'll just get rejected after that. That's number one. Other one that's even worse is, did I catch you at a bad time, it is never a good time for a cold call. And nine times out of 10, if you ask someone, a complete stranger, did I catch you at a bad time? They're going to be like, yeah, it is a bad time. And then you might ask, can I call you back? And they're like, not now, call me tomorrow. And then they're part of the witness protection program. And you will literally never connect with

04:34that prospect again. And so what we're going to do instead is we're literally going to do the exact opposite of what most telemarketers do is my goal when I'm opening cold call is for them to actually forget that it's a cold call. I want them to actually think that I'm like in their warm network, almost like I got referred to talk to them. And so that's what we call the heard the name tossed around opener. Okay. There are three steps to nailing the heard the name tossed around opener Number one is you want to have some context In other words you want to find like the common thread between that customer and other customers like them So, for example, like in this case, when I was selling insurance, I used to say like, hey, Jane, we work with a few other partners in the DLA Piper office down in L.A.

05:14It's Armand from Northwestern. Have you heard a name tossed around? And that was like I worked with other people in the same office. Like the closer you can get to home, the better. Part of the reason they won't totally blow you off is like even if you work with other people in the office and they're like, I don't know this person and I think they might be trying to sell something. They're probably not going to be a complete jerk to you because you work with other people in their office or you work with people who share the same investor. If you're like, hey, Jane, I work with other people who breathe. It's like it's not really close to home. They're going to be like, oh, it's like fake personalization.

05:47So you've got to like find that common thread. if you're stuck, sometimes you can combine threads. So you might say like, hey, I work with a few other CFOs in like the Chicago area. It's Armand from Acmeco. Have you heard her name tossed around? Even if they haven't heard your name tossed around, it doesn't matter. Like I use this at startups where I was the ninth employee and like no one knew who I was. I use this when I was 19 years old selling insurance and definitely no one knew who I was. It's about acting like you should have. So the vast majority of time, people will say like, no, like I haven't, but like, how can I help you? And you'll notice like their demeanor is a lot more positive than the fine.

06:27How can I help you that you'll get like with the how's your day going thing? And it's because you led with context. So if they say no, that brings us to the pitch. But before we go to the pitch, there's a chance that they say yes. They're like, oh, yeah, I've heard of you guys before. And here's a secret. If they've heard of you before, you don't have to pitch. you literally be like oh i guess we must have screwed something up normally we'd be working with someone like you by now i guess what did you hear and then they'll usually just like bring you right to the objection or they'll be like oh i've been considering you guys for a while or oh i'm not super familiar but i've definitely like heard the name tossed around and you sort of like go to

The pitch: problem proposition

07:02the pitch anyways all right so that brings us to step two which is pitch which is not actually a So the problem with most pitches is they tend to be like, we focus, they tend to focus on like what you do instead of like what the prospect is thinking about. So like, let's say for example, you were looking at like nutrition plans or workout plans or something in the fitness space. No one cares about your seven day shortcut to shred weightlifting program They care about hey I want to look really good during the summer without spending all day in the gym. That's what gets their attention. And so you want to lead with the problem they're trying to solve and then just solve the problem in as few sentences as possible.

07:48This is where marketing teams totally screw over salespeople. is like they just stuff them with product knowledge. And they're like, this feature produces this benefit and this feature produces this benefit. It's like we have this dashboard that gives you visibility across all your managers. And like you end up speaking in product language instead of problem language. And so the problem proposition is very simple. You're gonna lead with a triggering problem that literally gets your prospect to like sit up. And they're like, okay, that's pretty good. And then you want to solve it in one sentence with a one sentence solution. And then you just want to ask if they're open to learning more in like a low friction or

08:28an interest based call to action. So that sounds like this. If we go back to that example at Covey again, it's an AI screening resume bot. You want to like describe this problem in like triggering specificity. That might sound like this. Normally when I'm talking to like other talent leaders in the Sequoia portfolio, they like are completely inundated with like 3000 applications on the first day that they post a software engineer job posting. Covey uses AI and takes in like everything that you give us around your ideal candidate profile and it will surface the top 10% of candidates so you don't have to screen all of the resumes. My guess is like you're probably totally set but are you open to like

09:07taking a look at this thing for one of your roles not now but like when I'm not cold calling you out of the blue? And so again the three steps there is like today's show is brought to you by Responsive which helps sales teams respond to RFPs, security questionnaires, and buyer requests faster so deals don't die at the last mile. One great way to drive your deals faster is to run parallel processes instead of linear processes. For example, in vendor review, work with your buyer to kick off legal, security, and procurement review simultaneously instead of doing them one by one sequentially. We built a playbook with our friends at Responsive on different proposal accelerators that you can use to close deals faster.

The Mr. Miyagi objection method

09:45Grab it in the show notes. That triggering problem, that triggering problem needs to have hairy lollipop specificity. What I mean by that is if I told you a story where like you're walking around, you're like licking a lollipop and then you dropped it onto a shagra. and you held it up to this light right here. what would you see? You would see like hair and like dust speckles like off of the lollipop and it would be disgusting. Like that's the level of specificity that you need when you're describing the problem. If the level of specificity that you're using when you're describing the problem is like people don't like screening resumes or like doing this task takes a lot of time. It's not triggering enough. It doesn't evoke an emotion. So like and a lot of this comes forward in your tone where it's like it's like absolutely ridiculous. They have to screen literally like imagine screening like a thousand.

10:34paper resumes like the stack would go this high on top of your desk like it is actually laughable to think about it some of this comes through in your tone and then with your one sentence solution you don't give too many details about your product people don't care what your product does people need to know enough about what your product does so that they can believe you can solve the problem so notice in that case I wasn't like oh and we can filter by this this this this and this and we have

11:04I was saying like, hey, we use AI, to take what you want to see in a good candidate, and then we only show you the best candidates, which solves that problem. It's dumb human language. No buzzwords like single source of truth, streamline, optimize, all-in-one platform, leading provider of one-stop shop. All of these things mean absolutely nothing to your prospect. They sound good to your marketing team, but they

11:37seller is using and so they immediately put you like back in the telemarketer category and then lastly don't ask them for a meeting in your call to action meetings feel heavy try to ask them for like interest if they're open learning more or in the best case ask them to like take a test drive or come up with an offer it's like hey do you want to give this thing a spin on one of your roles not now but when i'm not calling you out of the blue right see if you can like get them to take a seat in the car not like sit down for a 30 minute demo with a specialist which like no one Like every once in a while you get a nice deal where they're like, sure, that sounds great. I'd love to be. And whenever that happens, I'm almost like surprised. I'll like look up the person's LinkedIn. I'm like, they still work here? Like did I even call the right person? But like sometimes people will say yes. Usually people will be like some sort of objection. All right. And so this is when we start to talk about the Mr. Miyagi approach to handling objections. What most people do. Today's show is brought to you by Responsive, which helps sales teams respond to RFPs, security questionnaires,

Selling the test drive

12:37requests faster so deals don't die at the last mile. One great way to drive your deals faster is to run parallel processes instead of linear processes. For example, in vendor review, work with your buyer to kick off legal, security, and procurement review simultaneously instead of doing them one by one sequentially. We built a playbook with our friends at Responsive on different proposal accelerators that you can use to close deals faster. Grab it in the show notes. when they're handling objections is they try to handle the objection. They try to fight the objection. And if you've ever had someone try to change your mind, the number one thing that I can do to not change your mind is I can tell you that you're wrong.

13:19And that's what most sellers do when they hear an objection. If someone says, I'm not interested, they start pitching harder and they're like, well, here's why I believe the solution that we bring is more valuable than what you're using today.

13:49And that way was not your way. And so when you fight that objection, you're fighting the way that they do things. And so that's why the first step of handling any objection is to pattern break. And you're actually going to agree with the objection. So let's pretend that someone gives us a competitor as an objection. And so for the sake of Covey, let's assume that they're using some other resume screening approach. bot, right? Of which there are many. So I'm gonna say something like this. I should have assumed you had something in place because honestly like screening thousand resumes would be a huge pain. And I'm not gonna lie, like usually when you have a bot in place, like it It doesn't even make sense to switch off of it. So they're like, is this person not gonna sell me? That's what happens when you agree with the objection, is like you release pressure. Step number two is you need to incentivize conversation. I don't have enough information to handle this objection yet, and I need to start to get them talking. When people start talking, they tend to feel comfortable. The job of a good therapist is to get their person talking. If the therapist is doing all the talking, then the person will start to clam up, be like, ah, don't give me advice, don't solve my problem for me.

14:52Part of the reason therapy works is like they get you to talk yourself into the right solution. Right. And so we're going to do some like sales therapy. Right. here and we're gonna do something really slick. So here's a secret with competitors. I need to ask them a trap question and I need to know like at least one trap question per competitor. What that means is I need to think of what is one thing that my competition can't do that I can do. And then I'm just going to ask them how they do that thing so that they come to the answer on their own terms. So in the case of Covey, a lot of times someone's existing recruiting software will have like an AI bot attached to it but it's like pretty crappy. It's like glorified filters, right? And there are certain things that you can't look for. Like you can't look for like someone who got multiple promotions in a short period of time, like trajectory or worked for like certain blue chip type of companies. And so I'm just going to like ask that in a trap question. So I'm going to say like, Hey Jane, just so no one from my team calls you again, I noticed that your team is like hiring a bunch of like software

16:02have to assume that in the bot you're able to do things like point out the human level nuance of things like quick promotions over a certain number of years or worked for like blue chip tech companies in this industry or like worked for both big companies and small companies so they've seen scale in startups like are you able to like get that level of nuance just because I want to make sure that this is like actually a dead deal so notice I'm doing a lot of incentivizing here and what I mean by that is I'm constantly throwing in little things like hey just so my team doesn't call you again

16:39Could you like really tell me like why this thing doesn't work? But then I'm like layering in little traps and I'm like, hey, like my guess is you can probably see if someone's gotten four promotions in the last seven years and like. that's something that I know the other competition can't do. I'm like laying these traps so that they'll usually give you an answer that's like, uh, it doesn't do all of that, but it sort of gets the job done for the most part. And that's my opportunity to do step three, which is like selling the test drive. Okay. So here's the thing is like, you're like right at the finish line. You've sort of like poked this hole of doubt in the competitor. And a lot of times this is when like sellers will come in with like pressure pitch and they'll be like, well, our product like has

17:22Do all these advanced filters and show you these types of candidates and these types of candidates. And immediately the prospect's like, ah, sales pitch again. And like you lose the deal. Right. And so you never want to sell the product. You want to sell the test drive. So you don't want to sell people, here's this nice shirt that I want you to buy right now. Here's this Tesla that I want you to buy right now. You want to be like, hey, I know you've got a car already. Do you want to give this thing a ride, like just so you know it's out there? And nine times out of 10, like people want to take the test drive. Like Tesla has sold a ton of cars to people who like never thought they were going to get a Tesla. And then they took the test drive and they're like, oh, like that's a car, right? And so you're going to do that with your product. And so if I was selling the test drive at Cubby with Jane,

18:07I'm gonna say something like this. I'm gonna like, Jane, honestly, like, I've noticed like you're hiring some like really awesome engineers and like, my guess is you have a pretty refined candidate profile. My guess is you're probably not going to switch off of your existing tool. But like, are you open to like us running this on one of your roles? Because we can filter for a lot of that like human level nuance that you're talking about. And if nothing else, like you'll know what's out there and you can see what it looks like. Today's show is brought to you by Responsive, which helps sales teams respond to RFPs, security questionnaires, and buyer requests faster so deals don't die at the last mile. One great way to drive your deals faster is to run parallel processes instead of linear processes. For example, in vendor review, work with your buyer to kick off legal, security, and procurement review simultaneously instead of doing them one by one sequentially. We built a playbook with our friends at Responsive on different proposal accelerators that you can use to close deals faster.

Resources and outro

19:01at And nine times out of 10, they'll be like, yeah, I'll take a look. And then once they're in the car, then you can be like, so maybe we could talk about financing. Maybe we could buy out your current car. Maybe we can buy out your lease. You can do all that stuff and quote unquote sell the value of your solution when you aren't doing a cold call on a complete stranger. But a common mistake that people will make is they'll try to turn these cold calls into sales pitches. And the phone is a meeting setting. Like get them on an actual call where you can like sit down. You're not catching them in between meetings. You're not going to get like interrupted by them. Like being like, shoot, I got to jump to my next one.

19:42and then you can actually walk them through a proper sales process. If you like this one, there are a couple of resources that I'll give you free. One, like we have this entire script template for yourself that you can get in the show notes. We have 18 objection talk tracks. I literally went through one of them that you can access for free down on the show notes. you really like this one, We put together an entire cold calling course that walks through the opener, the problem prop, the objections, how to manage your day, and a million other different things that I didn't cover in this video inside of a step-by-step course. And because you're watching this video, there's a special discount code down in the YouTube show notes. You can go check those ones out. Alrighty, folks, if you like this one, it would mean a ton if you liked and subbed. This channel is the number one way that we can continue to keep doing content like this. And if you like this one, let me know what you want to see down below in the comments or something like that. We cover all types of cold calling things, and I've talked about cold calling

20:34don't always know what is top of mind for people out there. So let me know what you want to cover or if you have like a product that we would want to do like a pitch on or something like that. And I'm sure we'll come up with something fun. All right, folks. Peace. Today's show is brought to you by Responsive, which helps sales teams respond to RFPs, security questionnaires, and buyer requests faster so deals don't die at the last mile. One great way to drive your deals faster is to run parallel processes instead of linear processes. For example,

21:04review simultaneously instead of doing them one by one sequentially. We built a playbook with our friends at Responsive on different proposal accelerators that you can use to close deals faster. Grab it in the show notes.