Transcription
There's this idea, especially by people that don't use PBOS's, that once they say no, the call is over. The call is only over if they're younger, which, by the way, they're probably going to do anyway if you don't use a permission. For example, someone says no. My immediate go-to is that because you hate cold calls, or you just hate me, right? You can even go more emotional. You could be like, "Is that because you hate cold calls or just salespeople?" People do not want to hate. So, they immediately will tend to distance themselves. "No, no, no. I, I don't hate you. I just don't like cold calls." "You hate old cold calls or just the bad ones?" Already, I've kind of delivered the fact that this is a good cold call. At this point, another 50% are turning into like, "Okay, go on. What is it about?"
All right, Julio, welcome to the show. You know, we start every single episode with your top three actionable takeaways. So, let's get your three. So, look, the first thing I think is keeping in mind that prospects are bored. You think you're unique. You know, "Oh, you know, I've got my own savvier, my own way of doing things." You probably don't. Prospects have heard it so many times before, right? Very first thing in the call, which is the opener. You just want to sound like not everyone else. That's the reason why the pattern interrupt, the "Do you want to hang up or let me have 30 seconds?" got so popular because no one was using it. And then all of a sudden, like, "Oh, I've never heard that before. Let me have a conversation with this guy." And I think, obviously, now that's becoming a little bit more overused, right? And I think you've got a couple of paths to go here. So, one of the ones I like, I like to go really funny, saying things like, you know, "Am I going to ruin your day? Am I going to ruin your Wednesday if I tell you this is a sales call?" Or alternatively, for more, let's say, educated clients that don't want to be too, a bit more buttoned-up, we will go for something like, "Look, this is a sales call, but it's a well-targeted one. Can I briefly explain why it could be relevant?" And all of a sudden, I've started immediately by grabbing the prospect's attention. He's thinking, "Okay, I haven't heard that. He's done some research. Maybe I do want to talk to this guy." And you're in. You know, you don't sound like everyone else, and you've got the prospect's attention. And as you guys know, cold calling is a game of getting the next 10, 30 seconds, and you do that one step at a time. So, that, I think the first thing is, make sure you stand out. You don't sound like everyone else, and then you're far more likely to engage them right off the bat.
Well, here's a well-targeted question. What's takeaway number two?
Awesome. So, look, obviously the opener is not going to make a cold call, right? And I think too many salespeople stress about that. Instead, what you want to do, you want to continue to grab their attention. And especially when I coach my North American clients, like in North America, you've got this culture of like, "Oh, you know, let me tell you how great we are. We've done all these things. We've won all these awards." That all of a sudden looks like that meme of the guy spreading himself the champagne, right? Which is not exactly what you want to start the call with. Instead, I much prefer to lead with problems. So instead of saying, "Hey, I'm great because of this," I'll be like, "Look, I'm talking to a bunch of people like you." And what they tell me, I want to give you a really practical example because there's this client of mine that's, I think he delivered one of the best possible pitches I've ever heard. So, he's a recruiter, right? And your recruiters is like super crowded markets, and he recruits for auditors, which is like a small niche within the financial sector. And so the typical recruiter would go like, "Hey, you know, I talk to a lot of finance managers. They have a problem with finding the right talent or perhaps they get paid too much." And he goes, "Look, I talk to a lot of uh finance managers. What they tell him is that currently it's really hard to find auditors because all of the best talent is snatched up by the big four and they're offering crazy salaries." And already, problem number one, they're like, "Boom, I've got your attention because you're talking my language." Exactly. Then problem number two is something like, "And alternatively, you're trying to get that talent or even getting from competitors, but there are now so many freelancers, the finding the one person that wants to go perm is very, very hard. So you really need to make sure you've got the perfect match there." And again, it's quoted two problems that are not going to be told by a generic recruiter, only by someone that really understands their market. And so, right off the bat, you're starting by talking about what matters to the prospect, not what matters to you as a salesperson, which immediately again makes you stand out.
Very nice. Round us out. What's number three?
I'm going to tie number three with number two. I would say that the hardest thing for anyone is either managing calling or doing a call. Calling is actually getting the calls done, right? I talk to 20 sales leaders a day. And typically the biggest problem is always getting the people to to do the job, right? And we think this is done, you know, by, "Oh, you know, I'm going to tell them you're going to do it, or I'll fire them," or, you know, "Hey, I'm just going to pay them really well." The thing is, good cold callers always get paid well anyway, right? And instead, I think something that's been missing the last decade, you know, I was brought up in a boil room. You had to call a fire. But then we figured it out. What if we make it a little bit fun, right? So, as a sales leader, you can gamify this. There's so many different ways. But you might be the caller like me who's sitting in his living room or office making the calls. So, how do you make it fun for you? And I'm going to give you a very practical one. We'll talk about this a lot, but I decided recently, you know what? I'm going to go a bit crazier. I'm going to start rhyming my first 60 seconds of the call. So, I'll give you an example. Nick, you're you're my prospect. Ring ring. "Hello." "Good morning, Nick. If I told you this is a cold call, would you smash your phone against the wall?" "Well, I just got a new one. I'm not going to smash it." "What's this about?" "I talk to a lot of sales leaders. They typically face one of three problems. The first one is that whenever they listen to their team sell, they're not pitching or challenging objections. Well, alternatively, their calls seem fine, but they don't generate enough qualified pipeline. Or finally, instead of cold calling, they're just sitting on Instagram and LinkedIn's calling." "In a nutshell, Nick, I'm a sales trainer. You might tell me you're 100% happy with your team's calls, and you will smash your phone against the walls. They rhyme. That was a rhyme. Five rhymes. Five rhyme."
I want to turn this into a masterclass on Julio's cold calling playbook from opener all the way through objection. You've given us a couple different variations on this opener. The most recent one that you gave us was you said, "If I told you this was a cold call, would you smash your phone against the wall?" Right?
Yep. That's right. Give me a Give me a couple. If I'm If I'm a sales rep that's trying to like build this for myself in a way that sounds authentic to me, give me like a couple different riffs or a couple different variations on the opener here.
So, I'm going to give you the the three typical recommendations. So the first one, so I typically only recommend humorous either with very high-level C-levels because it gets so many calls that it's just, it just stands out entirely. "If I told you this is a call about FX, would a piece of you die?" Right? So that that thing that just gets them like completely stand out. Very competitive markets, I would go for the humorous opener because they just so many calls, SEO, website development, Forex, all these ones that are just super crowded, go with the humorous. Alternatively, if you are targeting a more, how can I say, suited-up audience, this could be financial institutions or like C-levels, but maybe not the C-levels of like blue-chip companies, right? Where saying something like this is probably going to turn a lot of people like, "What the hell is this guy about?" And the one I like, this one is like the biggest fear someone has is when they receive a cold call is this person is going to waste my time because if you got only cold calls about things you wanted, you would love it. You pick up the phone all the time, right? So the second one would be something like, "Look, I was doing some research, Nick, and you're literally in the top 10 clients we would like to work with in in the scale-up field in Arizona. Can I take 30 seconds and you'll help me understand if it's relevant for you as well?" Right? So you see, I'm leveraging the fact that I understand them. I'm getting them to feel good because I'm making them feel good about the fact that they are my target prospect, and I also engage them for help, right? That's that's the power. "Can you help me understand if it's relevant for you?" That gets them. So, there's so many ways to engage. Out of all the openers I've tested with my clients, this is the one that consistently gets very, very high hit rate.
Well, what I really liked about that second one, you were like, "You're in our top 10 list of clients that we want to work with within the scale-up field in Arizona." And when you pair their industry with their location, it feels so much closer to home for them, and they're like, "Oh, this is relevant to me." And you know what? You might have more of a territory than just the state of Arizona. You might have the entire United States. That's 50 states that you have to keep track of, and I think also Puerto Rico. But you can just pivot that opener depending on the state that they're in. So you pull up your notes on one side, and then you just adapt that opener to whatever industry and location that you see in the CRM there.
Exactly. And so I guess my question to you, you've got a couple of these like humorous openers, you've got ways to make them a little bit more serious. What's your approach if somebody, because it sounds like you're using typically like permission-based openers where you're leading with something that's a bit of a pattern interrupt, and then you're getting their thumbs up to proceed. What is your response if someone turns you down on one of your permission-based openers where they're like, "No"?
Okay, this is my favorite part, right? Because there's this idea, especially by people that don't use PBOS's, that once they say no, the call is over, right? The call is only over if they hung up, which, by the way, they're probably going to do anyway if you don't use a permission-based offer, right? So, for example, someone says no. So, my immediate go-to, and this is just built into my brain now, is like, "Is that because you hate cold calls, or you just hate me, right?" Yeah, like just just right. And again, you can be like quite deliberate with this. You can even go more emotional. You can be like, "Is that because you hate cold calls or just salespeople?" Again, and this is crucial because people do not want to hate. No one wants to be hateful. So, they immediately will tend to distance themselves. And in fact, over 50% of the time, they'll they'll be like, "No, no, no. I don't hate you. I just don't like cold calls." And then my rebuttal is like, "Okay, when you say that, you hate old cold calls or just the bad ones?" And then already I've kind of delivered the fact that this is a good cold call, right? And and at this point, another 50% are turning into like, "Okay, gone. What is it about?" And then if they go like, "Oh, I really hate old cold calls." And then I'm going to hit them one more time. I go, "I promise I'll make this the least boring one you've got. Do you want to hear me out? And if it's not relevant, you'll never hear my weird accent again." And this in the US works so well because you can say, "You're never going to hear my New York accent. You're never going to hear my Californian accent." And you for 49 states, as long as you don't target your own state, it just works all the time.
Julio, I want to bring up an objection that you're probably getting from sellers all the time. We also talk about this concept of being disarmingly blunt and saying some of these ridiculous things to break the pattern of the corporate drone that is telemarketing. And whenever we talk about it, every once in a while, you'll get someone who's like, "No, but like, I'm calling engineering leaders or CISOs or senior people, and they expect a certain level of professionalism. Or I'm calling into certain parts of Europe where if you're overly casual, like that's a total turn-off for them." You're literally European yourself. And so, how do you respond to a seller who thinks that showing that much personality walks the line between being unprofessional?
For the audience that's listening to this, I want you to burn something in your head. It's very, very easy to reject or say no to a salesperson. It's very hard to reject a human being. And this is why this works so well because all of a sudden, you're not a salesperson, you're a human being. And that's the part that really is going to hit the most. And that moment in which you engage them, "Hey, I'm not a salesperson, I'm a human." It's just so hard for them to then turn around and be like, uh, okay. And so they, that's the real part of interrupt. So that's in the in the simple psychological way. But then like the funniest part is that I've got a ton of of coaches in Germany and Switzerland. And I've heard Germany's really, really different, right? But that's the thing. Everyone was like, "Oh, but you know, your stuff will never work in Germany." I'm like, "Yeah, why not?" "Well, German people don't like to have fun." I'm like, "Really?" Or is it just that you're not trying to make jokes for them? And that's the crazy part in Germany because everyone is so serious. But do you think these people don't have comedy? Of course they bloody do. They laugh like everyone else. It's just the humor is a bit more direct. So you've got to be more direct with them, right? So I think, yeah, it's, I, I'm yet to find like the only problems I have seen with this approach from the statistical empirical evidence is when you're targeting people whose level of language is not non-native. So, for example, when I was cold calling into Dubai, and they're not native English speakers, and then it's difficult because they're not getting it, right? I don't get the sarcasm, don't get the humor as easily. So in that case, I would be a, in Dubai, I had to like be a lot more like direct with how I was doing my calls. But apart from that, if you're calling Germans in German, if you're calling Italians, all of this, I, I test it across all areas of Europe and North America, and it works. And again, if it's a bit more the financial sectors, I think about banking, it's really hard. Like, I think engineers are are great. Banking, high-level banking, very difficult for example, compared to level of serious. But again, the, as long as the objection is like, is, you know, it could be, "Is it because you hate cold calls, or is it just my voice?" I mean, you don't have to make it sound funny, you can be very serious. "Is it, is it just you hate cold calls, or or is it just my voice, or was my opener that bad?" Right? Again, it, you, you don't, your tone will make it more playful. So, I think you can disarm that, and I'm yet to find a place where this type of responses hasn't worked.
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So let's talk about the pitch part of the call. So assume the person's been like, "All right, go ahead. Tell me why you called. They're fine. I'll take you up on this. Let's see if you can make this not the worst cold call I've ever heard." Where do you recommend people take things from here? You talked about making it about them, focusing on problems. And so if I'm a salesperson listening to this and I'm like, "Ugh, my pitch has been focused on how we're the best." How do you coach people to change the way that they are pitching? And what are some of like the best practice recommendations you'd have?
So, look, let's start first of all with with having that that penny drop moment, that moment of shift. So I give a very practical example to start. So AA meetings, right? Everyone is familiar what it is. You've seen it in in TV. If you hopefully you haven't been to one. But AA meetings have got this structure where they get the most vulnerable people on the planet to share their deepest problems. And the way they do so is because everyone else is doing it. And so what the takeaway from this is, it's way easier to share your problems if you hear that people like you are facing those problems. So that's why it's always starts with like, "Hey, our clients are, we partner with, we talk to a lot of people like," and this is, you want to go granular, "we talk to a lot of CTOs in Arizona that are specifically working at AI products." And then you give them a little nudge, like, "Hey, they're working really hard." So I give you a little pat on the back, little psychological boost, and then I start talking about the problems. Now, building out these problem statements. This is by far the most important part of the cold call. And the simplest way, I'm going to give you a practical example. There has been times in every salesperson's life where they just pitched and the person was like, "Yes, let's have a meeting." This can never happen at any other part of the call. I mean, objection handling maybe, but the opener will never book a call. The pitch alone can book a meeting, right? It's the only part that alone can book a meeting. So then what you want to draft is what are problems that your audience is very likely to face? The way to to start doing this, honestly, the best possible way is you go talk to your AEs, you go talk to your sales leaders. If you're lacking this, so you're lacking real client data, then you go talk to the equivalent person within your company. So you sell to finance managers, you go talk to this to the finance manager. "Hey, if you had to buy a product, what problems has it fixed for you?" Right? And what you want is the way I describe it is you want to use the language that the ICP, so the ideal customer profile, is using when they're at the coffee machine with their colleagues, or whether at home in the evening bitching to their wives, right? So, this, it needs to be like very specific. This is why I said they're sitting on Instagram scrolling instead of cold calling because it just hits them. Or before it was like, "The big four are stealing all your stuff." That that just hits, that gets them emotional. And this is there's a bunch of psychological evidence for this, but problems resonate two times as strongly than a solution. So you have twice the chances of engaging a prospect with the problem. Other than the fact that statistics are statistics are equally clear that B2B sales specifically, people only buy to fix problems. So if you're booking for yourself and you're just getting the tire-kickers, it's because you're not fixing problems. You're just getting people that are, "Oh yeah, I want 10% more." They're not going to buy because they'll have a bigger problem to fix.
Julio, can you give one more example? We have the audit example that you gave earlier in the show. Can you give one more example of like a really well-articulated problem?
Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So, we got I got a bunch of guys selling marketing in my in my community. And so, the one I the one I love is um is one about SEOs, and SEO is so difficult to to sell, right? I'm one of the ones like, you know, I talk to these business owners and they're really frustrated because they see the next-door shop taking consistently customers away from them just because they rank two stop two uh pages higher on Google and they've got no idea how they're doing. So you see like taking the customers away, so it's physical. It makes it visual. They see them next door and then two pages. So you're not making like be the top one like they are two pages ahead of them on Google. That's an example, right? Another practical one is like another one I love is websites. It's something like, you know, like sometimes they look at the website and they wonder, "Would I buy something from a website like this if I looked at it?" Mhm. And then again, it just gives them that reality feeling. And then again, it's advocating that problem. So, as long as it's got to be something that is going to hit home. If it hits home, you book meetings, you close deals. So, I get like 3,000 SEO pitches a day. And there was only one that I ever replied to. And it was someone who sent me an email, but it's similar premise. And he's like, "Arman, the 30 Minutes to President's Club newsletter, some of the best sales content I've seen on the internet. You got articles like this, this, and this. So, I subscribed to your newsletter. Problem is, I couldn't even find it. It ended up being filtered in my pitch folder by Google. I know the exact three reasons that's happening. If you give me the thumbs up, I'm going to tell you exactly how to not get your newsletter stuck in the pitch folder." And I was like, "Dude, that's good." And of course, his solution were things that I was doing wrong with like the content of my email and the SEO and all of that stuff. But if he led with, "Hey, we've worked with companies like Acme Coen, Intel, and Dell, and we're the leading provider of SEO," I'm like, "Great. You and 17,000 other people who blast me with 3,000 SEO emails. I don't care." But he hit me so close to home, I didn't even care what solution he had. It was the fact that he articulated the problem so well that I wanted the answer.
What's your take on the amount of preparation or research that somebody should be doing before they pick up the phone and call a prospect? There's some people that are in the camp of like, you've got to spend 45 minutes getting to know everything about them and their business before you pick up the phone and call. There's other people that are like, you should just be targeting based upon specific personas and know the general problems those people know have. So you don't need to do any true deep prep. I'm curious your take on where folks should fall in that spectrum.
So I think this is, they're both right, but the the amount of prep should be directly proportional to the size of the deal that you work with. So if I sell like, I for example, I I don't do any prep at all. I've got a nicely tight list, a parallel dialer, and I just dial, right? I'm a believer, you know, like a good poker player plays the card, a great poker player plays the other player, right? So, I'm going with a problem statement, and I know it's going to be resonating, etc. But if I all of a sudden decided to quintuple my pricing, right, and go for a much more targeted approach, then I'm going to be leading with a lot more relevancy because right now I'm playing a numbers game because I know I I can get enough for what I need. But overall, I think like I've got some guys in my community that like have got million-dollar deals. I'm like, "You do not pick up the phone until you have something very clear that you can factor into your pitch that will make it resonate to them." Ideally, even your opener. So, you know, like I think I think the best the highest performing openers are the really tailored ones. It's the same example as Tinder. I think you can have a great opener on Tinder, but when you make it tailored to them, then you actually get the highest reply, right? Uh, so you're not playing the numbers game over there, is what you're saying. You, I mean, you shouldn't depend again, depending from the quality, right? Depending how badly do you want the response, essentially, right? But I, I would say like, I think if you're in the 10k up to 10k, I would say just get a good list.
10,000 swipes. 10,000 swipes a day. Is that what you're just?
So Julia, let's move to the final section, which is objections. My guess is you have some pretty ridiculous responses to objections. Why don't you start with whatever you see as the most common objection that you usually find? How do you handle it?
The most common objections that gets talked about the most is "send me an email." I think that's across all bloody uh industries. The "send me an email" is the most common, right? Right. And I'm going to walk you through my three-step framework, which is applicable to almost all objections. And the first thing is, doesn't matter what they told you, you're going to agree to it. Properly agree to it. "Okay. Yeah, happy to do that. So, Nick, can you just double-check your email? Is it blah blah blah, right?" Mhm. Then, so the prospect's brain relaxes. They think, "Okay, I've sent them away." Then the second part, this is something that I don't see often done, but it's again, my one of my biggest winners, is I'm going to ask for permission before challenging the objection. So, I'm going to be, before I send an email, "Nick, do you mind if I ask a direct question?" And again, what I'm doing is, I've learned this 10 years ago when whenever I started being a manager, we decided before you give someone feedback, you always say, "Hey, do you mind if I give you some direct feedback here?" Mh. And all of a sudden, the person is prepared for the worse. So, they're far more likely to listen to what you're going to say next, right? So, again, I'm going back to what we discussed, the permission and the opener. The permission, the objection, it just builds that chain of yeses. And then what I'm going to do, I'm going to hit them with a question. So, this is the, I think the number one mistake I see salespeople do on sales calls is that they then start arguing, right? They're like, and they do the "yes, but." "Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm going to send you an email, but would you not be better to have a chat?" Well, no, dude. I just said send an email. So, it's not, you're not going to, you're not going to counter with that, right? And then I'm going to ask them a question because between yourself and the prospect, who do you think is the best equipped to deal with the objection? The prospect. Why? Because the prospect knows what they aren't able to do in their current solution. Otherwise, you're guessing what they aren't able to do. Look, even more simply, the prospect is the best person to change the prospect's mind. We have been taught wrongly that we need to talk at the person. You watch all these movies and with these sweet talkers. We, it just doesn't work like that. Like sales is not a TED talk presentation, right? It's a conversation. And so what are then going to do? I'm going to ask them a question to get them to ideally change their mind, right? So the first thing I'm going to do for "send me an email" would be, "Is this a polite way to tell me to go away?" Right? Because maybe it's not. Maybe they genuinely want to see emails. Some people do. So, I book meetings from emails myself, right? So, I'm going to challenge that. And this is, I want to hear how they react. Some of them laugh, some of be like, uh, maybe. Uh, and then I know, should I push one way or the other, right? Then what I would always recommend doing in with all objections, my first portal calls is always going back to the problems. Mhm. Okay, look, I'm more than happy to send you an email out of problem A, problem B, problem C. Which one is the most relevant to put the email on? Right? And the psychology behind is very simple. People love ranting about their problems. This is universal. It's the second most favorite topic apart from talking about themselves, right? So, if I can get the prospect to talk about the problem even a little bit, then they're more likely to give me more information later. And and sales is a game of information, right? So the more information I've got, the more I'm likely to say, "Look, well, okay, you tell me this. If I told you we can do XYZ, would that would that be worth a chat instead of a boring email?" But the step is like, I'm going to accept it no matter what it is, and make the prospect truly understand I've accepted it. I've listened to it. Then I'm going to ask for permission. "Do you mind if I ask a question about that?" And then I'm going to get the prospect to change their mind about something or to give me more information by asking a question, not by talking at them.
One of the objection responses to "send me an email" that made me the most famous, I think, is I, it came to me on a training for some reason, and I'm like, "Okay, have you ever received an email that was better than a conversation?" Some of them reply, "Yes, I have." "Okay, what was that email so good? How was that email so good so I can replicate it?" And again, I'm I'm gathering more information, right? But again, I'm trying to challenge the way in which the prospect is looking at this so that I can look at it from a different perspective. But probably it'll be good to have a few more objections as examples so I can give you some more practical ones as well.
Let's go with one that's like pretty dismissive. Probably the most common one, just someone says, "I'm not interested."
So the one I hate personally is, "I'm not interested." "In what?" "You're not interested in what?" Immediately, you're pissing the the prospect off, right? I mean, you could have the right tone and be like, "Sorry, I'm confused. What is it you're not interested in?" Which is slightly better. But again, and this is the main difference I see. There are some objections which are, I call, real objections. So there's a rational thought behind it. They gave it like, "I just signed a contract. I got a supplier, whatever, right?" And then the, what I call a brush-off. So, you know, it's just a knee-jerk reaction. They just want to get off the phone, right? And with the brush-offs, I'm almost always, I, I skip the accepting, accept the permission, and I'm going to challenge directly. And my most simple to "I'm not interested" is like, "Was my pitch that bad?" Just just like that. "Was my?" Or or it could even be like, "When you say that, is is that because you generally don't have these problems, or is it because you don't trust someone cold calling you could fix them for you, right?" And again, you see what I'm doing? Like, I'm trying to push the prospect in a direction or the other where I have the control of the situation. And this is why the questions are so important. Like, I always make a very clear example. Think about doctors, lawyers, and policemen. They're asking the questions. They are the one in control of the conversation. If I'm talking to you, I'm not. If I'm asking you questions, I am.
All right, Julia, we're running out of time and we got to move to the final question. And the final question is this. We've talked about a lot of really great cold calling habits, best practices, etc. Now, we got to flip the question on its head and ask you the inverse. And so the last question is, what is one bad habit that you see a lot of sales people exhibiting that you think they need to break because it hurts them more than it helps?
It's going to be something really about the mindset, and it's like they're not celebrating the little wins. I, I see so many cold callers, they they get discouraged. "Oh, this person hung up on me." Like, "Dude, that's going to happen so often." And I think like the best people I've seen performing in in my coaches are the ones that are like, "You know what? I couldn't do the opener last week. Now I can. Boom. Win. Now I can do 10 seconds more, 10 seconds more." And then that's how you build the habit. Because and the practical example is, think about if you ever played a sport. The first time you sucked, but you you kept at it and you got better. So that's that's the thing is like, break it down and think about what you're doing well, not what you're doing wrong, and you'll get better and better at cold calling.
Phenomenal. Julio, thank you for joining us. Everybody, stick around for a 60-second recap coming up soon.
All righty, Nick. It's time for a three-step recap and one thing you can do. All right, so three-step recap. Number one, we went through Julio's cold call opener. He gave us a couple different ridiculous versions. I'll give you two. Number one is, "Hey Nick, if I told you this was a cold call, would you smash your phone against the wall?" And so that's just a little bit of a ridiculous pattern break. The other one was a really well-targeted permission-based opener. "Nick, you're specifically in the top 10 list of clients in the scale-up field in Arizona." That's the context that he puts up front. And then he asks for permission to tell you exactly why I called you or why you're in that top 10 list. So you lead with some hyperspecific context about the prospect, and then you ask for permission to pitch. That brings us to step two. You've probably heard us talk about the problem proposition. And so the way that you want to pitch is you want to take the problems that your prospects face, and you either want to hear those directly in customer calls, talk to customers, or find the person that you'd normally sell to at your company and make sure that you articulate the problem in their words first, and then explain how you solve that problem. And then lastly, number three, we have Julio's way that he handles objections. His first step to handling any objection is he agrees with the objection. So in the case of "send me an email," is he'll say something along the lines of like, "Totally get it. Is the best email for you, nickblank.com?" Step two is then he asks for permission to challenge the prospect. "Hey, do you mind if I ask you a really direct question? Just like before you give someone feedback, you should ask them permission to give them feedback." And lastly, he wants to ask a question to change their mind. The best person to change a prospect's mind, it's not you, it's the prospect. So, the first question Julia would ask is he'd say like, "Hey, could you be honest? Is this a really polite way for you to tell me to go away?" And then if they say, "No, it's not. I actually want you to send an email." Then I'm going to ask another question. And that's going to be like, "Hey, would problem A, B, or C be the best thing to put in an email?" Once they say problem B sounds the best, then you can start to challenge one more time and say, "Hey, I have another direct question for you. Have you ever had an email that is better than a live conversation?" And again, that gets them to get to the answer instead of you to bring the answer.
All right, Nick, what's one thing that people can do?
So Julio had an extremely poignant quote in this one where he said, "It is extremely easy for a prospect to say no to a salesperson, but it's extremely hard for a prospect to say no to a human being." So my recommendation for you as a listener is go look at all of your pre-planned talk tracks. Things like your opener, your pitch, how you might respond to objections. Hell, I'd go look at your discovery talk tracks, your demo talk tracks, and think about, okay, Julio said it's harder to say no to a human being. He also said, "Frankly, our prospects are pretty damn bored in their jobs." Like, I don't know about you, Arman spent a long time selling ERP software to accountants at law firms. That was not an exciting job for them, and it was not an exciting sale of like, "Ooh, look at these dashboards." So you have to find ways to have some fun and show the human on your side. And so go look at the talk tracks that you're using regularly and see audit how can you inject a little bit of your personality into those. You shouldn't try to be Julio if like you don't have that style in you. You shouldn't try to be Armont if that's not you, and for other reasons. You shouldn't try to be me. Probably also for other reasons. But like, figure out how can you inject your humanity into the talk tracks you're using again and again and again. Plan those things out, and you will see prospects start to lean into the human side of things with you more.
All right, Nick. How could people help us out here?
So, if you personally are looking to level up your cold calling game, you might be familiar that Arman and I have put out some cold calling best practice resources. We wrote a book, "Cold Calling Sucks and That's Why It Works." We put together a full 30 MPC course that breaks down what to do, what to say, and how to sound in every single piece of a cold call, openers, pitches, objections, voicemails, gatekeepers, etc. So, we've got some stuff in the show notes, and maybe if my friends on the production team are feeling generous today, they might include a coupon code for a little discount. So, go check that out. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week on the show.