Amplify Success: Advice for Cold Calling

Welcome to Amplify Success, practical advice from Allego salespeople about what works for them.

Cold calling is hard. It requires bravery, resilience, and mental toughness. As a result, reluctance to cold call is a very common challenge for many salespeople. Reps are understandably anxious about picking up the phone.

But over time, sellers can build cold calling confidence and become superstars. Mary Charles, Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Allego, sat down with Melissa Merino, Sales Development Representative II and one of Allego’s cold calling superstars, to discuss how Melissa approaches cold calls and her tips for cold call success.

3 Cold Calling Tips

Cold Calling Tip 1: Have a Caring Mindset

Mary: It seems like there’s some secret sauce going on and we want to share it with the rest of the team. Can you talk about your mindset as you’re cold calling and about to get on the phone with a contact?

Melissa: A few different things come to mind. Number one, I’m always looking at their persona. If it’s a sales leader, for example, I’m going in with the mindset of knowing exactly what type of challenges they’re going to have and then knowing I need to listen carefully and understand when they start talking—having that mindset and knowing that Allego does have the ability to help in most of those challenges.

Caring, attitude, confidence, knowing that I can help them I think really helps. Once they do start sharing any pain, challenges, I right away know there is a way we can help. But I actually care to know more of what’s happening behind the scenes and then go from there.

Cold Calling Tip 2: Use Humor and Empathy

Mary: One of the things you do is try to leverage humor. Can you talk about how you do that?

Melissa: My communication style doesn’t determine if I use humor or not. I think at the end of the day, no matter what their personality type is, everyone likes to laugh. Everyone likes to be talked to as if they’re a human.

If they mention a pain or a challenge, I just relate back to it and kind of chuckle and just agree and talk about a similar challenge that I’ve seen as well. So, they know it’s not just them, and I think it helps relax them because they end up laughing and chuckling, too.

Mary: I sometimes hear sales reps give an automatic response when the person responds to the pain probes. They’ll say, “Great, thanks for sharing.” But if they’re talking about pain, it’s not great. And I think that can send it off in the direction where the person may think, “Were you listening to what I just said?” What do you do after they give you those areas of pain?

Melissa: For example, one of the sales leaders I talked to mentioned his top challenge was not enough time for coaching. He said, “You know, all of those are challenges, but number one is I don’t have enough time for coaching. If you can put more time on my calendar, that would be great. I don’t have that time to personalize these calls and get to know my team.”

After he said that, I said, “You know, I agree. I wish I could do that for you. Unfortunately I can’t. I wish I had more hours in the day, too. It’s something we all need.” I kind of laughed as I was saying that and then he also started laughing, and we just both kind of agreed life is busy nowadays and it’s definitely a challenge that’s common.

From there, I started going more into the pain funnel, and he was comfortable talking from there on, so I think that helped.

At the end, I wrapped it all up, saying I can’t put more hours in his day, but there are other alternatives, including Allego. I connected the dots at the end.

Mary: People can tell when you’re being genuine, authentic, and conversational—how you talk to your friends, family, and coworkers. If you can bring that to your cold calling, I think that leads to great success.

Cold Calling Tip 3: Have Confidence

Mary: What other advice do you want to share based on what you’ve been doing lately that’s helped?

Melissa: Confidence is something we learned from the beginning—confidence and tone—so fake it till you make it. I think I’ve always had that confidence. I think tone and just having that overall confidence and connecting with people, human to human, and throwing in the humor works for me.

Learn More

Read 14 Steps to Amplify Success with Agile Content to create and share best practices from sales reps.