Shea Heer - Wise Me Up To Cold Calling

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

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Copyright 2018 Shea Heer

The right of Shea Heer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978 1912881 420

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

To my partner, friend, love and greatest supporter of my work, Peter. I love you and thank you for your belief in my ability.

To my son, Reuben, I thank you for your patience.

To my YouTube subscribers and especially Preston King, who repeatedly asked me to write this book. Thank you.

Shea discovered her passion and talent for selling whilst working in the family business. This is where she learned how connecting with the buyer creates results. Her career outside of the family started as a door-to-door salesperson selling cable phone and television services to the consumer. Against all odds in a male dominated world Shea became the most successful field saleswoman they have ever had and consistently achieved rewards as a top performer in the company.

Shea now has over 20 years of sales and sales training experience, including B2C, B2B, Field, Retail, and Telephone. She is CIPD management certificate, has built and runs a sideline hospitality business and has a growing YouTube channel dedicated to helping sales professionals with everything from cold calling to negotiating.

She is also a happily divorced mum and now partner living in Gloucestershire, UK. Sheas personal values are:

Honesty is the key to respect and honour.

Optimism is the key to progress.

Risk is just another word for exploring.

Love is the key to sustainability.

Karma is real.

I think cold calling is still as effective today as it ever has been and I believe that it can open plenty of doors for you if you know how to make the calls confidently. In this book I have identified what the fears are throughout a typical cold calling process and I have explained how you can eliminate them. I also share with you how you can get better results through understanding the impact of your behaviour so that you can control this to achieve what you want to on a call. My thoughts, ideas, tips and suggestions are based on over 20 years of experience in sales and sales training, coaching, receiving and making cold calls. This book challenges you to think about your approach and offers different ways to help you to be great in your own unique way. Dont try to be better by copying what other people do. This book will help you to be you, but be a better you.

Being a good salesperson requires skills. Being a great salesperson requires an attitude to improve.

If you are a salesperson and you are reading this then you are already showing signs of being a great salesperson.

Its historically known as a numbers game with a sales script. To me it simply means a call that was not expected or not asked for by the recipient. Alternatively, some call it an unsolicited call. It does not mean aggressive, offensive or rude. In fact, I believe a cold call that is carried out well should not leave any of those thoughts in either the recipients or the callers mind during or after the call. So with my business being about helping salespeople I had to analyse why cold calling is such a challenge. After all, it is just a phone call and whats the worst that can happen?

Turn cold calls into warm leads by making them and not fearing them!

There have been and still are many discussions or debates about how necessary it is to make cold calls. Some might think that in todays age of social media and marketing, cold calling is an unnecessary pest and might tarnish the sales profession. Some feel it is necessary as a direct approach. I am biased toward the latter, probably because of my background.

There have been countless examples of how a cold call can lead to a huge success. In todays world it seems like an old-fashioned way of selling though I believe cold calling is the most direct way of connecting with prospects. Direct marketing is probably more widely connected with and more easily understood by many as the terminology used to describe marketing emails or e-shots. This is interesting because whilst the intention of an email might very well be to go direct to the decision makers inbox, we actually have little intelligence to tell us that the prospect has received or really read it. By this I dont mean to say that they clicked on it or moved it to a different file, I mean did they actually receive the message using the email address that the email was sent to and did they actually read the words in it.

Other alternatives to cold calling might be exhibiting or networking. This can be effective because you could say that you have a captive audience and one which is halfway ready to buy. Its more in line with retail where a customer comes to browse so the chances are that they are already receptive to the idea of that product or service category. However, it can be quite an expensive way to build business, especially if you are a start-up and dont have the funds to compete in the presence of the big corporates, who have experts working on their stands with big budgets.

Networking meetings are another way of finding new business, and again it can work. There is truth in six degrees of separation and sometimes its about who you know, not just what you know. I think one of the reasons networking can be effective is that its based on face-to-face interactions and face-to-face is proven to be highly effective in selling. The only downside of this is that it can be a lengthy, time-consuming process to get to the golden opportunity and it means having to physically travel to places and sometimes even pay to attend the events. In fact, some events like the people summits cost thousands of pounds to attend. I always find that networkers are lovely people who genuinely want to help others but they also have to focus on building their own business. Some people are great at this and manage to open lots of doors through networking but its not everyones cup of tea especially if you dont have the time and budget.

Some people argue that they dont need to cold call because you can work through social media, networking and referrals. Ive actually seen such comments on LinkedIn. If that works for them then thats great as it probably fits with their style of business and again this all depends on how long you have to gain traction and recognition through these sites. Social media today has become as aggressive a selling platform as email marketing and as there are now so many of them I can imagine that only selective posts are actually read anymore. We also all know that some posts that are consistent with lots of content could be written by profile owners social media representative so any incoming responses might still be filtered by the writer acting as a gatekeeper. I think its good to bear in mind that everyone on social media is in the main present on the sites to sell either themselves or a business, product, service or concept or even a brand.