During this lesson, we’re going to focus on some of the challenges you may face during the warm call itself.

Once you have identified the person that you would like to contact, the next challenge you’re going to face is the gatekeeper. Now the gatekeeper is someone that refuses to put you through to the person that you need to contact. This will typically be the receptionist and the reason being is because they receive many, many cold calls a day with absolutely no solution offered. There’s no need that’s been identified, which makes it incredibly painful for people to manage these calls on a daily basis.

So I want you to remember that we are warm calling here. There’s a big difference, but unfortunately the gatekeeper cannot tell which one is a warm call and which one is a cold call. So there’s some handy tips to overcome these challenges moving forward.

The first tip is to always provide a name. If you provide a name to the gatekeeper this will automatically provide confidence that you are not a cold call. Should this approach fail, it’s important that we do not give up. Through the validation process, I would hope that we have more than one contact that we should be targeting whether that’s in purchasing, engineering, sales, technical etc. So should you hit an objection – call back and try another contact. And remember, 80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact. The soft sell is the best sell.

Tip number two is not to focus on the purchasing team. Before the purchasing team receives a project, that would have gone through technical and engineering and most of the design and stipulations have already been set out by the engineering team. And what’s incredible is very few people actually target these departments. So we’re trying to differentiate ourselves from our competition. So let’s think bigger, let’s think wider, let’s look at the technical teams, and obviously the sales teams – because you never know where the opportunity might come from.
The chances of your success are that much smaller if you’re focusing on one area. If you reach an objection there and you cannot overcome it, you’re stuck. Whereas if you are targeting multiple different avenues into this company to tell them about the solution that you have for their need, then your chances of success are that much greater.

Tip number three is to overcome the electronic gatekeeper. It’s often when you call a company that you’ll hear “Please press 1 for sales, 2 for purchasing, 3 for engineering” etc. Now everyone will fall for the same thing. Everyone will press 2 for purchasing because they believe that’s where the contact lies. In many instances there is no one at the end of the purchasing phone. It will just ring and ring and ring. The only option that is actually taken care of is sales. So if you face an electronic gatekeeper, don’t press 2 for purchasing. Anyone but purchasing, because 90% of the time the purchasing box will not be answered.