The Complete Guide To Training Sales People For Cold Calling

Cold calling can be absolutely nerve-wracking.

There’s something terrifying about picking up a phone, calling up a complete stranger, and pitching them your product or service. 

That’s why you can’t just drop someone into a sales role that requires cold calling and expect them to do well without any guidance. 

You need to provide them with training so that they know who to call, what to say, and how to get that person to take the next step in your sales funnel. 

On top of that, you must ensure that your salespeople are prepared to handle the unpleasantness inherent in cold calling.

After all, not only they will have to face endless rejection but they will also encounter rude and even deranged behavior on a regular basis. Make enough cold calls and you’ll inevitably have some crazy person blow up on you!

So how can you equip your salespeople for success?

Here’s our complete cold calling training guide…

Introduce Your Dream Customers

As an entrepreneur, you have probably spent a lot of time thinking about your target audience, researching it, getting feedback from potential and existing customers, etc.

In fact, if you have built a successful business, the odds are that you understand your dream customers pretty well!

But you need to remember that your salespeople don’t have all that knowledge that you have accumulated over the years.

That’s why you should start your sales training by clearly defining your target audience, going over the demographic and psychographic traits of your dream customers, and clearing up the misconceptions that your salespeople might have about them. 

Doing this is going to equip your salespeople with the knowledge that they need in order to build rapport with potential customers, uncover their pain points, counter their objections, present your product, and close sales. 

Provide Product Training

You want to provide extensive product training to your salespeople.

Give them access to your products, simulate the most common use cases, explore edge cases, answer their questions, quiz them about each product, etc. 

The goal here is to help them develop an accurate understanding of the capabilities of your products: their use cases, their features, their limitations, etc.

End product training by having a discussion about the pros and cons of your products to see what they learned. Make sure to encourage honesty!

Prepare for the Most Common Objections

You probably already know what the most common objections to buying your products are.

Go over these objections with your salespeople and explain how to best counter them.

Ideally, you want to provide scripts for countering each objection, so that your salespeople would know exactly what to say if it comes up. 

Provide a Cold Calling Framework

It’s important to give your salespeople a cold calling framework that they can follow when talking to potential customers. 

We recommend teaching them Patrick Dang’s framework:

1. Research. Make sure to do your homework. Does it even make sense to call this person?
2. Building rapport. You have to first get the other person to like you if you want them to listen to what you have to say. And that starts with the right tonality, cadence of speech, energy level, etc.
3. Setting the agenda for the call. Explain why you are calling, show them the value that you bring, and give them a reason to stay on the call until the end.
4. Uncovering pains. Ask questions to understand the problem that they are struggling with, see if you can help them solve it and figure out the best way to position your product so that it would be obvious to them why they should buy it.
5. The next step. Say, if your next step is a discovery call, you can end the cold call by setting it up.

You can also show them this video where Patrick explains this framework in detail and provides an example:

Set Up Cold Calling Roleplay Sessions

If someone wants to get better at cold calling, they need to pick up the phone and start making those calls. There’s no way around this. 

However, you can help your salespeople prepare for the real thing by setting up cold calling roleplay sessions where one salesperson plays themselves and the other person plays a potential customer. 

This gives them an opportunity to practice using the cold calling framework that you provided. 

Ideally, you want to do this over the phone, so that your salespeople would start getting used to it.

Analyze the Cold Calling Roleplay Sessions

Make sure to record these cold calling roleplay sessions so that you can then analyze them with your salespeople.

The analysis is as valuable as the roleplaying itself because it gives them the opportunity to:

1. Hear how they sound on the phone. This can help them identify issues that they might miss otherwise. Maybe they come across as low-energy, maybe their cadence of speech is too slow or too fast, maybe they are using filler sounds (e.g. “umm”) or words (e.g. “like”), etc. All that can be difficult to catch without listening to recorded roleplay sessions or calls because we are all so accustomed to our speech patterns.
2. Learn how other salespeople implement the same cold calling framework. This can give them ideas on how to improve their own approach.
3. Get direct feedback from you. This can be especially valuable for junior salespeople who don’t have much cold calling experience. Remember that something that may seem like basic common sense to you might be a complete game changer for them!

Make sure to explain to your salespeople that awkwardness, saying the wrong thing, and being lost for words altogether is completely normal when you are new to cold calling. It’s going to happen on real cold calls as well. That’s just a part of the learning process. 

This is important because you don’t want your salespeople to feel embarrassed, offended, or attacked. Keep the analysis of each roleplaying session, the discussion about it, and your feedback constructive!

Set Ambitious But Realistic Cold Call Quotas

Cold calling is a numbers game. 

That’s why it makes sense to set daily, weekly, and monthly cold call quotas and then encourage your salespeople to focus on the process (meeting the quotas) instead of focusing on the results (closing sales). 

You should be ambitious but realistic when setting your cold call quotas. Don’t aim so low that there’s no challenge but also don’t aim so high that the target is impossible to reach. It’s important to strike the right balance!

Explain the Importance of Desensitizing Oneself to Rejection

It seems that the most plausible theory on why cold calling is so scary is our inherent fear of rejection.

We are social animals that have evolved to live in small tribes and depend on those around us for survival. 

In that ancestral environment, being rejected didn’t just hurt on an emotional level, it was actually dangerous because being cast out from one’s tribe was pretty much a death sentence. Being afraid of rejection makes complete sense in that context!

Our environment has changed but that primordial fear of rejection is still there. It’s probably why we are afraid of picking up a phone, calling up a complete stranger, and pitching them something. There’s no real risk but it’s still scary!

Fortunately, it’s possible to desensitize oneself to rejection. All you need to do is get rejected enough times so that your brain will stop perceiving rejection as a threat. 

And what exactly does “enough times” mean? Everyone is different in terms of rejection sensitivity but it’s probably safe to say that anyone who makes 1,000 cold calls will stop being afraid of rejection, at least when it comes to cold calling.

You want to explain all this to your salespeople. There’s nothing wrong with being afraid of rejection, it’s an inherent feature of our evolved psychology. But they will need to desensitize themselves to it if they want to succeed with cold calling!

Teach Stress Management Techniques

Cold calling can be really stressful, especially when you are new to it. 

That’s why we recommend teaching your salespeople some simple stress management techniques that they can easily implement at work:

• 4-4-4 breathing exercises. Inhaling slowly for a count of four, then holding your breath for a count of four, then finally exhaling for a count of four can be a great way to recenter yourself. This breathing exercise can help salespeople reduce anxiety before reaching out to leads and calm down after calls that went badly.
• Taking a 15-minute walk. Going outside and taking a short walk after a particularly negative interaction with a potential customer can help your salespeople regain their composure, clear their heads, and get back on track with making calls.
• Celebrating wins at the end of each day. Your salespeople should evaluate themselves on the number of calls that they make because that’s something that is entirely within their control. Did they meet the cold call quota for the day? Encourage them to take a moment to celebrate that. It’s a win!

You also want to create a healthy work environment where people are encouraged to manage stress effectively instead of just blindly working themselves into burnout. Leading by example is important here!

Want to Learn How to Scale Sales FAST?

Cold calling can be a great way to get your business off the ground but it’s not the best approach to growing it. Why?

Because salespeople are human. They are constrained by human limitations. And they can only make so many calls in a day. 

This means that past a certain point, scaling cold calling necessarily requires hiring more salespeople, which is a resource-intensive endeavor in and of itself. And the larger your sales team, the more difficult it is to manage, and the more expensive it is to maintain!

That’s why we recommend building a sales funnel instead. Sales funnels don’t have human limitations and can sell your product 24/7/365. They also don’t require salaries, commissions, and bonuses!

Moreover, this approach is also much easier to scale. Once you have a high-converting sales funnel, you can increase sales by simply driving more traffic to it!

Our co-founder, Russel Brunson, used sales funnels to grow our company from zero to $10M in annual revenue in just one year (it’s at $100M+ now!). 

We strongly believe that the same approach can be used to grow literally any business FAST. Want to learn how?

Read Russel’s book “DotCom Secrets” where he explains it all in great detail:

Get “DotCom Secrets” for FREE!