#575 - How Parallel Dialing Makes You Better at Cold Calling | Suji Goetzke

The biggest problem that people have is that fear of going into the call, and that's why there's been such a big reluctance to cold calling is you spend so much time researching as an excuse to push off the call. And that's why having something like parallel dialing on the side is really good for you to practice and know what to say, even if you don't know any points to go off of. Good morning everybody and welcome to this episode of 30 minutes of president's club. I'm your host, Nick Sigelski, and I'm joined with my wonderful co host today, Alex Murphy. And today we have Suji Getzki, who is a call calling machine. She gets into not just what to do on the phones, how to nail your cold call, but how to set up your lists and who you are calling and actually how you are calling them in a way to increase your connect rate. And have a way better conversations. So this was a very, very good one on cold calling Alex. Why should people listen? One of the hardest things with cold calling and outbound in general is how do I balance volume with quality? I want to do enough volume to hit my number, but I don't want to sacrifice quality and the way that Suji breaks down the difference between parallel dialing power dialing. I think strikes are really nice balance that a lot of teams could benefit from. So I especially if you're leading a team or on a team that's new to dialing highly recommend listen. And a three to one dial into this episode. All right, Suji, welcome with the show. We start every single episode with your top three actionable takeaways. So let's get your three. Yes, number one, most people are parallel dialing wrong. And what I mean by that is they don't know who they are calling when you parallel dial someone you should know exactly who you are talking to you should have people on the same list with the same title, same geographical location, same company size, same industry and the same pain points, you know exactly what to bring up on that call. And then for an example of what that could look like for me, it would be someone located in New York City, VP of sales, maybe around 200 to 500 employees at their company and their pain point could be that they are hiring BDRs that are going to be making cold calls and that specific in their job description. That would be my ideal ICP. So that's amazing. What's number two number two is how to research before you cold call in a way that doesn't waste your time you need to make sure that you're being efficient and how you do this is by power dialing. So you want a power dial on your high target accounts set 30 seconds in between your calls do a little bit of research look over their lengthens, but you shouldn't be getting up going and grabbing a water going to the bathroom grabbing a coffee. You should set up your power dialer. So you have that timer and you're efficient in looking at all the points that you want to get very nice round us out. What's number three. Number three is tonality is everything when you are cold calling you want to make sure that you are slowing down while you are speaking. I should be doing that right now. You also want to make sure that you take pauses as you're speaking. Just like I did there not sure if you noticed number three you want to end your sentences in a downward inflection rather than upward. And I'll explain how that looks soon. I want to dig in a little bit on this process you have when you're parallel dialing because I think the big hesitation a lot of sellers have when they're when it's time to do a parallel dial is I'm ringing multiple people when somebody answers the phone it is like I don't know exactly who it is and it sounds like your answer to that is to get really specific on the buckets of people you're calling in a particular block so that you can actually get them. When you're building those lists what is your process for building the list of all right here's bucket number one for my parallel dial session. It's super important to go in and take a look at first of all on the company level who it is you're wanting to target so again you want people in the same industry same location and then the same pain points. So when you go in you want to make sure that you're making these lists with different groupings so you could have one grouping with people who are hiring BDRs that are going to be cold calling right and then your second grouping could be people who are hiring BDRs just in general maybe they're not going to be cold calling because then they could use some coaching. And you want to make sure that these are in separate lists so then when you go to have your pitch to them you know how you should frame the conversation when you're talking to them on the phone yeah so the way that I'm thinking about this is. If I were still selling to law firms I remember we used a parallel dialer and I would be really stressed out because I would literally I just uploaded a list I remember of every single prospect I could possibly want to talk to into the list. And the problem is is like I would go from talking to a managing partner of an am law 100 firm to then my next dial was I was talking to an office manager of a 30 person law firm and the challenges those firms would deal with sort of the way that I would try to run that conversation. It's frankly different so I think what I'm hearing from you is I need to be when I'm parallel dialing having multiple different lists that I run through and I only focus on one very very niche list at a time so for me it might have been intellectual property law firms managing partners of those firms and they recently want a big case which means they need to be called money which is what we help with. And then I would have another list that would be like insurance law firms see a foes of those firms and they recently opened a new office which would mean they'd be expanding and there's more accounting complexity that we would solve for and what that allows me to do is like I don't have to context switch my pitch every time somebody answers the phone because I already know who they are. Exactly exactly that's exactly what you want to do because then you know exactly what to say what types of questions to ask and then how to really get under their skin and make them realize that they are bleeding and need you. Yeah well hardcore bro is that your opener hey are you bleeding when you're structuring your day when you're having your rap structure their day it sounds like you know you want to have these lists like ready to go and built and before you dial. It sounds like it also probably takes a minute to build them so like in the course of a day what is that looking like are you having like people dial in the morning and building lists at the end of the day for the next day or like how do you balance the list building versus the actual calling. At trellis we're a smaller company like we're a startup so everyone is building their own list and that's something that they do more towards the end of the day so then in the morning when they're most awake they can go and just. Rip and dial in like make their calls now in an ideal world it is best to have someone else making the list of the sdrs can be doing the outreach as much as they possibly can because they need to shine like that's where they're good they shouldn't be sitting behind the laptop making less. But once they get into the office right away in the morning 30 minutes they just go and parallel dial for a bit and then the next hour they go and do their power dialing that's how I have it structured deal velocity is a huge driver of win rates which is why armats and I partnered with the easy and effective CRM pipe drive to film a 60 minute video masterclass that covers all of the different ways that you can drive velocity in each individual stage of your sales process literally from opening call. All the way to contract review we documented our favorite tactics in this pipe drive in 30 mpc masterclass which you can get for free in the show notes. Today's shows brought to you by tight next which helps you connect with prospects instead of dialing into the void so you can make 100 cold calls a day but if nobody picks up your burning time so tight next literally guarantees you will triple your cold call connect rate or they will pay you $10,000. So the link in the show notes down below will show you that they match literally 5,000 credits for every 5,000 you buy go check it out I use it personally and it's a phenomenal way to get more conversation on the phone. Today's shows brought to you by consensus which helps you demo keep selling even when you're not in the room before I show a demo I set it up like it might have to work without me I include these three slides before I drop in number one. The biggest problems I learned in discovery number two how we solve those problems and number three eight what does success look like today slide you can steal that exact 30 mpc demo deck template powered by consensus go check it out in the show notes can you tell me about these lists because I imagine there's a world where I could get really really niche and I could go managing partners of law firms in California or managing partners of law firms in LA like there's endless comments. Endless combinations of permutations and I imagine there's a balance between you want segmented tight lists versus having 832 lists in practice how many lists are you managing or calling off of at any given time yeah it would be around like between 5 to 10 10 is a lot to really work off of to be totally honest. But if you have around 100 contacts per list then it's totally manageable because you can work through that entire list over the course of a couple weeks and then you're not calling the same people every single day. So you've got them bucketed that you know you know the pain point you know where they're at okay so they pick up what's the move like I so I'll be told I never use the parallel dialer I imagine my heart would jump out of my chest and I'd be clicking around like crazy. Who is this person what are they talking like what do I say oh my god like okay phone gets answered what's the next move your making what's the first thing you're saying yeah so. So typically I think it's good to have an opener where it doesn't matter who it is, like whoever it is picks up and you're going to be completely fine. So it could be something like, "Hey, Alex, I know this call is out of the blue, but you have 30 seconds to chat." Or I could even say, "Hey, I'll be honest, this is a cold call, but you have 30 seconds to chat." Alex, putting your name at the end, right? Now that is what you can do for your opener and that kind of saves you a little bit of time to at least glance at the contact page, get an idea of who you're talking to, what company they're coming from. But since you're calling on lists that are in different buckets, you already know exactly what you need to say. So it could be something like, "Hey, Alex, I talked to a lot of VPS sales at large tech companies like yours. I just talked to Oracle last week." And typically I hear from them that it is really hard to coach their reps while they're making cold calls and you have such a complex product. I was wondering what you are currently doing to overcome that. Because I already know why I'm calling you and know what your industry is, what your pain point is, or what a potential pain point is. And then I can get you talking from there. Yeah, you basically can get the conversation going. All of that is the work that you've done a bill in the list. You don't actually need to know who that person is and you're buying yourself time to then open up their page and figure that out. Correct. So in the beginning of the prep call, you were talking about there's like basically two types of calling that you are doing. You are either doing parallel dialing where you are segmenting and building these very targeted lists by what I will just call "firmographic information," which allows you to be really tailored and targeted even though you're calling multiple people at once. But then you said, "Hey, I've got some accounts or some prospects where I actually want to be even more precise." And that is when you are power dialing. So it sounds like your reps are starting their day with a block of parallel dialing. And then they take a break, they use the restroom, they get some coffee, and then they power dial. You were talking about the research that happens in between each call. So could you actually just give me a sense of what these power dialing blocks look like? How long? How many calls? Are we also emailing? Are we doing other things? What goes into a power dialing block for your reps? Power dialing hours is just a straight hour or straight block of only power dialing. So this can be anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour. You should try to aim for an hour. But if you stop at 45 minutes, it's okay because usually that's when your brain loses interest in what you're doing. Now the whole point with power dialing is you just hit play and your list keeps going. Are your contacts keep going one after another? You have no excuses to go up, grab a coffee, grab a drink of water, go and research that persons LinkedIn account for 30 minutes and get lost, do scrolling LinkedIn since LinkedIn is like just another social media platform nowadays. It's going to make sure that you are actually just locked into what you are doing. And all you have to do is set a 30 second timer in between your power dials and go quick scan their contact card, go look at their LinkedIn, and then you know what to say while you're on the call right away. 30 seconds does not very long. So like what are the nuggets you're grabbing in that 30 second window that you're then ready to use on the call? Yeah, for sure. Good question. So number one, do you have any past history with this contact? Are they a previous customer? Like look in your CRM and see what like who am I talking to? What does this person have that can bring up on the call? Number two, you should be looking at their LinkedIn quick-skim. Are they posting on LinkedIn? A lot of people are these days. Can you grab from one of those posts? Number three, there are so many AI tools out there that can help you so much nowadays where they will literally just go scrape the web and give you research tailored to your company and what you need to know, which you can just use and bring up on the call. You really shouldn't need more than like one minute to do all of that with how effective things are nowadays. You're you're thinking very highly of tech, luddites like me who can barely log into the CRM, let alone use chat GPT. What do you do if you can't find anything and you see that ticker count down from 29, 28, 27? You should just go into the call anyway. Yeah. Like it doesn't matter. Like the biggest problem that people have is that fear of going into the call and that's why there's been such a big reluctance to cold calling is you spend so much time researching as an excuse to push off the call. Yeah. You should just going into the call even without anything and that's why having something like parallel dialing on this side is really good for you to practice and know what to say even if you don't know any points to go off of. How do you guide your reps on when to use parallel versus power dialing? Yeah. That's a good one. So parallel dialing is really good for a few different reasons. Number one, it's a good way to just start out your day. You get a lot of conversations in a very short amount of time versus power dialing or just regular click to dial. You're not going to get nearly as many conversations. This is because you're contacting way more lines at one time, right? So it's a very good way to warm up your voice at the very beginning of the day. Just like if you're going to go play soccer, you're going to warm up, do some scrimmage with your team before you actually get into the game. You should be doing the exact same thing with cold calling or even math class. You do practice problem before you actually get into the lesson for the day. It's exact same. And then power dialing is when you have those high target accounts that you want to go reach out to. You shouldn't just go and waste your fresh new voice that just got into the office on your oracles or Microsoft's or Googles that you're trying to target. You should save that for the parallel dial list that you maybe just don't care about as much and you want to warm up your voice on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is a reminder when I was a teacher, we would do the bell ringer. So you come in and like it's the first thing and that your first thing we're doing is a quick bell ringer. It's like let's just get it warmed up. So you're almost you're treating the parallel block at the beginning of the day like a like a bell ringer. 100%. Mm-hmm. Interesting. That's cool. I mean, Nick, I think you when you were selling called it the 10 dial, no P rule. Am I? Yeah. I called it the 10 dial, no P rule. The day would start. And so this is when I commuted into an office and it was like a 45 minute commute into the office and I would get in my car, get my Starbucks. I drive in and like a normal person. I was a new BDR. I would get to the office and I would have to use the restroom. And so I would like go use the restroom and then I would go to my desk and then I would like talk to the other sellers on the sales floor. I would check my email. I'd go on LinkedIn and to your point like 90 minutes would go by and I hadn't made any calls and my job was to be making cold calls. And so I created this fake rule for myself that was called the 10 dial, no P rule where when I got to the office instead of going to the restroom, I had to go straight to my desk and I wasn't allowed to use the bathroom until I made 10 dials. And so that forced me then I before to get my list ready to literally I opened up all of the different sales force tabs that I would be calling. I get to the office and I would be like run into my desk, but I prompt like it breaks the seal pun intended here on your cold calling. You're just being your force to get into it and you're not doing the endless research. And like, let me check their page one more time. I don't know. Like it was like, I gotta make these calls. This is great for you, Nick. It was a little weird when you mandated that I do it. I think I need to talk to HR about that. Actually, I don't think that's a perfect. Oh my word. Oh my word. Okay. So let's pretend now we have past art. We're on the 11th dial. Okay. And dials. You're on the 11th and low and behold, Alex Murphy, your prospect picks up. So you were talking about your opener earlier. I'm wondering if we can actually role play what a cold call might look like because I, and then maybe we can point out some of the tonality things that you're doing. Are we going parallel mode? Are we going power mode? It doesn't matter. You just answered the phone. Hello. Hey, Alex. I'll be honest. This is a cold call. But since you're also in sales, do you mind if I share what I called? Oh, yes. Okay. I'm in sales. Yes. Go ahead. Awesome. Thank you. I noticed that you guys are hiring some BDRs. We're going to be making 100 calls per day. I was wondering what you are doing to power their cold calling right now. Yeah. This is actually something we're, first of all, yes, we are, we are pushing for 100 dials a day. Historically, like the team we've just used, like our CRM has a good dialer tool in it. So we can just, we can call from there. So it's one of the time. Are you calling about like parallel? Because we've looked at some of those two. So yeah, it's like an active conversation that we're having right now. Okay. Awesome. What are, what have you guys been looking into with parallel dialing in like, I guess, why haven't you explored it more yet? Hmm. Honestly, I feel like I've been on the receiving end of some dials. And it's like, I pick up the phone and there's this weird gap. And it's like, okay. Look who is that on the other end? And then that kind of, so as a, as a customer, I'm skeptical. Like I don't want my reps to be making bad dials. So sorry if that makes you sound like a jerk, but that's kind of my concern. Fair enough. If I told you this call was actually a parallel dial, would you believe me? What? Yeah. Well, actually, like, I'm not surprised because that's what you're selling, but it, yeah, that's great. Did you notice the gap? No, I did not. Partially because we're recording on podcasts. So you talked to me about some of the things that you do with intention on that call call that folks can pick up. Yeah, for sure. So first and foremost, when you're speaking a lot of times, people have this tendency to get really nervous when they're cold calling, when they're selling something, when you go up in front of a classroom and you present something and you speed up a lot. It's important to just tell yourself, okay, I need to slow down, I need to breathe, I need to take a sip of water, whatever it may be, to keep yourself just steady, don't be nervous. You're having a regular conversation with a normal human who wants to make you money. Remember that too. Number two, you want to pause intentionally. So when you have your opener, you want to take a pause at the end and breathe. Don't just keep scrambling on, don't rush. A lot of people, when they pick up the phone, they rush through because they notice the person on the other end of the line is rushing and so they want to rush. They shouldn't match that energy. I know a lot of people think you should be, you should actually slow down, bring them back to Earth and then pause. I just pause there, I don't know if you noticed. But it creates, like you do that intentionally to get people to listen to you, listen to what you're saying, and take in the information that you're saying as well. Today's show is brought to you by Responsive, which helps sales teams respond to RFPs, security questionnaires, and buyer requests faster so deals don't die at the last mile. One great way to drive your deals faster is to run parallel processes instead of linear processes. For example, in vendor review, work with your buyer to kick off legal security and procurement review simultaneously instead of doing them one by one sequentially. We built a playbook with our friends at Responsive on different proposal accelerators that you can use to close deals faster, grab it and show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Unify, which helps you prioritize the right accounts at the right time. Try this. Stack your tier one highest intent leads at the front of your morning dial block. So if someone signs up for a trial, visits your pricing page, dial them first before any other accounts before you open your Slack, your email before anything. Unify makes it stupidly simple to surface those tier one accounts automatically. We built a guide with you to find on how to get 100% of BDRs to quota in 2026. Go check it out in the show notes. For me on the phone, I find that I'm rushing often. This is a challenge for me, and even in sales calls, like Nick, one thing you've coached me on is like, ask a question and then take a sip of water literally while I'm like after you, or even don't ask a question and just pause. And then I'm like, which is very uncomfortable. I was extremely uncomfortable to pause right there. My hesitation is I'm interrupting this person's day. I don't want him to hang up on me. And if I slow down, they're going to hang up on me. And that's like when I was especially when I first started that was an issue like, how do you think about that. I mean, if they're going to hang up on you, they're going to hang up on you. That's the name of the game with cold calling. It's the name of the game with sales. And then I actually create this confidence that you know what you're doing and that you're okay with letting them talk and they're going to open up to you. Another thing is in like how you structure your voice itself. This is so hard to describe, but you really want to be intentional about how you structure your voice. And then when you're speaking sentences with a downward inflection instead of upward, what I mean by that is when you're speaking in order to sound more dominate and really get that person to listen to you. You want to end your sentences downward. So rather than saying, Hey, Alex, I wanted to know if this is relevant for you. I would say, Hey, Alex, I want to know if this is relevant for you. And it's like, that's what you would say if you were trying to close a deal, right? It just creates a lot more confidence and it creates a lot more dominance when you speak in that type of way. One of the things we had Chris Voss on our podcast a couple of years ago, and he was talking about this also. And the advice he gave to me, I was like, I don't really know how to control my voice, Chris. And he said, Nick, you can use your body like a remote control. And so we said, if you tilt your chin down, folks who are watching on video can see if you tilt your chin down, it will literally you cannot up to and if you tilt it up, you will. And so that's a little exercise if you want to really look like a freak in front of your friends when you pull calling. Oh, it's a good one. I'm going to take that because like, okay, my chin is down. And I know something that a lot of my friends like to do too, and I actually think is really good if you can, first of all, always try standing up when you're calling it makes such a big difference. Or if you're just selling a big deal in general, I always like to stand up. And then number two, some things that I see a lot of folks doing is they will literally go in a conference room, take their laptop and walk around while they're making their calls. And that helps people a lot too. And it also kind of lets out the nerves, let you feel like you're actually talking to someone as you're calling. And then it also helps with the tonality aspect. What else do you do with your reps who are feeling call reluctance to get them to actually make their calls? Because I imagine that's something you see with a lot of folks. Oh, yeah, for sure. There are a lot of things you can do. I think the biggest thing is to tell them to just do it and whether that is sitting down in literally making the calls with them. I remember back when I first started cold calling my manager would literally sit next to me and we were like typing out the numbers on a phone. And he would be sitting there with me calling with me mute the mics. I, okay, this is what you can say in this scenario on mute it. And I would practice saying that. So literally just going and making the calls with them actually makes a big difference because it forces them to do it if you have to do it with them. And then afterwards they get a little excitement because they're doing well and then they're showing you that they're doing well and then they want to go and do it on their own too. So this, this actually brings up a question I wanted to ask, which is. I was talking very, very recently with somebody who was leading an SDR team and they're dealing with some call reluctance and he was, we were talking about what, what to do in that situation and they're about to start using a parallel dialer. So if you're talking to a brand new team who hasn't done this before in the parallel dialing, you've shared some really good tips here, but like what other guidance would you give them to increase the, the amount that they're calling and then but then also like make it the most effective. Yeah. One thing that really helps, especially nowadays where a lot of teams are remote and you don't have that sales floor five anymore is literally just hanging out in a sales floor. Like there was a time when I was making cold calls completely alone. I was doing like my own consulting while I was in college. And I would just DM other LinkedIn people and that I saw cold calling and I was like, Hey, you want to hop in a Zoom room and make cold calls together. And surprisingly, it helps a lot because you have someone who can relate to you being like, I just miss that guy. I'm so stupid. Why did I say that? Why didn't I ask for the meeting. And they can also chime in with how they might have tried to improve, which you of course can never think of those things that they give the pieces of advice that they give you when you're in the call. But afterwards, they're able to pick it out and say it. And it's just it's a nice environment to be in when you know other people are suffering and doing it with you. Literally. I love it. Well, Stuji, this has been a phenomenal cold calling master class sad news. The clock is ticking and we're running out of time. So we got to move to the final question. So we've talked about a lot of really great things best practices that sales people can do when they're making their cold calls. Now I got to ask you the flip side, which is what is one bad habit that you see from sales people on the phones that you think they need to break because it's actually hurting them more than it helps. Literally just not making calls. I don't, does that count? Yeah, that counts. Okay. Like literally just not making calls and making excuses to not make calls and just being demotivated any time you don't book a meeting. Yeah. When you don't book a meeting, you should just say, okay, that's suck that guy sucks going to go write some bad notes in the CRM and then move on. That's it. I love it. I love it. Luzzi, thank you for joining us. Everybody stick around for a second recap coming up soon. All right, Alex, it is time for your two by two recap. What do you have for your two? The first one for me is the tonality piece. I mean, you know, I am a fast talker. I like to go. I get antsy and I you can tell. And it was such a good reminder to slow down. I like the idea of even just pointing your agenda on a little bit and take pauses and end on a downward inflection as a way of controlling the energy in the room or on the cold call. That was great. The other thing for me is when Suji's talking about the collaboration between cold colors doing it together as a group is something I hadn't thought about in a while. And it's so helpful to have people calling together because it is a challenging thing. It's really, really tough sales role to be doing you know, cold calling for a living and creating a sense of community. So you can all and in Suji's words suffer together. I think it's a great reminder that I'll be taken into my week. So number three, the first one for me is if you are going to be parallel dialing do not do what I did, which is upload a list of every single one of your prospects in your tab. Instead, you should have very tight targeted lists. Suji recommends having between five and 10 total lists that you are calling off of with approximately a hundred contacts per list. What SUji recommends is group those lists by. industry, title, geo, and trigger/pain point. So for example, one of my lists might be intellectual property law firm managing partners whose firm recently won a case. Another list might be CFOs of insurance defense law firms who recently opened a new office. Both of those lists, while they're technically law firms, we're going to have different talk tracks, different objections, different directions that I try to take those conversations, and that allows me to balance the volume of parallel dialing with deteriorated precision personalization of being very, very niche. Last one was when you are power dialing, and you're doing some research, you don't want to go down a wormhole of research. Instead, Sushi recommends in less than 30 seconds to look at these three things. Thing number one, past history with the customer. Have we talked to this person or company before? Thing number two, do a quick skim of their LinkedIn. You might find something. Thing number three, I don't know, plug in a question to your favorite AI tool of choice, and it's probably going to give you something about the prospect. If you can't find anything, make the call anyway. Don't use it as an excuse not to make the call. Nick, how can people help us out? We talked about building your list. We talked about calling your list. We talked about even what to say when the person on your list picks up, but did you know, Alex, that objections exist? You're going to get hit with an objection every now and then you might get hit with your objections. I don't think that's true. I don't think so. With 18 objections, and we have put together a guide from 30 NPC on how to overcome any objection and specific talk tracks scripts that you can use to overcome the 18 most common objections that we pulled in collaboration with Gong, where we analyze over 300 million cold calls. So that is for free. It's in the show notes. Grab it and we will see you next week on 30 NPC. Deal velocity is a huge driver of win rates, which is why Armand and I partnered with the easy and effective CRM pipe drive to film a 60 minute video masterclass that covers all of the different ways that you can drive velocity in each individual stage of your sales process. Literally from opening call all the way to contract review, we documented our favorite tactics in this pipe drive in 30 NPC masterclass, which you can get for free in the show notes.