#64 - 15+ Years of Cold Calling Advice in 36 Minutes (B2B Sales).mp4

All right, cold, cold, deep dive had to bring on the full trio for this one. We're going to be going into one, why cold calling is more important and effective than ever, but it's also become harder than ever. And really just breaking down why cold calling feels so difficult when starting and people feel so helpless. I think we've all been there. Then kind of like how we overcame the hump. And then we're going to get tactical, like cold call openers, how to structure scripts, objection handling, how we think about that. And then some frequently asked questions too that are coming up more recently. Like how do we handle the new iPhone call screen update, things like gatekeepers, dialers, where do those fit, things like that. So Chris, I'm going to start with you. Talk to us about when you got started cold calling because I know a lot of our audience is probably in this exact situation right now. Why does it feel so difficult? And honestly, like a lot of times helpless when people are trying to implement some of the stuff they're being taught in sales enablement, but not feeling like they're making any progress. Yeah, I think it's because it's a really uncomfortable thing to do. I mean, I think that should be pretty obvious, but people aren't used to cold calling, especially when you're coming out of college. And you're like, you know, that's your first experience in the workforce. You're just like, hey, call this person. And I think people, they practice a lot of vacuum. So they sit down, you know, they put together perfect script. And they're like, I'm going to crush it. Yeah. They got the phones. And then it's just like a terrible experience. But I think it, it cheers you really quickly. I think the reason why people stray away from it is because you try so hard, you repair so much, you get on the phones, or you listen to an able man, right? Like you go through all that practice, all that training by people who, in reality, have never done cold calls before or who don't. And so they, it all sounds good on paper. But when you get out there and you speak to somebody, it just, it falls apart. Yeah. And so I think once people have that experience, you know, some people obviously attack it and they say, okay, well, I'm going to try to do better. But I think for the far majority of people, it's one of those, oh, that was really shit. And I don't want to like, you know, I don't want to also lose face when I first start, like, I don't want to look like I'm a bad rap. I don't want to look like I'm failing. So I think people naturally just stray away from it. I mean, human beings, like we all avoid, like, tough conversations or difficult situations. So I think it just comes down to human nature. Like, of course, people are going to try to walk away from something that's uncomfortable. Yeah. It's like the Mike Tyson quote, like, everyone's got a plan to get punched in the face. Like, everything feels so good and training. You're following, you know, the permission-based openers, pattern interrupts, directional questioning, reframes, all this psychological nonsense, frankly. And then your manager, when they're role-playing along, it feels great. They're, they're answering everything the way you want it to go. And then it just doesn't work that way once you actually get on the phone with real people. I think that's one of the hardest things is like, it's so different when you actually get in a live cold calling environment. I think a lot of people, I know this is how I felt when I started deal with imposter syndrome. Like, I was young. I was just out of college. I was about 22 when I started cold calling. And I'm thrown into the fire calling, you know, 40, 50 plus year olds, IT leaders, finance leaders. And I'm like, what do I know that they don't know? And it just, it feels, it's hard to have conviction and speak with confidence when you feel that way. And I don't think enough of that as a dressed in enablement. Which I think kind of brings us to the next topic I wanted to cover, which Eric moving to you for this one. Because I know you probably felt similar to how we just described when starting. But for you, what was it that kind of got you over to the hump that made you feel go from feeling like, what am I doing? Cold calling and it feeling hectic and just like causing a lot of anxiety to like, all right, I feel like I got my wheels turning. I have a system and a process down that I can actually work with and improve. Yeah, I think a couple different things that really helped me. One, I think going into sales. I had just retired from my athletic career. And I literally remember the first cold call that picked up on me hung up right away. And it was just like, honestly, I just locked in to practice when I was, you know, I'm a goalie. So I get scored on. You just have to move to the next play. And so thankfully, I had a little bit of that. And that's what I'd say to the person that's really struggling out there is when you get hung up on the first time. I don't even remember who they are now. They certainly don't remember who I am. And I think if you have the ability outside of like the high adrenaline, I think the first couple of weeks, maybe even months you call kind of get you up. It's really uncomfortable. It's really weird. But when you actually step back and you're having dinner that night, like you won't even remember that person's name. They definitely won't even remember yours. I think the other thing too was really on messaging. At least in my organization, I'm definitely going to get a little bit deep in the sauce. But it was actually even emails on one hand. My SDR manager had a bunch of extremely lengthy like we are the best of breed. Here's we work with Samsung. We work with Verizon. And I'm sending this to people, you know, 100 person companies like what do they care that we worked with Samsung or Verizon. That means nothing to them. And so actually in combination to showing up every day and making a minimum of probably 30 to 50 dials, which like that should be like step one basics. You have to show up and do it every day. Don't like sleep on it, you know, three days and just try and catch up on Friday. Literally just doing it every day. You get desensitized to it. But then also I think to some of Chris' points and some of your points, it's like those early calls I had where it's like, okay, they're actually opening up. And I say insert company name like we work with XYZ to do this. And you can just hear them on the phone being like, God, you know, a hundred percent of the wall goes up. Yeah, they just lock up. And so a combination of like actually getting on the phones, like I wish I could tell you it was like one day I snapped in, but also changing our email messaging, like seeing our cookie cutter messaging. I was I just read it objectively. I was like, I don't like this. Why would I read this if I get this among 50 other emails? And so I just kind of went rogue if I'm being honest and changed it and actually started getting replies. And then that also kind of better informed how I led conversations to even just try to have a conversation, not talk to someone of like ask them one question. And then what we do XYZ, like I got a call call two weeks ago. The guy did exactly that. And it was just like he asked me a good first question. But then it was like great because we work with as like listening to stuff. So yeah, anyway, I think everyone has that who ends up crossing the yeah, making overcome in the hump with cold calling has that realization that their sales enable men and the stuff that's in their slide decks is really meant to be a starting point. And as it doesn't sound natural when you communicate, I guess they add to what you shared. I mean, for me, my big aha moment was kind of realizing that it was more effective for me to take control of cold calls rather than relying on a lot of the sales enablement training that's common out there where it's like, Hey, do you have 30 seconds for me to tell you why I'm calling best case scenario? Sure. And then it's like, Are you in charge of this? How are you guys doing this? Do you struggle with this? And it sounds good and training and they'll tell you're taking them down a pain funnel. They'll tell you all this great theory behind it. But in reality, you're not acknowledging the real world situation that you just interrupted someone's day. They have no idea what's going on. You haven't earned the right to just start asking a bunch of questions that are honestly better suited for a discovery call than a cold call. That is the, I think the biggest distinction that sales enablement just misses is that they train people in a vacuum where it's like, that's actually usually better training for when you get that person to the meeting. Talk to them about that on discovery call. My focus on the cold call is getting the right person to accept a calendar invite on the calendar so that I can then prepare for that meeting and run a proper discovery call. So it was a lot of me rather than just asking questions and hoping they sounded interested enough and didn't, you know, decline me or give me that defensive tone to the point where I could then go for the meeting. Instead, I took control and we're going to cover, go more in depth on it here in a minute, but I call it the value statement framework where after someone says hello, I deliver what I call an "assumptive formality" is my opening and then I answer three concise questions. Who I am, why I'm reaching out and what I'm looking to do. Ideally, in like a 20 to 30 second time frame and it just gets you off to a much stronger start to the call and they're engaging with what you just said and it also helps new cold callers because now you know what you're going to do when the prospect says hello. There's all this variance that's created when you're asking a bunch of questions because they could pull it in any different direction. In a lot of new SDGs just aren't they don't have that ability to riff back and forth. So I think that's a good transition into the more tactical side of things. Openers, I think this is one that causes a lot of people stress for for some reason. I mean, not for some reason it's kind of the way you're taught. I was stressed out when I had to deliver permission based pattern interrupts, you have 27 seconds for me to tell you why I'm calm and then you can hang up in my face if it's not relevant. I hated delivering that stuff but I guess how do you think about cold call openers? When you're calling your list and you get these prospects to say hello, what do you do those first 10 seconds to get off to a strong start to the call? Yeah, I think it's a style thing a lot too. So I've heard so many different ways to do it. I've heard people completely annihilate the permission based of it, but I've also seen people completely crush it. So I think it's also about your confidence and your tonality, your pauses and so forth. If your prospects feel like there's uncertainty in your voice, they probably can tell that, okay, this is either somebody really junior who can't answer any of my questions. So for me, who I first started selling to, were very very technical people. And so I realized it was very important, especially what you were talking about is to lead with why you're calling, actually explaining how did I get this person's contact information. You don't have to necessarily explicitly say, "Oh, what does it mean for me?" That's not a standard operating procedure. But I think having a hypothesis about why can I deliver value to this person? Taking a few more minutes up front to put together some sort of, exactly what you're talking about, a value framework, tapping it into why they're relevant, for your specific solution, not just delivering some generic pitch of, this is what we do and you know, you breathe and you would be a good prospect for me. So I think I spent more time up front, like if there was a specific trigger that I could use, I sold into very, very technical founders so we had access to like their specific tech stack, you know, if they were on a specific cloud platform, I could typically leverage that, you know, maybe call out the fact that like, hey, I see you're on GCP, it's typically the issues that we see as X and we work with a lot of companies just like yourself, want to give you a quick call and then kind of deliver that value framework statement that you're talking about. So I think just doing a little bit more research up front delivers outsize results, even though it's not as fast, it's not as scalable, and I know people have power dollars, and they just, you know, rip 100 calls and try to see whoever connects. Like there's value to that as well, but I think when you're first starting out, taking a little bit more time to understand who you're calling, how you can deliver value, and also I think not trying to answer every single question, that's one thing that a lot of STRs do. I think that was the big tipping point for me is when you try to position the meeting as the value, instead of trying to answer, like I was selling the very technical people, so instead of trying to answer like, hey, I have these Kubernetes clusters, what do I do with them? Like I'm an SDR, I just got to like what the fuck about now. That's something we can cover. Yeah, exactly. So I try to say, well, that's exactly what I was calling, and that's exactly why this next step makes a whole lot of sense, because I want to introduce you to my technical counterpart, who will sit down, you know, look at your tech stack, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? Every single script and so forth is going to change, but when you have that lens, I think it changes a lot more to stop trying to answer every single question, and start positioning the follow-up meeting as this is why you should continue the conversation. Yeah, exactly. And like to even go on that deeper, it's important to know what you're doing when you're calling someone, and the way I've always liked to do that, it feeds into the scripts too, is make lists with like homogenous triggers or characteristics, so like your GCP, for example, you can make a list of IT leadership that works at companies on GCP. You can make an AWS list, and as you're a list, you know every single person on that list has a specific trigger. It could be a job title, an industry they work in, like they all work in retail, something like that, it just helps you get off to a stronger opening. When it comes to openers too, like the literal opener I use to this day is just how you doing. But it's with that downward inflection. My goal at the opener is for it to go the same way every single time and eliminate variance. That's why to your point, if permission-based openers and pattern drops, those can work very well if you're confident delivering them. I just know based on my audience and the feedback, I know it's how I felt, I know a lot of you feel the same way, I just felt uncomfortable using that stuff, they could hear it in my voice, it caused them to pull, it create variance, like no, I'm going into a meeting or wait, where are you calling from? I want to eliminate as much of that back and forth in the beginning as much as possible so that I can just go into my value statement. So my opener to this day is just like, hey Chris, this is Connor Murray, I'm calling from XYZ Company, how you doing? Or like, have you been? It's not the exact word or phrase, but it's more my goal is to just eliminate, elicit a quick good, how are you? Even if they sound confused, because as soon as they say that, I'm immediately just going to start saying, good, yeah, I'm just reaching out because the reason I gave you a call is, and then I go into that 20 to 30 second, who I am, why I'm reaching out to them specifically, and what I want, which is kind of the script. So Eric, go to you, there's so much out there on scripts. I guess what's your take on scripts? Are there magic scripts that work 100% of the time, or do you more think of it from a framework standpoint? What do you, what guidance do you give reps when coming up with scripts, or at least how to think about it? Yeah, that's a great question. I think really all you can control is the first 20 to 30 seconds of a call. Then from there, the things that vary, actually the more you do it and the more you plan accordingly, are still somewhat predictable. It's not too different from an interview. It's like, especially as you get deeper into like a third round, fourth round, fifth round type of interview, they're going to ask you really deep questions. You don't know exactly what they're going to be, but you know more or less the 20 to 30 types of questions they could ask. And so there's like one thing that we could definitely get into, but as an SDR, it's like actually learning early on, you can't research your way and study, and then like, okay, now I know all 30 things, like you're going to get hit with some blindsides, but I think it's really to your point about controlling that first 20 to 30 seconds. It's interesting, like I was an SDR before we met, so my approach was a little bit different, but it really was about, my philosophy, similar to yours, is like, get them talking in that first 30 seconds, and at least see if you can open them up. And then really from there, depending on the product I was selling, there's three to five major tracks we can go from there, at which point to kind of leveraging what Chris is saying, selling to a highly technical audience. It's like first level question, how do you do XYZ today? It's a very basic example. I'm not saying I would use that every single time, but they hopefully open up, and it's like, oh, that's interesting. You know, we work with companies that do this, and I'm curious in your specific case, what challenges are you like level two question, right? And that sounds maybe vague, and I can definitely peel that back further if you'd like. But I think a lot of people get so nervous early on, they need to follow the script. They hear a response, and someone says, I'm on AWS and Azure, and they're like thinking like, what did it say on that scorecard, and like, they're thinking more about their response than like actively listening. And even just, I found, and I don't even know if I'm answering your original question at this point. Yeah. Like once I got through the opener, we can certainly discuss that more if we want, but they open up, even baking in, and we teach people this at higher levels, whether it's cold calls or interviews or otherwise, like saying, hey, I'm sorry, my phone kind of cut out there the last five seconds. Do you mind repeating that? Yeah. A genuine ask, when you actually train yourself to do that, you give yourself another 20 to 25 seconds to then think of where to take the conversation from there. Yeah. So I've got a lot more I could say on it, but I know there's tons of deep dive videos on your channel that talk very, very tactical scripts. Here's exactly xyz, plan for the unknown. Like, there's really three to five major things that are going to go in any direction you can plan for. And then those little things like, hey, my connection just dropped there for like the last 10 seconds. I'm sorry, do you mind repeating that? Like those are just little things that I added in over time because I showed up and made 30 to 50 dollars a day. Yeah. You learned through repetition. I like the interview analogy. I hadn't really thought of it that way before, but the script is almost like, I almost compare it to picture your SDR interview when they ask you, you have like, tell me about yourself. You have, you know, you're going to have 30 to 60 seconds unobstructed to absolutely nail that answer and tell them why sales, why me, why this specific company. That's how I view the script is that's why I like that is sumptive formality. And then I know I'm going to have 20 to 30 seconds to say something that I've put thought into and prepared and ideally rehearsed as you get more experience like hundreds of times. So it flows off your tongue and you know exactly what you're going to do. And I like to use those 30 seconds to answer those three questions, who I am, why I'm calling what I want. So if you're an SDR or a company or a sales leader developing scripts for your reps, you don't need them or even want them using any of these fancy tactics. You need to first just break down to the most simple structure, just answering those questions. So it can sound something basic like picture. If you're selling a finance HR platform like a work day or a Oracle or an SAP like applications, you have those lists ready by let's like we can do finance. So let's reach out and say, hey, John, this is contemporary call from XYZ. How you doing? Good. Yeah, I'm just reaching out. I'm part of the financial applications team here. So we work with retail orgs on things around strategic planning, budget forecasting, scenario modeling. And we usually do that by looking at consolidating systems and helping your team work off more real time data throughout that record to report process. I don't know, go back. That probably took 25 seconds. High level example. But now you're giving them something to bite off on. And from that point, you now have a few different options that I teach to new reps. You could either go straight for the meeting from that point and just be like, and by the way, I know I called you out of blue here. I was actually more looking to set some time later this week on Thursday or Friday morning just to introduce you to my senior counterpart or to our account team and get a line with your priorities going forward. Or if you don't want to go straight for the meeting and you want to do more discovery, rather than going straight for the meeting, you can save that bullet and ask some form of question. So yeah, curious, especially if you know something about them, like curious, I saw you use Anna plan or it looks like you might use Anna plan and work day for much of that process. If you want to tell her, curious what that looks like and whether you guys have considered something like tool consolidation before, but you have some pre-prepared question, but now at least rather than just leading off and saying, "Hey, my name's Connor. I'm part of the XYZ team. We work on few priorities. What do you guys use for your record to report process? You haven't given them enough to bite off on. The burden of proof is on you to deliver something confidently because you're selling yourself on these calls more than you're actually selling your solution. They're not even usually registering every word you're talking about. They're more just like, they're in a whirlwind. You probably just interrupted them, maybe mid-meeting or going into a meeting and they're like, "Does this person sound competent? Did they sound like they've been here and done this before? Are the priorities and challenges their naming? Has that come up in a meeting recently? A lot of times it's just a timing thing." They decide, "You know what? This is worth 15 or 30 minutes of time." I tell people, what you're really selling on these meetings is time. You're not even selling your whole value prop and you don't want to be playing that question game to your point because a lot of times you just walk yourself into a trap and talk yourself out of a meeting. Anyway, I want to be positioning the meeting sooner rather than later because I would ideally rather be having this conversation when they're actually prepared for it, not when they're walking down the hall to their next meeting. So what I tell people now is the next train of thought, what I like about that framework. is it's that 20 to 30 seconds unobstructed. It sounds like a long time in your head, but it's really not. And if you're speaking concisely and confidently, the prospect will listen. But once you physically get that out, there's now only three possible outcomes. Best case scenario, you get them, they are busy, but you got them in a good mood and they actually resonate and they're like, ah, yeah, I think I'm free on Friday, send it over. In which case, there's a little nuance. You can still do some disco after that, but like book the meeting, or they could give you a hard no, which is like taking off your list buddy, click, which that's unavoidable, that's gonna happen, but both of those, you don't really need to prepare for it. So now the only other realistic outcome is some form of objection or hesitation or clarifying question. And what I teach people here is there's usually three to five that are like your most common, and you can literally make flashcards and practice just like the script, like what you're gonna say when you get, no, we already use Oracle, or we already use SAP, you just boom, know what to say. But Chris, I'm just curious how you think about objection handling and how you got started when you were new, like putting together a process for that. - Well, it was a shit show when I first started. - Yeah. - So it was just all over the place, but I think when you really took a turning point was when I took a systematic approach. So I actually, if I could go back in time and do it all over again, I think what I would do is have a catch all, like you can always fall back on, and I think positioning the meeting is a value always saying like, hey, again, that's exactly why this next meeting makes sense, and sometimes that answer doesn't make sense, but it helps you at least like not sit there and sound like an idiot. And I think as you get more mature as a rep, as you start understanding your tooling a little bit more, depending on how complex your tooling is as well, 'cause I just had to admit and come to terms with the fact that I was never gonna understand truly everything about cloud infrastructure and like secrets management. So I had to lean on those things, and actually ended up being really, really favorable for me to position the meeting, and just be true, like upfront about the fact that like, hey, that's exactly why I wanna introduce you to my technical counterpart. As you start getting more and more mature, as you start understanding more about your solution, as you start having more of those conversations, you listen to more gun calls, you kinda pick up on like how these reps and A.E.s are hailing those specific situations, and I actually sat in on a lot of discovery calls when I was in S.C.R., so I kinda just was mimicking a lot, like how were these reps handling that? But again, you don't wanna turn it into a discovery call, so it's kinda like the foot and the door phenomenon where you wanna tell them a little bit, but then also maybe segue it into the fact, but again, every single situation in case is different, and that's why I wanna introduce you to, that was just my de facto segue into this is why we need to get on a follow call, and you don't wanna be on a call call for like 11 minutes sitting there, 'cause then also, I would sometimes I would have these really long call calls and I'm freaking crushing it. - Yeah, I'm gonna get this guys pretty quick. - But then you don't end up getting a meeting, 'cause you're like, oh, I'm feeling good, and then 10 to 15 minutes go by, and they're like, well, what would we talk about that we didn't, isn't it just a meeting? Why don't we just stay in touch moving forward? And you're like, I just missed out on my KPIs, the book meetings, and now I'm not getting paid, because I tried to do too much. - Yeah, I mean, that's exactly, and these people, it was kinda like a self-serve model, so they would just be like, no, that's awesome. You answered all my questions, so, I think we're just gonna stick to the free model, but once we're ready, we'll upgrade. - Oh, that's great. - So, I think, I mean, being systematic, I also like, the flash card thing is great. I actually just created Google Spreadsheet, so I just wrote down-- - Yeah, same idea. - Yeah, like, every single scenario that just sucked, I just wrote it down, 'cause I don't wanna be in that situation again, so, okay, what stumped me? You know, like, if I got a specific objection, I'll write it down, and I would just practice it. You know, and over time, you would make little, and it's not gonna work every single time. Like, realistically speaking, you also just have to come to terms with the fact that only a small subset of your calls will turn into actual book meetings, but even if you're two or three percent better than the other person who's probably really good, or the other people that aren't even doing any co-calls, that is materially enough to turn you into a top performer and to kind of change the trajectory of your career sales reps. - No, it's well said. And my view, you need to systemize it, and you need to sell the meeting with the objection handling. The flash card thing is like, that sounds like, it's not a novel idea, but no one does it, and I always point out to reps, it's like, a lot of us we went through years of school memorizing, like literally using flash cards to memorize useless history facts, biology terms, like mitochondria, and it's like, stuff we'd never use, but then now we're in the big leagues, like, this is what we did all that for, this is our full-time income, and how we generate it. It's like, yeah, if you, you know, sell financial applications and you come up against workday a lot, you should probably make a flash card and have a good response prepared for when they're like, no, we just moved on to workday, I don't know why it makes sense to me. You need to know what to say. If you even that one second to two second hesitation are you sounding like you're coming up with what to say, prospects can smell that, your odds basically go to zero. So it's not that much work, it's like, five to 10 flash cards of your top objections is usually enough to become pretty elite at objection handling, and then over time, you'll hear more niche objections that you kinda write down, and you're like, what am I gonna say to that? And you just build out this base of confidence. That's what helps you feel confident on cold calls is when you know what you're gonna deliver as your script, and you are confident you have, is wide of a base as you can in terms of like, what objections are clarifying questions or hesitations you're gonna hear because you've practiced and rehearsed all of them, and you magically start to feel confident. So, and just quickly too, the frameworks I use are to acknowledge their concern and tell them why it makes sense to meet anyway. So if it's getting too technical, like in that we already use XYZ system example, it's just acknowledge it, tell 'em what, yeah, we work with customers of XYZ all the time. So I mean, if there's ever a fit, we could move ahead, but I still think it makes sense for us to connect because we'd be your point of contact here if there are any priorities in XYZ area going forward. So how does Friday work for you? And it's like a lot of people, they actually found value in what you said, they're just not hardwired to give out their time so easily. And all it takes is for you to double down and sell the meeting, which is a way easier sell than to play the whole, this is where a lot of SDRs are misled by sales enablements. It's like, they'll give 'em these frameworks like, feel felt found, you got a mirror 'em and reframe. And if it's not around setting the meeting, it's generally a waste of time. You're trying to do way too much on a cold call. That is better served for a discovery call. You can't sell a 15 minute meeting or 30 minute meeting on the calendar. You're sure as hell not gonna sell them on taking a meeting because they should move off their ERP system and onto yours. So, and then if that doesn't work, my backup framework is what I call, acknowledge, sorry, ask clarify expand, wherein that example would be something like, God, and when you say you already use work day, like, is that just for planning or are you also using it for, I don't know, like blank and blank process? The reason I ask, that's the key line. The reason I ask is a lot of customers we work with, they're just using it for planning, but then they're using Anna plan for this and Blackline for this and there's usually a pretty big opportunity to consolidate, which is something we could cover on the meeting, but just curious if that's something you have thought about. And what you're really doing there is like, you're not trying to convince them on that. You're trying to almost show off a little bit like, no, dude, I actually know what I'm talking about here and this meeting is gonna be worth your time. You're gonna learn something. So, I just think a lot of objection handling is just way too over. It just over complicates it. I know how that's how I felt, but I guess kind of wrapping up here, we get a lot of questions, we wanna do some rapid fire frequently asked questions. One of the main ones being this new iPhone, call screening update, I mean, I guess either of you guys have you thought about this, what have you been telling reps when it comes up? Like, is it gonna kill cold calling? How are you thinking about it? - Yeah, I think what's interesting, I actually had someone, I filled out a lead magnet a couple weeks ago and they texted me first because they texted me and I didn't block the number. The next day, they called me and it actually got around that. So that's a potential hack right there. Then again, I think also if you're shooting text messages right away, I saw it was gonna block the person and just like forgot if I'm being honest. I think, so one of the things we talked about too is like, it actually is an interesting way. Half the reason I blocked it is not actually because I was getting tons of genuine call calls. It's like, I was literally getting spam. I pick up and there's that 0.7 second delay and it clicks in and it's like, "Hi, I'm calling from the IRS." It's like, "Get out of here." Total spam. But yeah, I mean, there's no doubt it's having an impact but I would also say, and we've talked about this a lot. One, I still read it, when I get a call and someone's leaving their voice note, I read it if it's genuine, I might take it. But also, I would say I think a lot of people right now, even more so, when I first, like, was co-founder of higher levels on LinkedIn, I would get a lot of calls and it just seems like this last year, like it's actually dropped off a cliff. - It has. - And someone who's making a genuine call call to me, at least at a minimum respected, I'm not gonna tell them to f off or ruin their day, I may not take a meeting, but it's so rare. I wouldn't say I appreciate it, to be clear. I don't think anyone does. - Don't call them. - But they're effective is what I'm trying to say. And so we can definitely get into the tactics, the ins and outs of the iPhone update, but I think it scared a lot of people off for no reason. - For no reason. - Yeah, and they're not even testing it, like they hear it and they hang up. Like I actually picked up a call call from someone who left a voice note to the AI gatekeeper, and I could hear in his voice, like, he was actually surprised. Like they stopped preparing because they're just used to like getting hungry. - Yeah, I think a lot of people are using it as an excuse to just not call call, 'cause deep down they don't want to, and they're like, "Ah, a call calling's dead, the phone screener's gonna kill it." My experience, it is the exact opposite. screeners actually help with answer rates because before screeners, like I don't know about you guys, but when I used to get calls all the time, all I would see is a number eight or nine times out of 10, it was a complete spam call or I would just answer and there's literally no one on the other line. So I just grew into the habit of not answering calls from numbers I didn't have. Now with the call screener, you can at least show them you're a real person. I just think people try way too hard with the call screeners. Here's two tactics I use. If you've already sent them an email to this works even better, but you can just use choppy lines and just be like, "Conor Murray following up on my email," or "Conor Murray, it's work related." That's all you have to say. It's easy. And it sounds like you're not trying too hard and when they read it, they now are at least 100% certain this is a real person, not just like a spam bot. So it is not killing, co-alling at all. It's even helping it because it's helping answer rates and it's also scaring off people who are putting in no critical thought and just being like, "Oh, it's killed, cold calling." So all right, Chris, I'm going to wrap up with you. I'm going to give you the choice on what topic you want to cover. Either gatekeepers, how you approach handling gatekeepers or dialers. And should people be using dialers? You can pick whenever one you want. It's interesting because I actually think they're kind of interrelated. Are you going to do both? I think it'll be more dialer related. But I do think I see a lot of, because I think the whole thing now is it's more about quality. I think your approach is really, really good. I actually would rather do that than I would provide a bunch of context and then see if they're going to take it called. Most of the time, I was going to say no. But I think dialers are really good when you have your process flushed. I think if you're just starting out, if you just jump on a dialer, you're going to get demolished. You're going to quit fat like you're going to be dying two weeks. And sometimes you don't have a choice. Sometimes you just get thrown into an SDR and it's like everything is so metric oriented. Your boss has a boss. He has a boss. And it turns into a numbers game in the end. And so while the dialer might look good because it's spumping up those numbers and connect rates, I don't like a dialer when you're first starting out because I just feel like the qualitative aspect of it gets removed. You have to spend a little bit more time preparing up front when you're first starting out. That's just the truth. You just jump out there. You might get some meetings here and there, but I just think once your process is dialed in, once you feel like you've got it down, you can handle some of those ad hoc objections and things that are-- because it's probably every single call that's going to be an objection. So I would probably try to avoid the dialer. If you do use a dialer, spend more time actually emulating top performers. Sit down on the weekends when your first thing started. Really just sit down. Pick one person. This is what I did. Pick one top performer. I sat down for an entire day and I just went through all the calls for the last quarter. I just wrote down like, "Okay, these are the most common questions at every single prospect." I just ranked them. It's like by mention, it was very systematic. In the end, I felt like I had a good idea of, "Okay, this specific objection or question has an x percentage probability of being thrown out there." I knew I had to figure out something on that. Once you get to a point where, "Okay, now I've kind of covered the bases for maybe not all of them because you can never really truly prepare for every single thing." But once you have a good enough baseline, I think it's fine to use a dialer. A dialer is an amplifier. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like paid ads. If you're messaging is shit, then you're just throwing money at nothing. It's the same thing with using a dialer. If you have a good process, if you feel like you're confident in what you do and how you tackle those situations, then sure, I don't mean this, but I just wouldn't jump out there and go straight to it. Yeah, exactly. It's an amplifier. If you're really bad at coal-con or just not comfortable with it yet, it's just going to make it feel worse. If you're really good and your only constraint is talking to more people that you're trying to get in touch with and you have the rest of your process down because you've done it manually and worked out the kinks, then by all means, dialers can be very effective. And I won't leave you all hanging to gatekeepers if you're done to get that answer. I mean, what I do for gatekeepers is not what you probably, if you search on YouTube right now, it'll be some like Grand Cardone video telling you to pretend like, "Yeah, tell them it's Connor." It's like, "That stuff doesn't work. What I literally do is just deliver the value statement. You treat them like they're the actual person who answered and then just tell them that's why I'm looking to meet with blank or whoever the person is." Because their job is to literally, I mean, it's what the name says, gatekeep, the person's time. And your responsibility is the same to build credibility and earn enough trust in that person's mind that you know what? If I was to set up a meeting with this person on John's calendar, they'd probably show pretty well and he wouldn't get mad. So a lot of topics covered. I guess, I mean, if you're a rep and you're looking for more hands-on guidance actually implementing the value statement framework and what we talked about, you can check out the link to Cole-Call mastery in the description. Also, if you're more in a sales leadership position and you want guidance from us actually coaching your reps, how to Cole-Call and implementing a lot of this process we're talking about, you can also check out the link to our custom sales engagements that we work on. But Chris and Eric, I don't know if there's anything, any final thoughts you want to. No, I think that's all. I think maybe just to end it as well, don't forget every single company, every single niche is different. So it's really hard to put you were probably looking for a silver bullet clicking on this video and it kind of sucks to be given the answer of depends. But keep in mind, every single persona is different, every single ICP is different. So if you're calling somebody who works in construction versus somebody who's selling or managing cloud infrastructure, how you handle those personas is very, very different. So it just comes down to being methodical, having a clear plan understanding who you're selling to and that'll dictate a lot of how you tackle these Cole calls and how you communicate with them on a regular basis. So yeah, this was Killer Episode, Connor, appreciate you kind of running through all the audience. So what the audience was waiting for is through the whole band together. Eric, you've got anything? Oh, good. We're good. See you guys.