Cold Calling Sucks and That’s Why It Works

Old calling sucks, but that's exactly why it works. That's the book title that are two guests are going to be sharing today, and I'll tell you what, I could not think of a better book title. Before we dig into that, I appreciate you checking out Outbound Squad. My name's Jason Bay. I'm the host at Outbound Squad. We're all about helping you turn complete strangers into paying customers. So if you're working with a group of account executives, you're making an Outbound pivot in the org, and you need to get them doing more Outbound, more PyJen, et cetera, so that they can reduce reliance on SDRs and marketing. You're definitely in the right place, and if you're managing a group of SDRs and you want them to be more efficient on the phone, email, et cetera, you're in the right place as well. So our guest today, Armand Ferroque, and Nick Sigelsky from 30 minutes to President's Club, wrote the best book on cold calling. I've read every book on cold calling, and I think what's missing from most of those books is very tactical ways to implement what you're learning. And what I mean by that is, yeah, it's one thing to tell me that I should say these really specific canned cookie cutter things, but it's another way to say, hey, here's how you might apply that if you're selling into a security leader, if you're selling software, if you're selling professional services, et cetera, et cetera. What they do in their book is that, and then some. There's also audio clips where you can hear what this stuff sounds like in action. And it's a really short read as well. It's just the most tactical book on how to make cold calls, how to handle objections, how to just be a badass on the phones. So without further ado, let's get to the interview where we're going to give you a really good preview of what's in the book, and I recommend going and checking it out. Again, the book is called cold calling sucks, and that's exactly why it works. Let's get to the interview. So I think the question we've talked about this a little bit. I was walking around in Brooklyn with you guys and talking about the book writing experience. Before we talk about that, there's so many books on cold calling, so many books on outbound, so many LinkedIn posts, YouTube channels. What made you guys decide to think that the sales world needed another book on cold calling? The world does not need more advice. The world needs more structured advice. And most books on cold calling are 400 pages of random advice and hot takes around why you should pick up the phone, and they're laid out in a way that make it so hard to actually break down what you should say on a cold call, step by step. And so that's literally what we did is we took all of the insights from our 200 interviews from RepSet, Salesforce took on to outreach to folks like you, and we took everything we've learned in 200 podcast episodes on 30 minutes to President's Club, and we broke it down in a mind numbingly obvious step by step guide on how to cold call. And it literally starts from the opener to the problem proposition, to objections, to what happens if you get it to a gatekeeper or have to leave a voicemail, and then what you do off the phones, it is mind numbingly obvious what you do. And then the second reason that we did it is that cold calling is such an auditory experience that even if you read the right words, even if you read the right cold calling scripts, the delivery oftentimes gets completely botched when reps go from book to phones. And so that's part of the reason we wanted to write this book with audio clips embedded inside of it so that you could not only read the right way to cold call, but you could hear the right way to cold call. And we felt like in order to truly teach cold calling, you cannot teach cold calling in a book without having some elements of tone as well. And so we felt like that was missing for the market. I feel like the best ideas are the ones that seem the most obvious. And what seems like a really obvious thing to do when you write a book on cold calling is to have an audio guide, not just an like an audio version of the book, but like actual clips of you saying here's what that sounds like in action. It's such an obvious thing that has to my knowledge never been done with a sales book. I thought that part was really unique. The other part, maybe Nick, you could tell us a little bit more about, I think that with books and sales advice in general, oftentimes it's like one person's way of doing something and it doesn't incorporate any data. And I feel like you guys had a really good mix and we're going to obviously dig into the book and share a lot of the tactics that I think are just awesome. But what made you guys decide to go like work with Gong and get them to pull a lot of data that I'm sure took them a lot of time to do that they haven't released publicly outside of this. Well, that's one of the other problems with a lot of sales books and a lot of sales advice out there. There's a lot of stuff that sounds really, really good. And from one sales person to another, it's like, ah, I bet that works. But we wanted to have advice that like actually worked across hundreds of millions of cold calls and it actually impacted some of the advice that we gave, it changed the way Armand and I thought about voicemails, for example, it changed the way we thought about how you might overcome objections because we were able to pull data on like the most common objections. And what we found is there are five objections that account for 74% of all objections on a cold call, which when I was a new sales person, I was really, really overwhelmed by I could get the prospect to throw anything at me for a reason why they wouldn't take a meeting or buy my thing. And when I realized, oh, there's actually really only five things that I really need to be prepared for because they're going to show up three-fourths of the time. Sales, cold calling is, you actually said this on the webinar the other day, Jason, it's very, very predictable. But the data can actually show you what you need to predict and prepare for. Yeah, I love that. Just being a data person, I love, it's like the advice backed by data, it's just like it's just money. Okay, and before we dig into the book, I got to ask you guys too, what was the thing that you guys argued about most when you wrote this? There wasn't a single chapter that Armand and I didn't have conflict or friction in terms of how we would teach or communicate something, not because we necessarily disagreed on something but because. Did you guys have to wrestle it out at any point, or? Oh, the worst was on Christmas Eve, I spent about five hours writing about when you give a pitch. A lot of salespeople think that the key to a good pitch is like, share your value proposition and Armand and I don't agree with that. We think your value of your product has no context for your prospect unless you share problems that they are dealing with because they are far more familiar with their problems than what a single source of truth all in one billing platform means for them. And I was trying to articulate that in the chapter and so I spent five hours on Christmas Eve. I literally went to a coffee shop down the block from my fiance's parents place and I'm writing, writing, writing. I sat in the draft to Armand and he calls me and he's like, yeah, this still is really rushed or something of that nature. And I just like, ah, I don't sound terrible. But he was right. He was right. He was right. Even though I knew this stuff cold, it took a lot of work for us to communicate everything in an extremely clear, succinct, usable way of people. Yeah. That's fine. I think the most common areas of descent in the book were things where we just assumed that it was the right thing to do. So for example, we talk about speaking in problems instead of speaking in buzzwords, like Nick was talking about, single source of truth, all in one platform, et cetera. And we actually wrote the entire book without data. And when we were trying to explain why you should have a problem be the thing that you lead with instead of your product, you have to come up with this like bizarre qualitative argument of, well, people think about paying more than benefits that people don't have context around a solution without understanding the problem first. And then we finally got the data. And it made so many of those arguments easier where it was like, oh, if you include single source of truth or all in one platform in your pitch, you have a 5% success rate. If you speak in problem language, it jumps to 16%. And so there are a number of times where in absence of data, creating a compelling qualitative argument was really challenging. Voice mail was probably the biggest one. We had an entire like rationale as to why you should leave a voicemail. People might read it. They're going to do this. And then we got the data which showed leaving a voicemail doubles your cold email response rate. So if you leave a voicemail and send a cold email, you get twice the number of replies on the email than if you don't leave a voicemail. That allowed us to erase all of this weird back end opinion that we had as to why it happened. And it said, be like, look at the data on this stuff. Yeah, that's why I love the data. It's a way that you can appeal to the logical side of someone's brain. Right? Let's get into the book, you guys. So it's broken up into a couple of different sections. So you guys broke it down the first 60 seconds, which I'm curious if you guys found data on this, the latest that I found was that roughly 80% of cold calls die in the first 60 seconds. What to do in the rest of the call? So how to handle objections, voicemails, gatekeepers. And then there's this last section that I love, how to be a machine. Essentially the productivity component of the cold calling piece. So our model kick this first question your way. First 60 seconds, what do we need to know about approaching the call, how to interact with the prospect from the moment they say hello? Yeah, and just to double down on the data piece, I'm going to read you guys a couple stats just so you realize how many cold calls die in not just the first 60 seconds, but in the first three minutes. So if your cold call lasts under a minute, there is literally a 0% success rate, 0%. So you're not booking a meeting in a minute, okay? If it lasts around a minute, 1%, if it lasts two minutes, 4% success rate. Still really bad. Like this is you have 20 conversations and you book less than one minute. Three minutes, it gets it to 6%. There's a huge jump out of four minutes where it jumps from 6% success rate at three minutes to 13% success rate. And then it just keeps going up from there to the point where 10 plus minutes, 30% success rate. So if you have a cold call that lasts over 10 minutes, you've basically got a 1 in 3 chance of booking a meeting, which puts you in the top 10% of cold callers out there, right? So the longer you go, the more talk time you can get on the phones, cold calling is a game of inches. It's about buying yourself an extra minute, one more minute, one more minute, one more minute. And that happens throughout objections. It happens throughout the problem prompt, but it definitely happens in the opener. So what you need to do in those first 60 seconds is you need to do something that differentiates yourself from the rest of the telemarketers. Because if you ask, how's your day going or did I catch you out of bad time, I'm maybe going to go into the long one and riffs around why those are bad openers. The reason those are bad openers is because every other telemarketer is opening with those lines. And when you say those things, whether or not they're good lines to use, it's because they are canned, fundamentally because they are canned lines, the prospect will categorize you alongside with every other telemarketer. We've all talked about the permission based opener as well, which sounds like Jason, I know you weren't expecting my call, could I get 30 seconds to tell you why I called and then you can tell me whether or not it's fit. Even that opener is canned because it does not change from prospect to prospect and because so many people are using it today, prospects are starting to realize that's another cold call opener and they immediately categorize you with the rest of the telemarketers. So the only thing that cannot be canned is if you open your cold call with context about them. And so both of the openers that we teach and I know Jason, you teach something similar is we lead with context. And so the first opener that we teach is if I'm calling you Jason and you're the CEO of Outbound Squad, I'm going to lead with how I work with other peers in your business, right? Let's say, hey Jason, we work with the guys over at 30 minutes of president's club. It's Arman from podcasting. Have you heard of a name toss around? Even if you haven't heard my name toss around, you're not going to be a total jerk to me because you work with those guys Arman and Nick at 30 minutes of president's club. And so that's your first opener. To heard the name toss around opener, you lead with context, right? And I use a similar philosophy where you put the context rather the trigger for your call before a permission based opener. So if I use that same example, Arman gave, what I'm going to do is I call you, you go, hello, I go, Jason, I just finished reading the state of sales report that you and your team just released last week. And I'm going to be honest, this is a cold call, but it is a well-researched one. And I'm wondering if I can have half a minute to share why that report can prompt me to call you. And then you can totally hang up on me if it doesn't make sense from there. Now what I need to be able to do is relate that piece of context that state of sales report that you released to what my pitch is, hey, oftentimes when people are releasing content, that means they want to do more podcasts and podcasting helped with that. But so I need to not just have a random piece of information is my upfront thing. I have to generally as a rep figure out what my five main like go to piece of researches are. And now when I'm looking at my prospects, I can know when I'm selling billing software, I would look for stuff like if the law for him had just won a case, which would mean they'd be collecting money and the billing software could help. Or if they open a new office, I would reference that because oftentimes there was billing complexity when they added new tax jurisdiction. So that's the opener that I use, which is designed to say, wait, this is a well-researched, research-targeted call to get them to sit up and get their attention. And the only goal that you have in the first 60 seconds is starting a conversation, right? And there's a couple tools that you guys have shared to do that. One, from yours, Arbondas, social proof. And you sort of casually just drop in the social proof and it's funny. I sort of smile every time I hear you do the opener because it's just so smooth. It's such a good opener. It's one of the openers I teach, and I give you credit for it. But I say, hey, here's one of the ones that works pretty well, and you can adapt it. I love throwing, like, geographic. You can, what's it called, localize. You can localize the opener, right? Hey, we're working with other contractors like X, Y, and Z in Texas. Or we're working with school districts in the LA school district like, you know, et cetera. And you can, you know, localize it to give it that feeling. And it's just like, it just jogs your brain. Like, it kind of scrambles your brain for a second. You're thinking, like, should I know this person? Let's talk about tonality. Because both of you, and I've made a lot of these calls, there's a very, there's a, there is a, I feel like people transform into a different human being sometimes when they pick up the phone and make calls. That's the best way I could describe it. You start to hear up talk. I don't know if you guys have experienced, I've never worked at a really large company, but when I interact with people at really large companies, there's like this corporate speak that feels super formal. Yeah. How do we avoid doing those things, and more importantly, why is it bad to come in very formal and why is our tonality so important? This is the part I feel like it's so hard to measure. Everything you say and sound must be different from the rest of the telemarketers. And so when you start to speak in that presentation voice, or you start to say, we work with a few other and recent portfolio companies, it's Armand from Pave, those little telemarketer uptones, those little signs of presentation voice or youth in your telemarketer voice. It doesn't matter if you say, have you heard of a name tossed around? If you're doing it in the wrong tone, because even though your words might sound different, your voice sounds like every other telemarketer out there. And so when you're practicing the tone, the first thing you have to do is, you know, one of the concepts you learn in therapy is you need to draw attention to the emotion before you respond to the emotion. And the same thing goes for cold calling tone, oddly enough, is you need to notice your tone mistakes before you can actually correct a lot of them because you don't even realize what you're doing. So I always recommend you, friend, record you not paying attention to it. So have a friend record you in a plain conversation when you're not expecting it. And then listen to that right to one of your cold call recordings and you will be shocked how different they are. And you'll be like, oh my god, I sound like that. That's what my uptones sound like. That's what my stutter sound like. That sounds crazy. And just by doing that, the moment you do your next uptone, you'll say it and you'll be like, ah, I did it again. And that's step one is noticing some of the common corporate tone mistakes. Yeah. I mean, just simply recording yourself and listening back to yourself. I find that most people don't do. What are your thoughts, Nick? Well, your tone communicates more than your actual words that you are saying. Because if you think about the experience for a prospect, they could pick up the phone, they go, hello, they hear an unfamiliar voice. Their brain actually gets hijacked for a second and they're not always hearing what you specifically said, which is a lot of times like when you hit him with the heard the name trust run, they're like, wait, wait, wait, what? I don't think so, because they're thrown off for a second. That's okay. Your tone, Armand, on the heard the name trust run opener, you're trying to communicate this familiar context we should know each other. Even if you haven't heard my name trust around, you probably should have. That has to be communicated with your tone. And if you sound unsure or uncertain or timid, it doesn't work. With my opener, the tailored permission opener, it's got to sound really, really, really low stakes and disarming because that opener, you're kind of getting them to agree to hang in there for a bit. And if you sound high-sale pressure, like you're going to trap them on the call, they're not going to say yes. And so you've got to think about what are my words trying to communicate, what am I trying to get across to this other person and your tone needs to communicate that. The big two ways that you can nail your tone are one, practice when you are not in front of prospects. Meaning, if you try to practice your opener just on the prospects that answer, if you're an average rep, you will make 800 cold calls and the data showed 43 people are going to pick up. So you're going to call call every single day for a month and you will talk to 43 people. 43 reps is not really enough to get great at your opener. And so instead, Armand used to do this when he would commute to work. I used to do this when I would ride my bike to work. This is your opener again and again and again and again on your own time. And you'll get more practice in a 30 minute bike ride to the office than you will in an entire month of cold calling. The other thing to do is don't underestimate the impact that your body language has on your tonality. For me, with my permission-based, tailored permission opener, I have to literally pull my hands up to get the disarming tone out of my mouth. For Armand, when he was first doing the, her the name-tosser on opener, I remember you would sit at the desk and intentionally put your feet up on the desk to sound more relaxed literally like an executive whose feet up arms back. So get the reps, get the body language right. I love that. I'm a big fan of standing up too. I just love pacing. I love being able to walk around while I'm talking to people. Okay, so we do our opener. Now you have to resist every bone in your body to be like, "Oh, awesome, Nick." So, an outbound squad, we provide sales training for companies like Gong and Zoom and Vidalia, and I would love to talk to you about your sales training needs at XYZ company. You have to resist every bone in your body to just pitching, talking about your solution, all of that kind of stuff. You guys have to teach something that I love, the problem proposition. I think the big part here, we talked about this during the editing process. That was one of the things that I talked about was, I think people need some guidance on not only what the problem proposition is, but what is it for them, and how do they speak to different personas based on their level of responsibility? Skip Miller talks about selling above and below the line. What does a problem proposition sound like for an executive versus someone that is an end user, like using the thing and experiencing the daily pain? So tell us a little bit more, what is the problem proposition in how, as a wrap, if I'm listening to this, how can I create my problem proposition? So again, most people get into sales because they have pretty high EQ relative to their peers. Most sales people, when they pick up the phone and make a cold call, dump their EQ in the trash, and they only think about what they need to do, and that's because cold calling is scary, it's challenging, it's tough, but people get so fixated on themself, they forget to think about the experience for the prospect that they are calling, and if you take a second to think about this person that you're interrupting in cold calling, they have zero idea what you do, you've interrupted them, and they don't have any context for, at Outbound Squad, we do sales training, they don't necessarily know what that means. Maybe sales training is a little bit easier for people to understand, but if I call somebody and say, we have an all in one practice management system for your law firm, it's really hard for the CFO of the law firm that I'm calling to envision what that means for them. So the value or the features or the attributes of what I sell are meaningless for my prospect. Now, if the prospect wanted to do some heavy thinking and think, okay, practice management, what could that mean for my law firm? We might be able to connect some of those dots, but I don't really want to run the risk that the CFO that I'm calling at 2.30 on a Thursday afternoon is going to sit there and be like, let me think for a second about what this all-in-one building practice management platform means for my business. I need to connect the dots for them between, here's what we do, and here's what that means for you. And so, the person that we're calling, if we use some EQ, they might not have context for what a practice management system is, but they sure as heck know how annoying it is when they send bills to clients, and the client doesn't pay the bill because they didn't put it in the right format that the company said, all our bills need to come in this special e-billing format. And so, I need to pitch to the problem I know that they have, and if I hit the nail on the head there, that will earn me the right to then talk about, hey, here's how we make that problem go away. So I need to spend most of my energy attacking and describing the problem that people deal with before I earn the right to get into the solution. I actually didn't get them to sit up and say, oh, yeah, wait, we're dealing with that. How do you make that go away? Now, I can have a conversation, and I can give you more detail. You might have follow up questions, though, Jason. But Nick, if I don't talk about my solution here, like, aren't they, like, isn't that bad? Like, don't I have to tell them about the solution? How are they going to know what I do? This is the never-one objection I always get when I speak. So you will get into that. So I'll give you an example. For a long time, I sold billing software to law firms. And the big problem that these law firms dealt with was they had to send bills to their insurance carrier clients in a very, very specialized format. They had to be formatted in a certain way. The law firm couldn't use certain words on the bill. Otherwise, the insurance company would say, oh, we don't pay for research. We don't pay for phone calls. We're not paying that $200,000 bill because there was a $5 line item for a phone call. And so I could talk about all the ways that, like, we helped validate whether or not the words were right, that we made sure that the bills were always in line with the client guidelines. But the customer didn't always have contacts for that. My pitch would be, look, typically, what I'm talking with CFOs of insurance defense law firms, you all tell me it can be really, really frustrating to have to deal with so many deductions, rejections, and appeals on the bills that you send to your insurance carrier clients. And it ends up resulting in a ton of outstanding AR. And we worked with about 300 different law firms in the US helping them cut down on those appeals and rejections. And I guess I'm wondering if you might be able to learn more when I'm not totally calling you out of the blue. So I didn't give a ton on the solution, but I don't have to because they can picture now, okay, I am dealing with that problem. This now earns me the right to say, let me tell you about how we make it go away in more detail. This is one place where we actually disagreed a lot in the book is Nick's traditional problem prop did not include anything about the solution. I usually say that you have to include at least one thing about the solution because you could be solving the problem anyway. And so what we resolved to is the one sentence solution is we do X to solve the problem. So I want to play a game with you guys. So I was doing some outbound consulting for a client the other day. And we designed a problem prop for them. And let's see if you guys can guess what they do based off of the problem prop. You guys ready? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So after the opener, I'd say, well Jason, the reason I'm reaching out is most of the time when I'm talking to a talent leader or recruiting leader, they can't stand sifting through 2,000 inbound resume applications just to figure out which five candidates they actually want to talk to. And so Covey takes all of your ideal candidate criteria and uses AI to surface the top applicants so you don't spend all day screening resumes. I know you're probably all set, but are you open to taking a look when I'm not cold calling you out of the blue? What do you think they do? ATS? Yeah, upload what you want your candidate to look like and it will screen 2,000 resumes on your behalf. Yeah. Crazy. That's what they do. And so if you explain the problem that they're experiencing they're trying to solve, we only need one sentence say, Covey does this to solve the problem and make it go away. And Jason to answer your question, notice that we're using your chunking up tactic when we talk about the one sentence solution. So oftentimes the triggering problem in order to make it hyper specific, you need to get a little bit tactical, oftentimes more tactical than a senior leader might be familiar with. I need to make it real that there are 2,000 inbound applications just to figure out which five candidates they should talk to. That's a tactical manager level problem. But then I'm going to chunk it up. And when I use my one sentence solution, I'm going to say so Covey basically automates that whole process so that your recruiting team isn't spending all of their time screening resumes and they're spending that time to which oftentimes reduces your cost to fill a seat. And that's where you can chunk up. You can chunk up in the one sentence solution where you say we do X to solve the problem, which means this for you really good. How do you guys approach the problem proposition for solutions that are not so cut and dry? So to give you an example, like if you took a, how would you approach a solution that has like four different business units that they might sell until it is more of like an ERP type of thing. I think a lot of the enterprise sellers, if they're selling something that six figures or multiple six figures, it might be a solution that touches a lot of different parts of the business. How do you guys think about the messaging part? If you have a solution that could touch multiple parts of the business, multiple different personas, et cetera, how would you think about that and suggest that someone tackles that? This, this is something that I dealt with when I sold to law firms because I sold, I sometimes call it a billing system. Really, it was a practice management system that did everything from helping the law firm with client intake to there was accounts payable modules to, there was a billing element. What I would have to do was determine who were the people that I actually wanted to book meetings with. Generally, it was the COO of a law firm, it was the CFO of a law firm, and it was the managing partner of the law firm. My pitch to those people would be different, and all I was doing was I was looking for some people might use the term of beachhead. I was looking for what was one problem that I was almost certain that this persona would have that we could make go away. So for the law firm, CFO, it was often that billing, one that I just talked about. For the managing partner of the law firm, one of the things that's frustrating, typically when I'm talking to a managing partner of a law firm with more than three practice groups is your firm is taking on all sorts of different types of work, but you can't always tell which work is the most profitable, and which ones are the lost leaders that you're doing just to bring in new business from a client. Most folks have a general picture of what that looks like, but a lot of the firms I'm talking to are really trying to take a deeper look at that stuff, and we help do that by doing a cost allocation exercise with your firm so that you can determine where you should be investing in growing the firm. Are you open to learning more when I'm not cold calling you out of the blue? It's a different problem. It's not all of the problems that we could solve for the firm, but I'm picking one thing that I know they'll care about the most, and now to your point, I can have a conversation. Oh, by the way, we help firms with lots of different things, we probably should meet and have a deeper conversation. The cold call is the start of the conversation, so you have to pick what's most compelling and we'll get their attention. The other thing that you can do is there are two strategies. You have to go one big problem, and you attack that, and then you have a pivot problem later on, and that's what I did at CARDA, because we would do cap table, I was about to say it the wrong way, we would help companies manage their stock option plans and their equity plans, but then also we offered financial services, which is like human capital, like we're doing valuations as a service, you couldn't throw all of them, all of that at them, so we would start with the valuations and then pivot to the cap table, or we would start with the cap table and pivot to the valuations. The other way you can do it is you can do what I call a three point problem, which is you pick the beginning, middle, and end of your problem if you have a really complex solution. For example, one of my clients, their name is Practice, and what Practice does is they have a solution for tutoring and professional coaching businesses, where a lot of tutoring and professional coaching businesses, they have to use calendar to schedule all of the tutoring sessions, then they need to track how many tutoring sessions have been taken in another spreadsheet, and then they need to build all of those tutoring sessions in QuickBooks, and so to do each of those three different things are three massively different workflows, and so you have a three point problem in your problem problem, which is, well Jason, the reason that I'm reaching out is usually when I'm talking with another person who's running a tutoring business, it's a little bit of a cluster because you have to deal with the scheduling of all your clients, and then when the tutors actually start to give the sessions, you need to track and make sure that they're actually counting all those sessions, and then you've got to talk to your finance person to do the billing, and there are a million other things in between, and so Practice covers everything from the scheduling to the package tracking to the billing and everything in between, so that you can focus on running your coaching business instead of making sure that you're tracking all of your tutoring sessions for 30 minutes, and so you can pick three parts of your problem that cover a wider part of the solution and get tactical on each of them, and then say that we cover everything in between, of it, so it's really sitting down and applying 80/20 rule, it's so easy to get overwhelmed as an enterprise rep with our solution has eight different use cases, and I can cross sell two other three, four different things, hey start with something really simple, what is the most pressing pain that this person is going to have and talk about that? Let's talk about section two, so after we do this, I don't know what your data showed, but I am assuming the majority of the time you're going to get some objections. So, let's talk about objections, there are three types of objections, and then you guys have kind of a nice little framework and I'll kick this question over your way or month. What about objections, the types of objections should we know, and do you want to walk us through the simple framework? For sure, so there are three types of objections, dismissive objections, situational objections, which are things where it's like I have no budget or I have no resources that I'm really busy, and then you have existing solution, objections, which are I'm using a competitor or I've built something in-house, and the most common bucket are dismissive objections, and I think dismissive objections are pretty exemplary of what most objections are, which is they're not real objections, they're reactions, 50% of objections are dismissive objections, and dismissive objections sound like I'm not interested, send me some information, tell me in six months, they're swats, and the reason those are exemplary of most objections is a lot of sellers try to handle, I'm not interested, as if it were the real objection, as if a prospecting to your product, but they're not, they're objecting to the interruption itself, and so if someone says I'm not interested and you try to go and explain why your solution has all the reasons they should be interested, or how you're going to produce a million ROI, or you repitch, or you pivot pitch, or you try to do all of these pressure sales tactics that only gets your prospect to push away and kick more, and so the first step of what we call the Mr. Miyagi framework to handling objections is to agree with the objection, and I know it sounds really counterintuitive, but the reason you need to agree with the objection is when you agree with someone's knee-jerk reaction, it's like they tried to sit down and chair and you pulled it out from underneath them, it feels really dumb to keep fighting someone who's not fighting you, and so if they say I'm not interested, I'm going to be like, I totally get it Ben, I screwed up here, you probably would have called me if that were the case, and honestly I don't love making these calls anyway, hey just so no one calls you again Jason, could you give me a sense is it, is it because my pitch was really crappy, or you're not thinking about this problem at all, or is it that you just hate getting cold calls, and it's okay if it's number three, and that brings us to step two, which was embedded in that talk track. Step two is I want to incentivize you to have a conversation with, is after I agree with your objection, I'm going to ask you a question to share more about the objection, I'm going to say like, hey just so no one calls you, which is your incentive, would you mind telling me is it this or this, and once I get you talking Jason, now we're having a conversation and again, as we said earlier, the longer the call goes, the more talk time, I can have not only do I get to handle more objections and demonstrate that I'm capable of holding a conversation, right, there's just something about, no one says yes to a meeting upon an opener and problem problem, sometimes prospects just need enough time to realize that you're not a rando, and by getting them talking, you increase the talk time. But two, I'll pause there for a second, four we can move to step three, or if you want to just rip step three, I'm happy to, now rip it, yep, rip in step three. So step three, you say, look man, I totally appreciate the call, yada, yada, yada, I'm on this competitor, I'm working with sales, doing already. What I need to do is I want to do step three, which is sell the test drive, Jason, if you're already driving a car, I should not be talking to you about buying this car, buying out your current car, financing a car, all of those things just increased the pressure of the sale. You don't even know if you like this car yet. I'm just going to try to get you to take the test drive. Tesla knows they're expensive. They sell a lot of rip and replace cars by getting people to sit in a Tesla first. And so I'm actually going to push the sale away when you give me the competitor say, oh, honestly Jason, like sales group is a great group. I guess you're probably not going to switch off of them. I've had a couple other folks switch off of sales going from time to time because of reasons like this, this or this. I'm not assuming that's going to be you, but if nothing else, would you be open to taking a look just so you know how other folks like Gong or outreach approach, new product launches in the sales tech space. And if nothing else, we can put a face to the name. I'm offering you the ability to get smart. In other words, when you sell the test drive, you want to answer the question, why should you take the meeting even if you don't buy the product? Why would you want to take the meeting, even if you didn't buy the product at the end of it? You have to be able to answer that question. I'm so big on like education, insight, like learn from their peers, et cetera. And I think the big key with that is as an account executive, you have to deliver a good call, first call experience to in order to follow through in that promise. Nick, what do you have to add, objection handling, your, what I love about the book, by the way, is that your two styles, I feel like are very different. There's stuff obviously that you agree on, but there's two very distinct styles in both of them work. But what are your thoughts, Nick? The most important piece of objection handling is agreeing with their objection. The reason that fighting an objection doesn't work, and when I say fighting, I mean, most sales people think the key to overcoming objections is memorizing snappy responses or witty retorts to their prospects rejection. Prospect goes, I'm not interested before the salesperson has even said their pitch, salesperson thinks, well, I haven't even told you what I'm selling. What are you not interested in, you know, again, we need to have some EQ. You are choosing to, and this is our job in sales is to interrupt people and try to start new business conversations. That's an okay thing, but it's still just because it's part of your job. It's an, for your prospect, an unpleasant and unwelcome interruption. And so here's what happens. You pick up the phone at a convenient time for you. You called call your prospect, they answer, and they realize it's a cold call. And that you might give a little pitch, and they say, hey, look, I appreciate the call. I'm just not interested. After run of the mail salesperson says, nope, I disagree with you. You don't even really know what our product does. How are you not interested? Prospect thinks, okay, asshole, you just interrupted me. I told you I wasn't interested, and now you're telling me I'm wrong? See you later. You just talked about delivering a good first call experience. How about a good first 15 seconds of the relationship or interaction experience? Yeah. You're just telling you, you literally just told your prospect, when you tell me something, I'm going to call you a liar. And you tell me something, I'm going to start conflict and disagree with you. So even if they tell you an objection that's obviously false, I'm not interested. Yeah, they might not know what you sell yet. You have to take it at face value and agree with it. Because otherwise you just seem like an interrupting conflict interested asshole. So you have to laugh and agree, I'm not interested totally. This one's my bad. My guess is you probably would have gone on our side and sent an email to us saying you were. If you were, look, I don't want to I want to make sure nobody bugs you again. Tell me more. Now you can have a conversation and you have to create some space between that initial rejection and your later ask for, hey, maybe you should take a look at this. That's the biggest thing I think people get wrong. The most important piece is that emotional space you create between the rejection and then you later ask for the meeting. Yeah. This is like the ultimate life hack too. If you could just do this in your everyday life where nothing really triggers you and everything is like, oh, you're like, I'm curious where a person is coming from like it just serves you big time. So we've talked for 60 seconds, openers, problem proposition. We went into some objection handling, again, check out the book, working people check out the book, by the way, Amazon, that's a place to come back slash book when the book goes live, which is going to be August 14th, you can get it on Amazon and anywhere you go. These guys literally have like how to handle any objection you could possibly come across in a call with like audio snippet examples. So go to make sure to check that out. How to be a machine. I want to touch on this because we only have about five or six more minutes left. The how to be a machine piece is hilarious to me because all three of us here are total like productivity fanatics, like we love being productive and I feel like we do it all three of us in very different ways, actually, but the how to be a machine piece, why is productivity is such an important element of calling and I'll kick this question your way around. Dial conversion, dial volume, like the productivity and like energy component of this, what part does that play in being a badass on the phones? There are two elements of the calling math equation, volume and conversion. Let's talk about the volume piece first. So when I talk about volume, I'm just talking about number of cold calls. When I talk about conversion, I'm talking about what percentage of those cold calls connect to a conversation, what percentage of those conversations lead to meetings, and then what percentage of those meetings show up aka your show rate. So if you start with the volume piece, the number one way that I've improved SDR teams is by just raising the expectation for minimum activity every single week. So for example, I was coaching an SDR the other day and he was like, I did 65.and I worked 15 accounts this week and he's like, should I spend my time differently? And I was like, no, you should just do more and he was like, you should be doing that every day. And he was like, how do I do more? I was like, pull up your calendar. I'm like, okay, so you're checking your inbox at nine. You have a qualification call at 10. You have a second qualification call at 11. When are you going to make your cold calls? Well in the gaps, okay, got it. So when are you going to send all your recap emails and how are you going to make sure that you don't get distracted by those two? And the problem is the hardest task in the day is usually prospecting in cold calling. It's also usually the most important but not necessarily urgent task in sales. So the longer the day goes on, the more likely you are to have more urgent but not necessarily important things thrown on your plate. So the only thing that you can resolve to do is cold call first thing in the goddamn morning. And so wake up, don't check your inbox or have a 30 minute inbox time block at 8.30am. And 9am hit the phones. And what that means is guys, I get it like customer calls come in all that stuff. I was literally the ninth employee at Pave and my job was to hire an entire sales organization while also selling deals while we were hiring. And so I had to take all of my customer calls from 12 to 5 and it was like clockwork. Other calls were not allowed to happen before 12pm, Pacific time. And then from 9 to 12, it was prospecting like clockwork. And I never missed a dial commitment because it was the first thing in front of the day. It was the first thing that I knew I had to do before all of the other stuff that frankly I wanted to do a little bit more. Nick, that's someone. You have some funny stories on this. What did you use to do when you went to their office? Yeah, yeah, so to Armand's point, first things first. And there's a philosophy a lot of sales people have heard, eat the frog, which is the idea that if on your to-do list was you got to eat a live frog. It's probably best to do it first thing in the morning because if you don't, it's still going to exist. You're still going to have to do it. And it's just going to look slimier and grosser and nastier and still be sitting on your desk. Cold calling is the same thing. You know you need to do it if you want to keep your job and hit your number. But a lot of sales people save it for the end of the day and then they sort of do a half-asked job or they miss a dial commit or they sprinkled their day with calls here and there. For me, I like to create artificial deadlines for myself to force myself to do the thing that I don't want to do. So when I was a new salesperson, I created a rule for myself, which was called the 10-dial no P rule, which was I was not allowed to go to the bathroom in the office until I had made 10 cold calls. Good morning. I'd show up at work. I would have drank like a big thing of water, a venti-ized cold brew in my commute in. And before I created this rule for myself, like a normal person, I'd get to the office, I'd go to the bathroom, and then I would sort of tinker. I would answer my emails. I would like look at Salesforce and like try to get some stuff organized. I might prep my call list for later and then by like 10.30 I hadn't really done anything and I would just feel terrible. Like the cold calls didn't feel easier. So what I committed for myself was I was like, I don't like cold calling. I want to get this off my plate as quickly as possible. So what I would do is I created that rule for myself. Once I instituted it, I would get to the office. I would get in, open the door, and race to my computer. My call list was already prepped because I was like, I'm going to have to pee in the morning, I need to do this in the evening. I would make my 10 cold calls, then I would go to the bathroom, then I would come back to my desk, and by then the seal of cold calling had already been broken for me. And the rest of my dials for the day, they didn't feel as bad because I'd already gotten them out of the way. So it was a ridiculous rule. And yeah, it was tough when I had that 10 minute cold call that I knew was going to turn into a meeting and I'm sitting there being like, but it worked. It worked because I got the hardest thing off my plate and I kicked off the virtuous cycle rather than kicking off a vicious cycle where I'm checking my inbox for 42 minutes in the morning and I'm prepping a call list when I should be ripping my dials. Totally. I think one of the things you both talk about, I talk about the slot too, is this idea that we need to make the task easier to start. And it's no different than if I want to work out early in the morning prior to work, having my workout clothes and stuff out ready to go. It's just one less barrier to do that. If I need water, I fill up the water bottle the night before. If I'm making cold calls, I go and select the contacts that I'm going to make cold calls on or I load up the outreach tasks or whatever it might be. Like I'm doing all of that work in advance so that literally it's like, it's almost hard or not to make the calls when you do it because it's just right there in front of you. You guys, this was awesome. Again, I said this before, but this is a freaking awesome book. You guys, seriously, like hats off to you. It is hands down, not blown smoke, the best book on cold calling. There is not a book that comes even close to this on cold calling by a long shot. So make sure to check it out, 30nPC.com/book, cold calling sucks. And that's why it works. I couldn't like also think of a better title or a book. It's so catchy. But the thing that really sticks out to me is that one, it's written by two guys that have done a lot of cold calling and taught other people how to cold call to its extremely tactical. You can customize it for your specific situation. You can hear audio snippets that these guys actually make in calls. And there's a sh*t ton of data to really validate a lot of claims that they're making. So honestly, you'd be stupid not to buy this book. Like the thing you need to do is go buy it and start putting this stuff into action and just surprise the hell out of your leadership, you know? Anything else you guys want to leave the audience with before you take off? That was just about the best testimonial. If folks have made it this far, that means you're a fan of Jason Bay. And Jason Bay was one of the few audience editors or guest editors who literally come through this book step by step. And you need a damn high bar and Jason, I know you have a damn high bar for good quality content. So we appreciate everything that you did to make this thing of reality and make it possible. You made it 10 times better. I'm great. Well for you Jason, you're a good person. Thank you for that.