How You Can Quickly Become An Incredibly Effective Cold Caller, with Wendy Weiss [Episode 83]

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In this episode, Wendy Weiss, President of Cold Calling Results, and also known as The Queen of Cold Calling, provides detailed information about how to become a truly effective prospector. Included among the subjects we discuss in this conversation are:

• How to get into the right frame of mind to make cold calls. Anyone can do it!
• Why there’s no difference between a warm lead or a cold lead,
• The two biggest mistakes sales teams make when it comes to cold calling.
• How to eliminate the twisted thinking that prevents sales reps from making cold calls
• How to make certain that you’re targeting the right customers for your calls.

If you’re a sales leader, sales manager, or sales rep focusing on rapid lead response, this episode is definitely worth the investment of your time to listen.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul: Wendy, welcome to the show.

Wendy Weiss: Hello, Andy. I am delighted to be here.

Andy Paul: Wow. Delighted to have you on board. So take a minute. Introduce yourself.

Wendy Weiss: Okay. I will do that.

I will, share with everyone that I am known as the queen of cold calling. I was actually never supposed to be the queen of cold calling. I was actually supposed to be a ballerina. I grew up in Pennsylvania. And I moved to New York city where I still live in work and I live, I moved here as a teenager to dance, and then eventually every artist in New York city, I needed to date job.

So I got a job with a telemarketing company that did business to business appointment setting, and it turned out I was good at it. Who knew because ballet dancers, we don’t talk, we dance, but we don’t talk. And what’s your dance for a, I danced with Pittsburgh ballet theater for many years. Okay. Yeah.

Andy Paul: And when you came to New York,

Wendy Weiss: I danced with a number of pickup companies here in New York city.

And I actually went back and forth, to Pittsburgh from New York. for many years. Got it. And, so

Andy Paul: it’s all it became all about sales.

Wendy Weiss: yeah, I’d became all about paying the rent at a certain point. it, I enjoyed my day job. It turned out I was really good at it. And I started my own business where I had clients that I would represent.

And I did all the new business development, for them. And it was actually one of those first clients that dubbed me the queen of cold calling, cause I found so many opportunities for him. And from there I went into the business that I have today that, I work with business owners, entrepreneurs, sales professionals, people that need to develop new business.

And I feel like I’m doing something that’s. Pretty darn important. It’s still difficult out there. And, what I do like to share with my listeners, so are our listeners, is that fundamentally, this is a communication skill. I was really lucky when I got that telemarketing job so many years ago, I didn’t know anything about business.

I was a dancer, but I was lucky because they taught me the skill. And learning the skill enabled me to build a business. And so what I really want to share with all of our listeners is that whether you are the person making calls, or you’re a manager with a team that’s making calls, this is a communication skill and it can be learned and it can be improved on,

Andy Paul: let’s start a little more basic than that.

So why do people seem to be so anxious to want to kill the cold

goal?

Wendy Weiss: it beats me, Andy. it’s very interesting because the conversation about cold calling is always such an emotional conversation. And there are people, a handful of people that love cold calling and, I think it’s fun.

And I would certainly fall into that camp. I think it’s fun. And then there’s everyone else that supposedly hates to cold call, but here’s the thing. Tell telephone. Some prospecting cold calling is not an emotional experience. It’s actually marketing and the opposite of hating to cold call is not that you now, I love it.

The opposite. Of hating to cold call is actually getting to neutral because if you are neutral, you can function and you can do what you need to do. And

Andy Paul: let’s explore that. So the second, cause I liked that term and I read your material. It talks about it. So what you’re saying is that no neutral doesn’t mean you really love it either.

Wendy Weiss: There are many things that one might have to do in one’s life or in business that you don’t love doing. But it’s part of the things that you need to do. And developing leads is one of those things.

Andy Paul: There is no business without leads, cause there are no sales without leads.

Wendy Weiss: And the other piece of this is no matter where one finds a lead, you’ve got to talk to that person on the telephone.

Exactly. And there’s this whole idea of salespeople love to divide everything into warm leads and cold leads, but here’s the thing. Prospects do not think of themselves as being warm. They don’t think, Oh, I’m a warm lead. Therefore I’m going to behave in a certain manner. When you pick up the phone and you call someone.

That prospect, all they think is this person saying anything that I think is interesting

Andy Paul: or that has value

to

Wendy Weiss: me, or that has value to me? And if the answer is no, they say I’m not interested in, they hang

Andy Paul: up. And so this is really a key point and this is one I make over and over again.

And I couldn’t get you to make it even more firmly. is that. it doesn’t matter whether you’re pick up the phone and calling somebody that’s, we’ll call them a cold lead as opposed to a warm lead or you’re calling a warm lead. That first call is fundamentally the same, whether they reached out to you through a lead or not, your process has to be largely the same.

Wendy Weiss: Yes.

Andy Paul: let’s talk about that. Cause that’s that I agree with you. That’s such an artificial distinction that salespeople want to make, and yet the mind of the customer, it’s no different.

Wendy Weiss: None. no difference at all. Even if they call you.

Andy Paul: Exactly. Even if they call you, it’s still the same.

Yeah. This is such a key point, for, business owners and sales managers and salespeople who are listening to the show, that first interaction with the prospect is fundamentally the same, regardless of how it was initiated.

Wendy Weiss: I will share with you a and a couple of years ago, I went to a conference.

It was put on by the warrior forum. And for those who may not know the warrior forum is a group of internet marketers. I went to this conference and I’ll, I’ll share with everybody. I was a little bit intimidated cause I fall asleep, assumed that, Oh, they do everything online. They never talk. They never have to talk to anybody.

And so I was really amazed. there were two speakers on two different days, Matt basic and Willie Crawford. Both of whom have multimillion dollar businesses, both of whom are considered to be internet marketing gurus. They teach people how to do they teach entrepreneurs and business owners, how to do internet marketing.

Both of them used exactly the same model, which was, they drove leads through their website. And then each of them in their organization ran a telemarketing room where they had people on the phone calling those leads.

Andy Paul: And why wouldn’t you, right? as opposed to opening into a funnel and dripping them emails and hoping to drive them to point of purchase, shortcut it, pick up the phone and call them.

Wendy Weiss: Yes. And especially they, both of them were selling very high ticket coaching programs. And while somebody might click on a buy now button, to buy a book, Cora

Andy Paul: $200 training programs,

Wendy Weiss: something like that, they’re not going to click a buy now button to buy 10,000, 20,000, $30,000. They’re not going to do it.

They want to talk to a human being

Andy Paul: right as they should. As they should. Okay. So let’s get back in a little bit back to the business. So back to the beginning, excuse me. So what do you see are the two biggest mistakes that sales teams make when it comes to cold calling?

Wendy Weiss: the two biggest mistakes are probably not being prepared and not making the calls.

Andy Paul: All right. let’s talk about the preparation cause you. You talk about that in depth? yeah, I was just before the call, I was looking at one of your, eBooks. You’d written recently about the cold calling survival guide, which I think was a great piece of information. Then once you give people information about how to find that a little bit later, but you have lots of steps of preparation, which I think were really important to go through.

and one on one this I thought was surf. Really interesting as this first one he talked about was belief. So tell people what you mean about belief when it comes to cold calling.

Wendy Weiss: what you believe is very powerful. And we started this podcast with you asking me about, people, so many people say cold calling is dead.

and if you believe that cold calling is dead and won’t work for you, you’re going to have a really hard time picking up the phone. If you believe that you’re bothering people. You’re annoying people. They won’t want to talk to you. They already have a vendor and couldn’t possibly be interested. These are not beliefs that help you be successful.

And and this goes back to what we were saying earlier about being neutral. what if you believe that because you done your homework. you had a pretty good idea that the person you were calling had a challenge, a business, some kind of business challenge that you might be able to help them with.

what if that’s what you believed and that, because they did have this business challenge, they were going to be interested in what you have to say. If that was your belief, it would be much easier to pick up the phone. And I work with people all day long. That struggle simply with this issue, that what they believe does not support their ability to be successful.

And a Henry Ford said either you think you can, or you think you can’t and either way you’re right. And fundamentally that is true.

Andy Paul: That’s a great thing, Especially, yeah. Especially when it comes to cold calling. Yeah. and I think that’s, again, key point just for again, companies are looking at how do they make their cold calling more successful, more efficient, more effective, more productive is this element of belief is really, as Wendy talks about it’s, you’re not, yes, you may be disrupting their day, but it’s something they’re going to get value from.

You have to believe that you’re able to provide that value that they need.

Wendy Weiss: And actually I have another ebook called a practical guide to getting sales teams to prospect. that’s written specifically for managers and in the practical guide, I go through the different forms of twisted thinking that salespeople engage in that keeps them from being effective.

And I’ll give you an example. Mind reading, many salespeople are great mind readers. they will tell you, call the prospect, prospects in a meeting. and they will tell you, that means the prospect doesn’t want to talk

Andy Paul: to me.

Wendy Weiss: That’s a mind read.

Andy Paul: You had some injuries, right?

Yeah. They must not be interested.

Wendy Weiss: They must not be interested because the secretary said they were in a meeting. maybe they’re actually in a meeting. So there, various forms of twisted thinking that salespeople engage in that and human beings engage in this kind of a thinking as well.

It’s just very counterproductive if you’re trying to be a successful sales professional, or trying to manage a team.

Andy Paul: it really gets back to your point is that you have to be in that neutral position. You can’t fear making the cold call. It’s not personal. this is something again that you’re, you have a belief that you’re adding value.

So while you may not actually love making cold calls, you’re convinced that you have value to add. And it’s a business assessment and necessity. Excuse me. Pick up the phone they could call.

Wendy Weiss: Yeah, I know all on the same topic. I’ll share with you, Andy, a story from my very first telemarketing job. When I got that job, I was about 20 years old.

I knew nothing about business. I was a dancer. I made, I was really, I lived in New York, in an apartment with five other dancers, made no money at all. And, so I got this job and within about a week they had me calling the really difficult, the CEOs, the presidents, people that. Supposedly wouldn’t take cold calls and I would get, are these mostly male, certainly much older than I was certainly much more, financially successful than I was at the time.

I would get them on the phone and insist they meet with the client and they would do it. And later on when I started doing training, I had to figure out, why was I able to do this? I was 20 years old. I didn’t know anything about business. And I realized something very interesting in my world. At the time I was a dancer and I considered myself to be an artist in my world.

Artists were very important. People, business, people were not as important in my world. As artists, therefore, when I picked up the phone and called a business person, I thought that business person would be absolutely delighted to speak with me. Cause I was an artist. Now, did this belief have anything at all to do with reality?

no, but it was what I believed and having that belief made me really successful because I was totally fearless. I thought everybody would love to talk to me.

Andy Paul: Yeah. And I think, yeah, you’ve identified a really key point is that, and we can explore a little bit more on that, but it’s, as I recall my own days when I was making cold calls and as back in the day when I was walking business parks, physically making cold calls, not to store the phone, but yeah, I, depending on the price I was selling at that time, but it was like, I couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t want to talk to me.

because I thought there’s so much value in what I’m selling. Is that why I thought they were nuts if they didn’t want to talk to me.

Wendy Weiss: Yeah, exactly.

Andy Paul: Yeah. so if you can have that belief that really forms a core part of the, so we’re going to take a quick break and we’ll come back. We’re going to talk more about preparing to make calls, because I think you have some great things to say about how people should prepare and who they should target in their calling.

And this idea about being scripted or not scripted, which I think is again, another huge point of contention in sort of the sales sphere these days. And we want to talk about that now, before we do though, is I have a question. I ask all my guests, I’m going to pose the scenario to you and I’ll take your answer when you come back after the break.

So here it is, you’re a sales manager. You’ve been hired newly into a company to help them because their sales have basically stalled out and upper management brought you in to turn that around. They’re really anxious for change to happen quickly. So what two things would you do in your first week on the job that would have the biggest impact?

So think about that. And we’ll be back after the break with my guest, Wendy Weiss, the queen of cold calling. Hi, this is Andy connect and sell is used by sales reps at nearly a thousand companies, including hundreds of technology, startups, and several fortune 500 companies to overcome the challenges of getting prospects on the phone.

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Wendy Weiss: Welcome

Andy Paul: back. My guest today is Wendy Weiss, founder of cold calling results and the queen of cold calling. I love that. So let’s talk about the scenario that I posed right before the break year been hired as a new sales manager into a company whose sales need to be turned around.

What two things would you do on the first week in the job that had the biggest impact?

Wendy Weiss: Okay. the first thing that I would do, Andy would be to look at the numbers, that would be hopefully that this employer, my new employer would have, I actually have some sort of system in place that tracks.

Dials conversations and appointments. it’s amazing in 2015, going into 2016, how many companies are not tracking anything at all. So that’s the first thing that I would do. If there is no system in place to track, I would get one. So that’s number one. And then number two, who is, I would look at all this, all the system, there is this myth about prospecting cold calling that it’s call anybody, say anything, throw stuff at the wall, hope it sticks.

And that. Actually, there’s the myth of the numbers game, a hundred dials a day. If that doesn’t work make 200 dials a day. I don’t think that ever worked really well. It doesn’t work today cause it’s really hard to get people on the telephone. So you really need to have some systems and some strategies.

So that’s what I would be looking at next.

Andy Paul: Excellent. Okay, good. What sort of leads into the next question then is how do you prepare them to make sure, to make calls know how do you make sure you’re targeting the right business entities or the right people within those entities to reach out to?

Cause too often, as you said, and I’ve seen this with companies I work with, is that really scattered those, calling randomly

Wendy Weiss: and there’s only so many hours in the day, even if you have a team and their entire. Job they’re inside salespeople. That’s all they do. They’re on the phone.

There’s only so many hours in the day that they can spend dialing the phone. So let’s use those hours productively. So the first thing that you do have to look at is out of everyone in the entire world that might buy some teeny tiny little thing who is most likely to buy a lot and then come back and buy some more.

Cause those are the entities you want to be calling. So that means taking a look back. And this is one of the first things that I do with clients. If they don’t have a good list or they tell me they don’t really know. So who’s a good prospect. We’re going to go back and look at their customers and take a look at, say the top 10.

And by top, the ones that generate the most revenue and that are the most profitable. And what do they have in common? Is it the size of the company? Is it a specific industry, vertical, size of the company in either employees or revenue, what is it? you need a profile of what makes a good prospect for you. And you can do that by looking at who your current customers are, because you are looking for prospects that match the profile of your best customers.

Andy Paul: And this is, it’s a funny how this is so hard. Seems like for many companies is to say, look. Where are we going to find new business? Let’s do more like the customers we have already. Because especially when I see this more in smaller enterprises, maybe a little less mature in some of their processes is they cast wide nets out there and they contend to drag in any fish that they catch when not all fish are the same.

Wendy Weiss: Not all fish are the same, that is for sure. And sometimes when I’m working with a client, I’ll ask them to describe an ideal prospect to me. And they’ll say things like, they should appreciate the value of our services. They should understand the value that we bring or they should be easy to work with, or, these, we all want clients that are easy to work with.

Andy Paul: Yeah, we’d all love. We’d love to have clients that intuitively understand the value that we provide.

Wendy Weiss: Absolutely. But you can’t really go out and buy a list

Andy Paul: or build a company.

Wendy Weiss: You’ve got to be very concrete and specific about what are the parameters that make a good prospect for you.

Andy Paul: Yeah. It really boils down to making choices. And this is, I think the hard thing that’s that many sales managers have is that the process of becoming more productive is part of that is eliminating activities that you’re not going to do or prospects. You’re not going to call on and focusing on those, as you said, they really have the highest probability of being an ideal client for you.

Wendy Weiss: And, let’s say you had 10 different ideal client profiles, then throw them all into a hat and pick one and start. You don’t have, yeah, you don’t have to do them all. Cause I see clients getting paralyzed because they have choices and they’re all good choices. So what do I do first? Doesn’t matter, pick one.

Andy Paul: Alright, so let’s move on then to the stock pack we talked about before in the first part of the show about, okay. Don’t matter where the lead comes from. You got to pick up the phone and make that first call and there’s been some, you read in the sales literature these days more and more written about, salespeople are over scripted and you sort of I think hit it right on the head you talk about, it’s important to have a script, but not to be scripted. Tell us what you meant by that. Cause that’s, it’s I think it’s a really important point for people to understand.

Wendy Weiss: Okay, yeah, you’re right. Many people are very resistant. To using a script, but the truth is that every single sales person, every single sales professional in the entire world, even the ones that say they don’t use scripts are all using scripts.

And this is what I mean. Everyone has an elevator speech. Oh, a way that they introduce themselves, whether it’s on a call or they go to a networking meeting or, there’s a kind of standard way that they introduce themselves. That’s a script. It may not be written down, but if you’re saying the same thing over and over, and again, that is the script.

All sales professionals get certain quests over and over again, they get the same questions and they have standard answers that they give. If you’re given the same answer to the, that question, every time you’re asked it, that’s the script. There are objections that salespeople hear all the time and they have standard answers. And if you we’re given the same answer every time you hear that objection, that’s a script. So should I use a script is not the right question. The right question is, does my script work? If you say something and your prospect says I’m not interested and hangs up on you, that script doesn’t work

Andy Paul: Right time to modify it.

Wendy Weiss: Time to make some changes. So the idea is that a script is that you think before you talk. And that you have a specific goal in mind. And if what you’re saying, isn’t helping you achieve the goal, then you need to modify what it is you’re saying so that you can achieve the goal for that particular conversation.

Andy Paul: And I think that one of the things that’s really important in that regard is when you’re at the beginning is go ahead and write it down. Memorize it don’t read it, but memorize it, practice it, memorize it so that you start internalizing it so that when you do have that opportunity, as you talked about in your literature, it’s relating to your ballet days, it’s like muscle memory, is then it comes out naturally. And if it doesn’t work, then you sit down and modify it, rewrite it, practice it again, test something new.

Wendy Weiss: And here’s the trick, Andy, because written language and spoken language are very different and we’ve all been trained really well in school capital letter at the beginning of the sentence period at the end, but people don’t actually speak the way we write. And what happens is, and this is one of the reasons I think that people say, Oh, I can’t use this script because when they write it down, they write it in perfect grammatical English. Like they’ve been taught in school, which would work if you’re writing a marketing brochure or something for your website, it’s gotta be in perfect grammatical English, but not when you talk. And so the key, the real secret is to write it down, but write it down the way that you talk. Call up your voicemail, talk into your voicemail, then play it back and write down what you said.

Andy Paul: Perfect. Or practice it in front of your colleagues. There’s nothing wrong with a little role-playing to help people, learn what works or doesn’t work or to see how their messages received. I’d spent some time studying with a teacher on public speaking and about how to give a keynote address and one of the key lessons was write down the speech word for word, practice it, record it, listen to it back, internalize it. So it just becomes a part of you.

Wendy Weiss: Yes.

Andy Paul: So yeah, when we talk about sales reps being over scripted, I think what people are really referring to is that they’re reading the script. And if you’re in a situation where your reps are reading the script, it’s going to come across as the fact they’re reading it. And they’re not able to engage a prospect’s interest when you’re reading something off a piece of paper.

Wendy Weiss: All right. And, television anchors read from teleprompters all day long, and sound lifelike. So it is entirely possible to learn to read a script and sound lifelike. But it does take some practice.

Andy Paul: Yeah, it takes some practice. That’s really the key thing. But yeah, I think the bottom line is at least for me, is that I think it’s so important that you talk about is write it down, practice it. Everybody has a script. Test your script. If it’s not working, it’s not producing the results you need to, in terms of being able to set up followup appointments and so on, then modify it and test something new. Don’t just keep using the same thing over and over if it’s not producing the results you want. So another question for you is should sales reps leave voicemails

We talked about before is hard to get ahold of people. Statistics say, I’ve read 80% of, phone calls and business to business sales, go to a voicemail. Should they leave voicemail? If not, what should they do instead?

Wendy Weiss: If you’d asked me this question two years ago, I would have said, hang up and call somebody else. But you’re absolutely right that today more and more phone lines are answered by voicemail. So we do need a strategy to get people, to call us back and so what I’ve been doing with my clients, that works very well to get prospects to return phone calls is a voicemail campaign. And a voicemail campaign is a series of voicemails that you leave over time. So it’s like a drip campaign for voicemail, it’s marketing 101. We know that repetition increases response. And so the chances of somebody returning a phone call, if you leave them one message, might it happen. It’s not the most likely thing to happen, but if you leave a series of messages over time, it does increase response. And if you’ve got an email address, to go along with that phone number, leaving voicemails and sending emails over time, increased response.

Andy Paul: And so the voicemails should be scripted as well.

Wendy Weiss: Voicemails are scripted. Everything is scripted. Yes, right?

Andy Paul: Yeah. This is the point that’s oftentimes overlooked as is given the high probability that you’re making a call, that you are going to get connected to a voicemail system.

And if you’ve determined that you are going to leave a voicemail, Yeah, a random voicemail, quickly improvised voicemail’s not going to get you the response that you want is, so what is the message that you want to receive? What’s the call to action for the prospect to call you back?

Wendy Weiss: Yeah. And it’s actually, it’s the same as when you get someone on the telephone, you’ve got to be prepared and you’ve got to be prepared to say something that’s going to be compelling.

One of the questions I get asked all the time is. Wendy, what do I say when the prospect says I’m not interested and what’s always confused may actually, Andy, cause I ha I have some colleagues that will give scripts in response to “I’m not interested.” If the prospect says I’m not interested in say this, or if the prospect says I’m not interested, say that. I think the time to say something interesting is before they say, I’m not interested. And that does require some thought

Andy Paul: Yeah. Yeah. Part of the reason they may not be interested is the fact we haven’t said anything interesting or compelling to them.

Wendy Weiss: Exactly. The other reason might be that you’re calling the wrong person, which is why it’s really important, the wrong target, which is why it’s really important, going back to what we discussed earlier to target.

Andy Paul: Exactly. And it’s also possible that people truly aren’t interested. And you need to understand as a sales rep, when that situation arises, cause you don’t want to continue to waste your time, trying to force this person to become interested when they’re not really a prospect for what you have,

Wendy Weiss: If you’ve targeted well, though, and have a good introduction, the prospect or the I’m not saying everybody’s going to buy from you, but the prospect should be willing to at least have a conversation. They may after that conversation not be interested, but if you call a prospect, you introduce yourself and they say, I’m not interested and they hang up, you probably haven’t said anything interesting.

Andy Paul: Or you haven’t targeted the right

Wendy Weiss: People or you haven’t targeted the right people.

Andy Paul: Okay. Wish we could spend more time talking about that, but we need to move to the last segment of our show. And like I said, when we finish Wendy will give you some more information about how to find out more about how to prepare yourself and I’ll succeed at cold calling in your business. So here, we’re going into this rapid fire question section of the show, I’ve got some questions to elicit stream of consciousness type answers. You can give me one word or you can elaborate as much as you wish. Are you ready? Okay.

So what’s the most powerful sales tool in your arsenal?

Wendy Weiss: My brain.

Andy Paul: Love it. I was going to say either that or the telephone for you, but yeah. So what’s the one tool you use for managing your own sales that you can’t live without?

Wendy Weiss: Contact science .

Andy Paul: Don’t know that. what is that CRM system?

Wendy Weiss: No, it is prospecting software.

Andy Paul: Contact science. Yep. And what does it do?

Wendy Weiss: It automates the prospecting process and it’s an efficiency tool. CRM is not actually made for prospecting.

Andy Paul: No.

Wendy Weiss: And it is very unwieldy on top of which it’s often very difficult to get salespeople to use it.

Andy Paul: So it was contact science, like a, it doesn’t have a dialer built into it and?

Wendy Weiss: You can use it with a dialer. It’s got a click to click, to call feature, and it’s, from the user’s perspective, it just makes it so incredibly easy. You do put your scripts in there. And it basically says, Hey, Andy, call this person. If you get them on the phone, say something like this. If you get the voicemail, here’s something you can say, send them this email.

Now call this next person. And it keeps them keeps you totally organized. It’s easy to use. it gives you metrics and, It’s the best that I’ve seen on the market. And I use it for my prospecting. My team uses it for prospecting and I recommend it to all my clients.

Andy Paul: Excellent. I’ll have to check it out, Contact Science

Wendy Weiss: Tell them the Queen sent you.

Andy Paul: Tell them the queen sent you I imagine you on these TV commercials, I am the queen of. Okay, so who’s your sales role model?

Wendy Weiss: Sales role model. A lot of what I do comes from my background as a dancer. And when you are a dancer, you warm up, you rehearse and then you perform. You take a ballet class every single day to work on your technique.

And before you take class, you warm up so that you don’t hurt yourself. And if you’ve got a performance coming up, you don’t just run out on stage and start dancing. You rehearse so that to create that muscle memory, so that you can do what you need to do and you don’t have to panic or worry about it. You just do it and you do it really well cause you practiced it.

And doing that warmup and rehearsal is what actually enables you to do the performance. And it actually works exactly the same way in sales. The myths about cold calling is you just get on the phone and you call anybody and you say anything, which doesn’t actually work. What you actually need to do is warm up, which is who are you calling? What are you going to say? When you get them on the phone, what are you going to say in your voicemail? What are you going to say in your email? What are you going to say in social media, if you’re using social media, like figuring it all out in advance, what’s the process? Practicing it so that when you do get that prospect on the phone, you’re not stumbling all over the place. You can be calm and confident and represent yourself and, whatever your offering is and do that well. And that’s, what’s going to enable you to successfully perform. So my role model is a dancer.

Andy Paul: Yeah. You said one interesting thing there that, you didn’t really elaborate on, but it’s you said you took a class every day. And one of my huge passions in life is trying to get sales people, sales leaders, to invest more in their own personal development, through educating themselves about sales and marketing and all the aspects of the business that could contribute to their sales success.

By investing some of their time, every day reading or going online and listening to a podcast or watching a video or something about sales.

Wendy Weiss: Yeah. dancers take class every single day. even the stars take class every single day.

Andy Paul: If you’re a superstar sales person. I don’t think you know it all right. As soon as you think, you know everything, then you’re starting to go on the downhill slide at that point, as far as I’m concerned. All right. What’s the first sales activity you do every day?

Wendy Weiss: I get on the phone.

Andy Paul: Make calls.

Wendy Weiss: Yeah.

Andy Paul: All right. And I think you asked this question or answered this question once before. I’ll ask it again. Those what’s the one question you get asked most frequently by salespeople.

Wendy Weiss: I’ll give you a two.

Andy Paul: All right.

Wendy Weiss: Okay. The one is, what do I say if the prospect says I’m not interested, we’re talking about them. And the other one is there a generic script? And the answer to that is no.

Andy Paul: And with that. Thank you for joining me. That’s a great answer and we really don’t need to elaborate on that. So I want to thank my guest today is Wendy Weiss for joining me. Wendy, tell folks how they can find out more about you.

Wendy Weiss: Absolutely. first of all, I will invite all of you to download my cold calling survival guide, and you can find that. At coldcalling911.com and the subtitle for the cold calling survival guide is start setting appointments in the next 24 hours. And that’s the book that you referenced earlier, Andy and I also have a ebook. And by the way, cold calling survival guide is a complimentary ebook. I also have a book for sales managers called a practical guide to getting sales teams to prospect. And you can get that at coldcalling911.com/maangers.

Yes. Those

Andy Paul: links will be on the show notes page for each podcast and this podcast. So visit Andy paul.com forward slash podcast. And you’ll find this episode and all that information. Okay. and you’ll also be able to, contact me directly through coldcalling911.com. Excellent. Okay. Wendy, thank you for joining me.

Wendy Weiss: My pleasure. Thank you for having me