Cold Calling: The Ultimate Guide to Ruining a Call in 10 Easy Steps

Hold on. We didn’t quite catch that. Say it one more time?

…Alright, we got it now. You’re telling us you hate success? You don’t want to increase revenue? You want to directly, intentionally, and unremorsefully sabotage every business process, from cold calling to closing?

Well….oooookay.

You know us as the folks with the goal of helping you “accelerate sales, grow revenue, and increase profitability.” Your passion is in direct opposition to ours, and normally we would inform you that you’ve come to the wrong place.

 But today is your lucky day.

Today is opposite day! (Enjoy the free elementary-school nostalgia on us.)

We’ve compiled a list of the worst mistakes you can make while cold calling, so you can carry out your nefarious plans with confidence and ease.

How To Ruin a Cold CallI In 10 Easy Steps

1. Do NOT Prepare Ahead of Time.

If you’re determined to make your cold calling efforts super ineffective, don’t do any research or prep ahead of time. 

Avoid:

• Creating an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
• Getting to know your prospects through their website and social media channels
• Organizing personal details to use during your call
• Understanding your audience’s unique needs
• Practicing your pitch on your own

Cold calling can only be successful when you put in deliberate effort prior to picking up the phone. So make sure to just wing it and you’ll do spectacularly poorly, guaranteed.

2. Make Sure Your Leads Are As Unqualified As Possible.

There’s nothing that will suck the life out of your cold calling strategy faster than wasting time on unqualified leads. The more time you spend on calls that make no sense for your prospect or your company, the less revenue you’ll make, and the greater your non-profitable business plan will be.

Make sure you NEVER ask your prospect any qualifying questions at the beginning of your call, and avoid all authoritative decision-makers. If the person who picks up says his name is Steve and his main job is to restock the granola bars in the break room every week, you know you got the right guy.

3. Pay No Attention to Scripts or Company Cold Calling Resources.

If your company provides you with resources to aid you while cold calling (like product information, call script outlines, or checklists), turn them into paper airplanes and divebomb your disgustingly productive co-workers. Who needs this stuff? Not you! 

As the anti-revenue machine you are, you need to do away with even the IDEA of staying on-brand and catering to the carefully culled data your managers have translated into resources for increasing sales. 

Once again, we repeat: you gotta just wing it. Following company standards and referencing resources intended to give you a leg up will only hinder your efforts at failure.

4. Talk to Your Prospects, Like, Super Casual, Dude.

You should think of cold calling like any other call. Close your eyes and imagine you’re talking to your mom or some other person you know really, really well. Being overly familiar on a cold call with a practical stranger will give them the heebie-jeebies and they’ll end the call so fast you’ll probably set a new personal record.

Prospects are most likely to respond positively to a caller who is professional, yet personable, friendly, and down to earth. They want to get a sense that they are understood and cared for in a specific way.. 

So if you accomplished step 1 effectively, and you go into the call with no ability to personalize the conversation, while at the same time acting as if you’ve been BFFs since preschool…well, that’s a recipe for epic failure, my friend. Keep up the good work!

5. Embrace Multiple Personalities.

I’m sure you remember a time when you were on the receiving end of a sales call with a salesperson who didn’t know the meaning of the phrase “no, thanks.” Take a minute before each call to bring that moment to memory. Meditate on it. Breathe in the negative energy and breath out any positive vibes that might still be hiding in the corners of your inner being. Think like a salesy salesperson. Act like a salesy salesperson. BE the Salesy Salesperson. 

To implement this persona into your cold calling strategy, you must:

• Be as pushy as possible 
• Talk over your prospect at every opportunity
• Wear them out with repetitive statements
• Ignore their questions
• Pressure them to commit TODAY

Another effective personality you can adopt is the Timid Salesperson. This model focuses on ultimate ineffectiveness by being elusive, unsure, unclear, and passive. It helps decrease conversions by making your prospect feel like you don’t know what you’re talking about. It lowers their confidence in the product or service being offered. Plus, if you omit a strong call to action, they might even miss the next step of the process altogether, leaving you with the ultimate prize of…absolutely nothing. You’re crushing this!

6. Avoid Guiding Questions.

Another way to confuse and derail your cold calling efforts? Ask the wrong questions in the wrong ways. 

You want to ask closed questions that only require a “yes” or “no” answer to ensure you never get any helpful information about your prospect that you could use to address their pain points and secure a sale. Questions are key to learning more about your prospect and personalizing your call in real-time. So when you do ask questions, make sure to phrase them in such a way as to be unprofitable for both you and your prospect.

Another way to fail at cold calling is to start with a long monologue and only ask a question after the prospect is annoyed, confused, or zoned out. An effective cold calling technique would require you to ask an open-ended question very early in the call to secure your prospect’s interest, get them talking, and help you know how to best direct the conversation moving forward. 

Without this element, your client is likely to check out before you can even get to the meat of your pitch, and from there it’s a steady downhill trajectory toward an unprofitable end. 

7. Don’t Listen.

One of the most important elements of a successful cold calling experience is listening to the client. So after asking your confusing or irrelevant question, make sure you don’t pay attention to the response and focus only on saying what YOU have to say. It’s your call, and you can talk if you want to! 

The less you know about your client, their pain points, and their needs, the better. That way you can offer useless information and services that have no practical value to your prospect or their company, giving you a quick and easy out in no time.

8. Never Leave a Message After the Beep.

It’s very common to not reach your intended target directly when cold calling. Your prospects are busy people, and if they see a number they don’t recognize, they might screen the call by letting it go to voicemail. 

If you’ve been following these tips, you should be woefully unprepared for such an occasion. You’ll have no clue how to translate what was supposed to be a two-way conversation into a short, engaging message that encourages the prospect to return the call (or pick up the next time you reach out). For some clients, a voicemail is a softer, slower way to ease into a conversation and builds brand awareness before having a full-on discussion, so you want to make sure you screw this up in a big way.

If you have a call pushed through to voicemail, you have one of two options.

1. Don’t leave a message at all (or even better, breathe heavily for 15 seconds before hanging up) and leave them to forever ponder your identity.

2. Leave a long, rambling, indirect message that makes it clear you offer next to no potential value and discourages your prospect from ever engaging with your company beyond marking your number as “spam.” 

9. Work Off of Old, Outdated Data. 

If you’re particularly eager to make a bad first impression while cold calling, work off of data that has aged and is no longer relevant. There’s nothing that says “I really don’t care” quite so poignantly as calling to speak with an executive who no longer works for the company. 

Operating off of incomplete information, aged data, and outdated contact lists ensures you stay irrelevant and out of touch with your prospect’s current needs and company environment. Data ages rapidly, so if you stick to your guns and don’t update your database, your chances of messing up somewhere along the line are high.

10. Make Fewer Calls Over a Long Period of Time.

With all these steps combined, your cold calling strategy will be marked by massive amounts of time wasted on non-profitable calls. It will take longer to work through your list of leads, and they’ll be so unqualified anyway that you’re basically destined to fail. 

Fewer calls/unqualified calls = loss of revenue. Time is money, and when you’re wasting all your time botching calls with low-quality leads, that means potential revenue streams with qualified customers are being flushed down the porcelain throne on a daily basis. 

Ok….Opposite Day is OVER!

Phew. That was painful. 

While the tone of this blog isn’t meant to be taken seriously, a profitable cold calling strategy IS serious business.

Thankfully, Squeeze knows every twist and turn along the way. We are experts at qualifying your leads quickly, communicating authentically with your clients, and nailing your cold calls so effectively your prospects can’t resist converting to loyal customers. 

Our numbers speak for themselves. But if you’re still skeptical, we encourage you to put us to the test! Contact us today to learn more and request a proposal. Our plans are performance-based and we don’t lock you into a contract, so if we don’t meet your expectations, you get your money back.

You have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. Let’s help your company “Squeeze” the day—today!