10 Years of Expert Cold Calling Advice in 31 Minutes (B2B Sales)

all right man back at it going to do a super deep dive into cold calling and the reason I wanted to bring on Connor specifically to do a very deep dive into everything about cold calling is because we've never had the stance at higher levels that our cold calling method is the best I wanted to show you someone who has certainly elements of what we talk about but developed their own style at Oracle Connor has a proven track record as a top performing SDR he's an SDR manager for two years where his team was consistently

the number one team in his org at Oracle like this is about as legit As It Gets In terms of people you're going to learn cold calling from and Connor uh before I kind of brag on you too much like feel free to add to that and just share your background so everyone's aware here of like how deep we're about to get into the sauce yeah thank you for the warm intro this is this is one of my favorite topics is is coal calling I think it's a really important skill to learn when people are

first breaking into that SDR job they know it's that's something that's coming that they probably haven't done before and it causes so much anxiety there's many other parts to the job obviously when it comes to being successful in the SDR role but coold calling is one of those skills that everyone knows is coming it's really hard to learn I think a lot of the training out there personally that I see all over the web we're on YouTube YouTube LinkedIn it's a it's misleading and I basically just came up with Frameworks that worked for myself and

if your mind is similar to my mind and I know there's a lot of you out there because just from the number of people I've coached there are a lot of people who had some of the same struggles following that ad advice is me when I started out I know these Frameworks that we're going to cover today are going to serve you very well and I can say that with confidence not just from doing it myself but actually coaching it to hundreds of people yes where I work but also outside of Oracle as well yeah

for sure and if I haven't mentioned it already also Connor has a YouTube channel that's Linked In the description so definitely check it out there for deeper Dives but Connor I know as a starting point one of the things we wanted to talk about is like the early days of us cold calling I like if I listen to my early coold calls I have a few of them saved it's like disgusting to me but before I get into that I'd be curious like when you started just talking about what it was like mentally maybe some

of those early things that you were trying to mimic from other you know gurus or personalities or influencers and uh yeah we'll peel back from there yeah so I think I started in the same place as a lot of people who maybe are watching here I was someone who I was going through training I'd like to think I had the right qualities like I was there to work hard I was taking notes I was reading the books I had read the Challenger sale and all that stuff beforehand like I was ready to go and I

thought when I was going to start the SDR job and actually get in seat out of training that I was going to hit the ground running and something happened when I first started making coold calls I would just like freeze up or when I would follow the techniques that were commonly taught like leading off with open-ended qualifying questions and using permission based openers and these things that didn't feel comfortable for me I could I felt like I couldn't get any Rhythm into any of these calls and worse than that I wasn't even learning anything from

the calls like that weren't going well because I didn't even have the capacity to think it was like I would be on the call and I'd be so worried about what comes next after they answered a certain question that I would lose track of the initial goal when you're actually making a cold call which is to set a meeting um so for me I actually struggled I I went from thinking I was going to be very hot out of the gate to I think I was the last person on my SDR team to book a

meeting over the phone it took me like a month and I practically had I kid you know I I had to beg a guy like I was I knew I had him he was interested and I don't remember exactly what I was said but I it was along the lines of like please just take this meeting I'm going to send you the invite and the guy was somehow nice enough to accept it and that's how I got my first meeting but after weeks of working so hard and doing the things that I see commonly taught

and how I was trained I was like something's wrong here because I'm putting in the effort like I'm showing up early I'm working I'm making the dials and I don't feel any better at cold calling now call it 6 weeks in than when I started out it was really a around that 2 to three month Mark where I flipped my strategy which we could maybe talk about in a second and my results instantly also flipped and I started becoming a lot more effective on the phones yeah I I definitely well we'll definitely get into that

for everyone's reference Connor's going to break down what he's taught to literally hundreds of people now at Oracle and like for everyone's reference Connor starting out as probably the slowest member in his start group went on to like literally make trainings that Oracle uses companywide to like train reps he has videos in Oracle correct me if I'm wrong here that are are used uh to train people on cold calling so maybe maybe just diving in again for someone who's just getting started or still struggling with cold calls I'd love to prob into more where you

were struggling early on you said a couple things that stood out where you felt like you didn't even like you couldn't even take feedback or learn from the calls that were going poorly why was that what were some of the things that you were doing that just really like handicapped you all around so yeah a lot of it it it was not having a plan like a plan of attack or some form of framework that I could follow so that I knew what to do like when that Prospect says hello every call call starts when

someone answers the prospect says hello I knew I was going to do ab c d as soon as that happened where when I was following a lot of the training it was a lot of you want to ask open-ended directional questioning and get them talking and it's stuff that sounded good but in practice I found I was getting a lot of push back and what I was realizing was I'm interrupting these people in the middle of their workday like they're not thinking about software like all day like sometimes I think we get in our own

world that these people are just waiting for our calls no you're calling fi like I sometimes I call Finance people for example they're probably ripping together some spreadsheet trying to get like something done for their CFO before the hour ends and it's like 3 minutes before the meeting they're cramming and you coold call them and you start asking them so what are you currently using for your planning and budgeting system and how's that going for you are there any initiatives in the near future and they're like dude I have a meeting in 2 minutes like

I'd maybe talk about this down the line but like I'm not going to have like an 10-minute Discovery call with you on a random cold call so a lot of the training I was following was I just didn't have a plan I didn't have like a consistent framework to follow a lot of other stuff like the permission based openers I just found very uncomfortable and it taught is Gospel like you have to use permission-based openers or you could combine it with a pattern interrupt like hey do you have 27 seconds for me to tell you

why I'm calling and then you can decide whether you want to continue the conversation and like when that's done right it can work and I always preface this by saying use what's comfortable for you I don't have anything against that stuff if it's comfortable but what I can't stand at times is when trainers teach this stuff is Gospel like there's no other way and sdrs are just really uncomfortable using it and they struggle to get any sort of Rhythm on cold calls and then they just give up on cold calling quite frankly and that's why

you see a lot of sdrs out there who maybe they do end up promoting to the account executive role but they get there strictly through email they act there are so many account Executives out there who actually never learned how to coold call because they were like this is too hard none of what I'm trying is actually working I'm not getting better at this I'm booking enough meetings on email let me just double down on that and it's just such a crucial crucial skill you miss out on it's like riding a bike like once you

learn how to co call it's so hard to learn but once you do you never forget how to do it and it's a skill you'll have for the rest of your life that's a money-making skill that's valuable and it's Unique because a lot of people don't go through the trial and error and the pain of learning how to do it yeah I and I think even aside from directly cold calling which I 100% agree is very valuable it's like if you get to a point where you can guide an effective cold call in set a

meeting that pays dividends and for instance Discovery calls or even now when I'm working with more Enterprise and strategic clients when they come in everything has seemingly gone great some director you've never heard of comes to the call and is like Hey we're actually really dissatisfied with this and we don't want to renew unless you do X Y and Z like handling all of that on the fly if you just work at a solid brand where you can more or less barely scrape by by just doing email it's going to handicap you when you have

like real strategic level conversations down the line because you haven't quite frankly like at least from from my perspective like gotten the kicked out of you like while you learn these types of things so um maybe maybe transitioning a little bit now to to when things started to turn around not like you went from zero and the next day like everything was perfect but like maybe talking to that person that struggling looking for those first couple of things to dig dig themselves out of a hole what really started to click for you when did it

start to turn around and then we'll get to more of like your actual Frameworks and methodologies that that you teach so when I when it started to turn around it was out of frustration I it was I don't remember the exact day but it was probably a day where I went in a conference room ripped like a hundred dials and got nowhere and it it might have been I kind of remember this one blowout call that I feel like might have been the call not positive on that but I had this like five minute call

where I was doing executing the typical sales training perfectly like asking the directional questions like and it just went it was a it felt like a good conversation and I really thought I was going to get it and then they were like ah actually just send me an email and like quickly got off the phone and I sort of had this realiz and I yeah I sort of had this realization once they got off the phone I was like I just spent 10 minutes on the phone with that guy and I didn't even ask him

for a meeting the reason for my call like is to I want to set a meeting like yes you can have some back and forth but I just spent 10 minutes and didn't even ask the person the whole point of the reason I picked up the phone in the first place and I kind of had this realization in my head that if you don't ask for the meeting you have a 0% chance of booking the meeting you have to to book the meeting you have to ask for it so even if you ask for it

and let's say your call call script is awful you get through it but you at least meet L ask like are you free next week even if it's not great you have a nonzero probability of booking the meeting it might not be high maybe it's a 1% chance but I basically told myself in that moment that going forward I was going to take control of these cold calls rather than doing most of the listening at the outset and asking a bunch of questions and trying to get some random person whose day I just interrupted to

open up to me I'm going to take control and answer three questions who I am why I'm reaching out to them specifically and then stay what I want which is time on their calendar and at first I probably wasn't great at it but I could feel with that structure the calls started going better and even when I got told no it wasn't as bad of a no because in my head I'm like at least I asked like at least I gave myself a shot of booking that meeting instead of just asking a bunch of random

questions and hoping they sounded interested enough to the point where I could eventually go for the meeting so I came up and I didn't name it this at the time this is more after I became an SDR manager and had to coach people this stuff and how I made this transition I call it a value statement I call it a value statement framework where it's a little bit contrary to what's taught out there that you want to be doing most of the listening in the value statement framework we're going to take control deliver value first

I say the bo burden of proof is on us as the coal caller to deliver that Value First and convince them that we may be worth spending more time with before we start asking for anything in return and what we typically ask for in return too early are these questions are are for their time and asking them about what they're using how that's currently going are there any other initiatives going on right now like yes you can ask that but you have to deliver Value First and what I found is once you get good at

the value statements a lot of people just say yes right out of the gate because you can make them more targeted and we could go really into it on it's designed to be a repeatable structure so that it's almost the same words every single time you kind of just plug and play a few keywords depending on who you're calling to make it more targeted M so that was really the big mindset shift though was that I decided I'm going to take control of these calls and go down swinging I would rather get told no asking

than have a 10-minute conversation and just get a quick send me an email see you later click yeah fair enough and I I I think that that's a really great overview because I feel like a lot of people yeah there there's different symptoms some people come into aggressive they're quite frankly like not handling a convers smart enough I feel like that's less common it's it's very are I don't know maybe 10 20% of people are not afraid of calling but then don't have like the mental chops to like actually lead a combo so when you're

talking about things like value statement let's maybe start to for the person watching or listening start to Define like what that looks like right whether it's a framework or whether it's a script like how do you articulate this what's the repeatable thing that viewers can take away from this video so there's three steps to a value statement there's the opening of the co call there's delivering the value statement and then once you state what you want the final part is the close and it's meant to be this framework every single time so I can start

with the opening because the opening is one of these things I teach a little differently than a lot out there is to keep it simple repeatable ideally it goes the same way every single time I to this day just say how are you but what I call it is an assumptive formality basically what I'm what's going on in my head is how do I get this Prospect to just give me a quick formality back and once they do I'm going to immediately start going into who I am why I'm calling and what I want and

get rid of the those thoughts in their head like H this is a coal call I didn't know this person who's reaching out I wasn't expecting this so the key to the assumptive formality is using a downward inflection I say how are you you can say how have you been again contrary a lot of training out there is like oh you can't say how are you you but it's like this is how normal people communicate with each other like if you were calling someone and it was a sales call you'd say how are you I

think at this point the pattern interrupt stuff and the permission based openers that maybe used to actually be a pattern interrupt Now you kind of have sales breath in my opinion when you start saying things like hey you have 30 seconds for me to tell you why I'm calling so I more say hey Jim this is Conor marray call from XX company how are you the key is that downward inflection where slight difference if instead I said hey Jim this is Conor Murray call from X company how are you it's it's very like same words

but the upward inflection is like this person might actually wants to know how I'm doing and might be here a while where the first one is more designed to get them to just say most of the responses I get are along the lines of uh good how are you some are like quick they're like yeah good how are you some are confused like uh good how are you but whatever it is I just say good yeah I'm just reaching out because or the reason I'm calling is and then that's when I start going into my

30second value statement I like to keep it around 30 seconds I answer those three who I am why I'm calling and state what I want which is time on their calendar and now a lot of those objections you normally face early on in the call like where did you say you were calling from how' you get my number how who knows how they responded do you have 30 seconds for me to tell you why I'm calling they're like ah no I'm going into a meeting today the goal is to limit variants get a formality from

the Prospect and then as quickly as possible start delivering value and they'll very quickly forget this is a coold call and that they weren't expecting the call and start listening like oh this person's rattling off a bunch of prior ities that are important to me how they solve them they came to play ball yeah it's kind of how I look at it what's an example there so you do the downward reflection how are you they're like I'm good how are you what's an example of a value statement there that you have for 30 seconds yeah

a basic one like if I was calling someone in a finance department in most of these it's designed to be yeah 30 seconds 45 Max I would say hey Eric this is Connor call from Max company how are you good how are you doing well good I'm just reaching out because I'm part of the team that supports why company regarding back office Financial applications and we work with companies in the retail industry specifically on priorities related to strategic planning budgeting forecasting usually by reducing the Reliance on Excel and automating a lot of those monthly Financial

reports and I know I kind of called you the blue here so I'm more just looking to set aside some time next week just to get introduced in align with your priorities going forward how's your calendar look on Wednesday or Thursday so that's kind of an example I chose retail as an industry and I could break I have whole videos on on my channel where I break this down but you could keep that structure and call most Finance people and that's going to be a relevant script for them so this is how you design a

script for sdrs that's they don't have to think that much you can literally so this is what I did when I was new and starting to try this stuff I would literally just rehearse that like 10 minutes a day and at first I didn't sound confident but over time I developed little pauses that were comfortable for me little words that were comfortable for me there's no EX value statement script that I have that works for everyone it's more that framework of taking control and then answering those three questions I've found this to be a way

more effective way to coach sdrs than like open-ended directional questioning that they're just not ready to riff and go back and forth when it's the first time they're making coold calls to like Executives yeah what one thing I want to double tap on there first of all that's great and also just to mention again like you detail this and a ton more on your Channel but I also think while we're kind of on this thread and kind of digging into this deeper now my natural question that I think of when you get done with that

is what are common objections you get there right and how do you handle those so yeah and that this is what I teach reps is try and be prepared for the most so here let me take a step back once you physically this is what I like about this framework is once you physically get that out who you are why you're calling and what you want there's only three possible outcomes now they either give you what I call a hard no where they basically say take a hike take me off your list click and they

hang up and there's nothing you can do so you don't even need to be prepared for that outcome the other outcome is they say uh sure like a when you get good at it a lot of people will just say sure out of the gate and they might ask you some questions after that but they'll say uh yeah sure Wednesday doesn't work but maybe Tuesday in the morning or something in which case book the meeting so two of the three outcomes are very self-explanatory either make your next dial if they just hang up on you

nothing you can do they say yes book the meeting otherwise try and be prepared for the most common objections so a common example of a common objection I recommend people make flashcards for is hey Conor thanks for reaching out we already work with XYZ competitor so I don't see why it makes sense to meet I would immediately instead of asking them so how's that currently going for you how's XYZ system going for you are you open to making any changes like because you're not going to convince them to do that on and off the cuff

C call I more double down and meet them at the end and say got it yeah that's actually why I was reaching out we work with customers of EX competitor all the time so if there's ever a fit we can move ahead but this is more just to get introduced in align with your priorities going forward and introduce you to our team that will be supporting you in this area for the foreseeable future so does XYZ date work for you and now you've just given yourself a second shot on net that's a nonzero probability of

booking the meeting but here's the thing is now if they still say no to that which a lot of time I'd say the majority times they still do they push back but usually they'll have some sort of of question for you or go deeper into why they still don't think it makes sense to meet and this is when you can use the opportunity to open up the conversation here's the key distinction I have with a lot of sales training out there is that now is that is when you can start asking for something in return

because you have delivered value first so instead of leading off with questions at the beginning of the call before you've even answered those key questions who you are wire call and what you want now they clearly know again yeah who you are wire they know the intent of your call and here is where you can start opening up the conversation but I still do recommend pulling it back to setting a meeting because realistically I'd rather be having this deep dive discussion on an actual Discovery call than have my first one chance be on an off

the cuff cold call when they're not expecting it yeah for sure and maybe just restating of how we got here and and also a few points now so you basically asked for time twice you've done the intro with a downward inflection how are you and then you've given that 30 to 45 second Val statement with the ask for time they said hey we're using a competitor so it really wouldn't make sense to you know talk you've then reiterated like hey it's just an introduction conversation this is the team that supports you for the foreseeable future

now they've rejected your second line of questioning and say hey no I don't really think it makes sense right now what's a common example from here of where you might coach someone to take the call whether it's question or something to talk about Etc yeah and what's happened here at this point is you haven't built enough credibility in their eyes yet like what you're ultimately doing here at a high level is you're trying to sell time you're trying to sell that you and whoever you work with and the way you're communicating you're valuable enough to

where it makes sense for them to set up set aside more time to meet with them so here's where I would open up and this is going to change depending on where you work but if they said we already work with XYZ competitor and double down so the time they still didn't meet then I would start telling them well typically what we see and how we work with customers of x YZ competitor is this and ask them some question related to like what are they using for that Gap that your company fills when working with

that competitor and getting them to open up there but then I still recommend you pull it back but you kind of want to Signal your expertise in these questions that you actually understand how your solution fits in with that solution and this is just a competitor example there's all sorts of examples where you should have flash cards ready where it's like oh we don't have the timer bandwidth right now reach back out 6 month down the line you want to have some sort of pre-prepared response I recommend like the top three to five objections have

those down before you start branching out and worrying about Niche objections because then you're giving yourself the best probability to book the meeting and that's how I look at it your first probability is when you ask for the meeting initial initially your second probability is when you double down and ask for time the third one is when the conversation opens up and you ask one more time there yeah yeah for sure and I think lot lots that resonates I think it it's it's interesting to hear how you've architected it because I think there's similarities and

differences from the way I do it but exactly that it's like any type of objection for me is never going to be like okay this Call's over now granted like yeah like at some point if they keep saying no and like they're clearly losing steam like you probably lost the call but I think yeah it's funny how so many people will hear like an objection or like oh we're using their competitor and it shuts you down they have no idea how to handle it or they haven't even thought just about like when you plan ahead

for these types of objections and I'm using your competitor or we talked to you guys in the past it's not a fit all these different things like when you actually plan ahead for those you can spin it and I'm not even saying that it's a guaranteed like to get a meeting but people will hear that and be like ah damn and like close and just miss so many opportunities like last thing I'd say before I hand it back to you to close is like I literally had a call where I reached out to an Sr

a site reliability engineer who covered the East for this company and I was trying to sell them on this deployment technology a past company I worked on I saw from the news that they were moving from Amazon to Google cloud and I reached out to him I was like hey I saw you're in the midst of a transition to Google cloud and using all these different toolings and he's like no we're not using that we just started using this other tool which was actually the open source version of the Enterprise version that I sold so

for those of you watching it they were basically using the free tool of the Enterprise version that I called I literally my next call was to an SRE on the west coast who covered the West Coast team and I opened the call by saying hey I just spoke with your your team in the East who's developing on Argo which is like the free open source tool and same exact thing I was like I was wondering if we could sit down and show you how we're working with XYZ to go through Cloud migrations from AWS to

gcp got the meeting booked in like 15 seconds right the first guy hung up on me I was like damn but I actually extracted something meaningful by staying there trying to just stay through any type of objection get as much as I could and parlay that to the next one so anyway that kind of ties into where I wanted to ask you kind of in closing right this is what you teach RS when they're first new on the phone right I think it's a good fallback it's a like to your point it's a lot more

manageable early on to handle objections even if it sounds a little bit scripted and robotic early on you at least build like the emotional and psychological capacity to like actually handle these objections right so as someone gets better and better how do you see them taking this framework which again is not a script this isn't like the golden thing you have to say every call how are you seeing top performers on your past teams that have taken that and enhanced it or how have you developed that over time and made it sharper and sharper so

the whole framework is designed the one the way I just laid it out is to help new sdrs maintain control of the process and be as prepared as possible so that at every layer of the call they are at least prepared for what to do because where I've seen s new SDR struggle is once once things go off script or what they're not anticipating they just don't have the confidence the product knowledge they don't have the confidence to answer the questions they're getting asked and you start to hear their tonal tonality falter and the call

just goes south and then if they're never taught a different way they just sour on sales in general and there's so many people who have probably just given up thinking they just suck at sales or suck at coold calling when really they just needed a starting point to help them maintain control and get used to hearing yes the key difference as sdrs progress and quite frankly once you're in the account executive role is you can modify this framework to to go to not be as rigid so an example of this and this helps a lot

of people I teach new sdrs to tell them who you are why you're calling and what you want and get all three of that out of the gate what I teach more experienced sdrs who are used to going a little off script and having a little back and forth is I still preach the assumptive formality take control as quickly as possible tell them who you are try to try to sound a little more targeted maybe based on the industry this person's in or their title trying to make who you are a little more targeted but

you don't need to overthink it so say who you are and then why you're calling but then truly just finish with a statement and get their feedback to what you just told them before you go into what you want first you save that bullet in the chamber instead of immediately going for it you TR and this allows you to to beef up the wire calling too to keep it 30 seconds you can add a little more value in there but there's a misconception in my opinion I love statements I don't think salespeople think they need

to be the one leading asking questions questions you can truly just tell someone here's who I am here's how I here are the priorities and challenges that I solve that are relevant to you and here's how we solve them sometimes there's a little like 1 to 3 second awkward pause but then they start telling you how what you just said to them is relevant and now you have more information to go off of and you can start doing a little bit of that Discovery but then now you have that bullet in the chamber after you've

had a little bit of back and forth and more information to act off of and you can say hey and by the way I was actually more reaching out because I wanted to set some time next week and kind of naturally go in that direction because yes on on aggregate it is a little weird to go straight for the meeting but I think it's a better framework to get sdrs used to doing that and once they've heard yes and they know cold calling is possible and something a skill they can learn that's when I dial

it back and get a little bit more advanced and teach them to open up the conversation a little bit more yeah and may maybe just making this like super explicit for anyone listening so I know You' given the example of what you and asking for the time right out of the gate what's an example of a statement as opposed to that question asking for time right out of the gate it'll be a variation of what I did earlier but I might beef it up a little more based on like let's say I'm just going to

try and come up with one if I'm calling into a we'll do Finance again in the life science account I'll get the assumptive formality hey how are you good I'm just reaching out because I'm part of the Strategic life science team that supports X company regarding back office Financial applications so we work on things related to clinical trial planning commercialization supply chain execution usually by reducing the amount of spreadsheets and point solutions that you're using for that and G getting everyone on a common s system and a single source of truth but you finish with

a statement and if you just pause they'll start a lot of times they'll just start sharing oh we we use this or this is how we do it now and they might have a question for you but you get a you can get a sense of their Vibe whether they received it positively and you can do way better than what I just did that was like off the C but if I this is what I preach is making lists upfront that are as homogeneous as possible so it ideally is like you make a list of

as many people in your territory that are in the life science Industry that also work in finance and then you can come up with one value statement that's going to be pretty targeted towards that's how you can just go go go and move fast at a high quality because in the end this framework I've taught is to help sdrs this is for your you you can set aside your a accounts that you want to be more strategic with this this is for the other sea of accounts and contacts that you have in your territory to

help you make like go from making $25 a day to $100 a day without sacrificing quality Y Man uh ton of great takeaways and like we could probably do a part two on this I'm sure and I'm sure we will throughout this weekend where we're filming uh more episodes but also for those of you that made it this far like if there's any questions you have fire away in the comments below as well we definitely appreciate that more than happy to ask questions also just want to restate Conor's YouTube channel is in the description he

actively monitors his comments as well so check out his other deep Dives as well where he goes into this even further has templates he wi boards a lot more than I do and uh I think it's great so definitely check that out and lastly just mentioning Connor is also part of our team at higher levels as well so he is a coach he is going to be contributing content in the future and also available on live calls but Connor before we hang it up um I guess the only thing I haven't asked like And subscribe

if I haven't over asked you for a ton of stuff now but uh Connor anything else man this is great by the way I really appreciate it yeah I mean I would just say push through there's so many people who give up on cold calling and email can get the job done I this is my take that over time I actually think a lot of the email stuff's going to become a less effective as like Ai and automation just becomes so easy and everyone's sending the same type of emails people just are inherently going to

learn to ignore that stuff in in their email inbox and I I truly think it's the people who can pick up the phone make a dial like that's such a good money-making skill whether you stay in Tech sales or just it's just going to serve you for the rest of your career but if you don't push through and learn that there's going to be a little piece of you on the inside as you let's say you continue through the tech sales Journey that's like it just feels like you're missing something like I never learned how

to do that and it's just doable so yeah yeah well man great place to end I'm sure we'll talk more about it on future episodes and appreciate everybody if you made it this far [Music]