50.000 cold calls later, here's what I learned...

Leon Matschke: Over the last four years, I've dealt over 50,000 phone numbers. And there are a few things that I've learned that I wanted to share with you so that you don't have to go through all the rejections and the trial and error. And so I'm going to show you the exact system, the call structure, the tonality, psychology and mindset that actually books meetings. And I use this to book like hundreds of SMBs, so small businesses all the way to enterprise organizations like Red Bull, Airbus, BMW, McKinsey, Salesforce. and many, many more. And so in this video, I'll show you all of that stuff in hopes that I can save you for years. So let's get into it. So, sales, and this is what I've learned, sales is the number one skill that you can learn in your entire life. There's no single skill that is more important than this. None. Because if you're good at sales, you will never be poor again. That's a guarantee. Especially on cold traffic. If you're able to contact a stranger, then talk to them, and then they're gonna send you a few thousand dollars every month. You can't go broke. Right? Ever. So sales is in everything in life. Getting a job as sales, negotiating a race, like if you have a job as sales, it's not just for businesses. Convincing your team to do something other getting other people to do what you say It's also sales closing people is obviously sales relationships, too Right. You can see this in this graph here Your social life too. Everything just gets better. It's all sales Because you're selling something either a product or yourself or an idea. It's all sales All right, and cold calling is the best training ground for sales because you learn to read people, you learn to listen, you learn to handle rejection, you learn how you can be likable in a very short amount of time. And all of that transfers to everything that you can see here, to your networking, your relationships, your social life. You just become a human overall because your social skills just upgrade. Alright, so you need to know that with every dial that you do, you get better not just at code calling, but at everything. which is a nice bonus. Because if you have the right social skills, you can basically get anywhere in life. If you know the right people, then you can do whatever you want. And getting to know the right people comes down to having good social skills and being useful, which is exactly what sales will teach you. But the thing is, all know cold calling is hard, right? No one wants to pick up the phone. No one wants to get rejected hundreds of times. But the problem is... Cold calling being hard is the point of it. That's why it works. It sucks and that's why no one does it. And that's why it performs way better than any other channel. Right? You get rejected over and over again and most people quit just because of that. And I get it. I get it, fool. I've done so... I've done thousands of cold calls and still to this day I dread picking up the phone and doing it. And let me tell you something as a quick reality check. That will never go away. ever. Alright, so if you're sitting there in hopes that if you just dial enough and it will get easier, of course it gets easier, but it will never stop. being unenjoyable. That's just the reality. But the people who stick with it get paid the most and have the highest conversion rates of any outbound channel. All right? So if you actually have the guts to stick to it and go through the pain of doing it, then you will get amazing results. To get the same amount of meetings booked from emails or DMs or any other channel, you need to send at least 10 times more, at least, if not 50 times more. All right? And that's for positive replies. If you want book meetings, the gap is even bigger. All right. So you have higher conversion with lower volume, whereas other channels you need high volume and you have lower conversion. Now I'm not saying cold email doesn't work. I'll get to that in a second. Because the system that we use is something where you combine emails and cold calls. And this is what I suggest you do. You need to run this at the same time. All right, so you send tens of thousands of emails per day. That's what you do. And then everyone who replies positively gets called within five minutes and everyone else that doesn't reply still gets cold called. And if you do this, you will catch everyone. All right. And that way you combine these things because you do a lot of volume because emails are much easier to scale volume wise. You just send more emails. Whereas if you want to do more recall calls, you need to hire, which is difficult. By the way, I made a whole on hiring. So if you go on my channel, search for the video, how to build a sales team, it's going to show you all of that. the most recent one. Anyways, so if you combine these, then you get... best of both worlds, right? So you have cold email at scale, you send tens of thousands per day. That's ideally what you want to do. And then when you get positive replies, then you call those within five minutes and you spend 70 % of your time roughly on only these. All right. If it's a hundred percent of your time, that's great, but usually it won't be. Okay. But this is like your priority on this side. And then the people who don't reply, Once you're done with these leads, then you just cold call. So you sit there, every time a new lead comes in, you call them right away. And as soon as the phone call is done, if you have no other leads, you go on normal cold calls. And so you're constantly switching between warm and cold calls, which means you reach everyone in the shortest amount of time, the best and most effective way possible. Right? So at the end, you get book meetings with maximum efficiency. And why is calling within five minutes so important? Well, ideally you want the highest booking rates possible. And this diagram shows it pretty well. So here we have booking rate on the left, right? And here on this axis, we have time after positive reply. We can see this window where within five minutes, your booking rate is roughly 80 % or more. All right. And if you wait longer than five minutes, it rapidly drops until you're at like 20. And then if you wait a few days and it drops to some very low number. And so this is the single most high leverage thing you can do. It's just be ready when you get a new lead. It's so important. I cover it so many times yet. I see so many businesses not doing this. They have hundreds of inbound leads sitting in their inbox and they're not calling them. You're missing out. All right. Even if you have to hire a full-time person to just sit there and call new leads without doing call calling, they just sit and wait. Then if you want, Forex the results, I think that's worth it. All right. So you get a 300 % higher booking rate, which is about 80%. And you have a 70 to 30 cold and warm split. That's essentially what you want to do. And so by the way, if you want help setting up the system so you can actually send tens of thousands of emails per day, that's what we do. You could just click the first thing in description, made a video about that. So just enter your info, takes 10 seconds. Watch the video, find out how it works. Pretty easy. Yeah. Let's understand the sales process next, because this was kind of the next lesson that I learned along the way, because everyone gets this wrong and terminology gets mixed up. So I just want to clarify. All right. In your sales process, you have three things. You have prospect, leads and clients. That's fundamentally it. Prospects are strangers that haven't shown any level of interest yet. All right. You reach them through cold email and cold calls. It's all cold. because they don't know you yet, you've never spoken before, they've never replied before. They just fit your initial criteria of someone who could become the client. Then we have leads. And leads are people who have shown some level of interest. And with some level, we split that into kind of a funnel. So you have upper funnel leads, middle funnel, lower funnel. And the meaning of that is just how much interest they showed. An upper funnel lead, for example, is just like if someone gives you their email and first name. for a newsletter. That's a lead because they've shown some level of interest, more interest in a prospect, but it's not a lot. Okay, so that's an upper funnel lead because they're far away from buying. Then you have middle funnel leads, which are like replies to emails because those haven't booked a meeting yet, but they replied that they're interested or webinars or stuff like that. And then you have lower funnel leads, which are people that booked a meeting, all right? They want to talk to you. Those are lower funnel leads. And then obviously you have clients, which are just leads who bought simple as that. Right. And if you take cold calls, they turn prospects into lower funnel leads immediately. All right. So you call a stranger and you book a meeting with them and warm calls convert middle funnel leads into book meetings because that's how cold email works. All right. You take prospects and you get some sort of positive replies, some sort of interest. So you get middle funnel leads and then you call them. with a not warm call because they're not prospects anymore and you just put them one level down to book a meeting. Okay? And in those meetings, you close people, they become clients. There you go. This terminology gets mixed up so many times that I just had to explain this once. ⁓ So let's get into the actual structure of a cold call. All right. So a good cold call has five stages. Okay. We have the introduction. We say who you are. You have the opener where you ask for permission to pitch. You have the pitch itself. Once you get permission where you state the problem, how you solve it. You qualify after they respond positively to the pitch where you want to find out if you can actually help. And then if they qualify, you convert them. So you book the meeting. Simple as that. All right, so. The introduction is pretty simple, right? You need to say who you are and where you're calling from because people need to know that. right. So keep this one or two sentences max, just say, Hey, this is Leon calling from company. You can also say on a recorded line. If you're recording your calls, right? Don't ask just as a quick side note, don't ask, can I record this call? That just adds friction. Just say, Hey, this is Leon calling from Eminence Consulting on a recorded line. How are you? That's a good. introduction. Simple as that, right? There are so many fancy introductions that I've heard. Just there's a thing called the bar test, all right? Every sentence that you say in a script, just imagine you walk up to someone on the street in a bar, for example, a casual environment, and you say that sentence to them. If it works, if it's natural, perfect. for example, if you approach a stranger and you ask them for 28 seconds, or do you want me to leave right now? Like I've heard that opener, it's complete bullshit. That just sounds weird. All right. Don't do that. Just be a normal person saying these fancy openers won't improve your conversion rate by 30%. Right. So just, just be normal because over all of thousands of calls and have coached so many salespeople, every time you made it simple and you just asked, how are you? Instead of just some fancy introduction, it worked so much better. Right. Even if you look at the numbers. Let's say your fancy opener gets a few percentage more to listen to the rest of the pitch. If you look at your whole sales process though, the conversion rates to a client were much higher if you're just a normal person. Okay. So just keep it simple. Then we have the opener itself. So they say, I'm good. How are you? Something like that. I like to use a permission based opener because then you won't get interrupted in the pitch. So you just say, you have a minute? Can you explain what this is about? Right? Do you have a moment? Again, don't be weird. Don't say, do you have 26 seconds or do you want to throw your phone out the window? I've heard it all. It's like, don't. Do you have a minute or a moment so I can explain what this is about? When they say yes, they're way less likely to interrupt you in the pitch. So you've bought yourself time essentially, because remember, they're still a prospect. They're a stranger. They don't know you and they want to know what this is about, which is why saying, I can explain what this is about is important. because then they connect you wanting a minute with them finding out what it's about. And that's where it works. All right. Once they say yes, by the way, if they say no, just move on, right? Don't be weird again. If they don't have a minute to listen to you, it's much more efficient to just hang up and call the next person and trying to objection handle and do a bunch of stuff. All right. Once they say yes, you go onto the pitch. And here it's important that you say what you do. in a way that a 12 year old would understand it. Third to sixth grade reading level is what you're trying to do. So you can just, as a template, we help type of company get outcome by doing solution. Just your pitch is one to two sentences. I want you to really, because I hear a pitch that's like five minutes long. If you can't explain what you do in one to two sentences, then you don't have a good offer. And a product and an offer are two separate things, by the You can have a great product, but you can have a shit offer. And the offer is the thing you present to people. So it needs to be good. All right. So this sentence matters a lot. We help type of company get outcome in simple language, by the way. Bye. some not detailed explanation of the mechanism you use to get them the result. One sentence, two sentences, focus on the pain you solve. Don't just say, we have this amazing feature and this amazing feature and this, no one gives a shit. Just be straightforward, tell them what you do. And then after that, you obviously ask a question because you don't want to end your pitch on a sentence. And you just simply ask either if you don't want to go for the meeting straight away, do you want me to send you a video explaining how it works? Write that always works well. Also for software, can record like a five minute loom, just show them how it looks. Or you can go straight for the meeting and then you just ask, is this something you're looking for right now? Something like that. All right. Is this somewhat interesting to you? Because the leads that will book will say yes to that. It's simple. Okay. Then you go on to qualifying where you just ask some questions to figure out if you can help. You can use qualification frameworks like BANT. So B-A-N-T, budget authority need and timing to check off if they're actually qualified. If you have any specific criteria, then just make sure you ask. Important with qualifying questions is that don't just ask to ask. Make sure that When you get an answer to your question, it fundamentally changes the approach you take, the behavior you take. If you get an answer to a question and no matter if the answer is yes or no, you do the same thing, then that question is useless. Okay, so you can just cut that out. Don't ask questions just to ask. And if you're just starting out, you probably don't need this. So just go for the meeting straight away. Okay. If you notice during the questions that you can't help them, then don't push for a meeting that will waste everyone's time. And you want to make sure you can actually help them. And if you do, then you should be relentless though. with booking the meeting because it's your job as a salesperson to help people get the best solution for the problem they're facing. And so if you know this, that you can genuinely help them, then you should try your absolute best to make sure they get the help they need. Okay. And the last thing is you convert them. So if they qualify, you book the meeting, the sales rep then later handles a close, or if you book for yourself, then you do that. But your job essentially in a cold call again, is to just convert a prospect into a lead. So you open the door to them being able to be sold to. Okay. The next lesson I want to cover quickly is something I already touched on, it's keep it stupid simple. All right. Like I already said, third to sixth grade reading level should be what you're aiming for and whatever you say. And this is not just for cold calls. It's also for emails, for any marketing, for your website, anything that your prospects see should be simple. And if it's not, and if you need to use corporate jargon and all that stuff, then you don't understand what you're selling. All right. You're losing a lot of leads. So I, The amount of times you see this, we leverage an AI powered multi-channel demand generation engine, intent signals, all that AI stuff, right? No one understands what you're doing. You all sound the same. If you just say, we help B2B companies book more sales meetings without hiring more reps, which is what we do by the way. So if you're interested in that, again, you can click the first link in description. Just watch the video. This will perform so much better than some complex pitch just because you want it to sound fancy. So just keep it simple. It will make everything work better. You don't need to sound fancy. Your job is to find people who need your help and then give them the help at the best rate possible. And you do that by keeping it simple. Third grade reading level performs over 150 % better on average than just these corporate things, words. right. So say what needs to be said, remove all the filler words and move on. And if you need to use some industry term that is specific to your industry, don't assume the people you're reaching understand it, even if they're so-called experts in that field. They're probably not. Okay. It doesn't hurt to explain, but 99.99 % of times Every industry term can also be explained in simpler words. So now that you know what to say, right? You also need to know how to say it. And that's where tonality comes in. And everyone overcomplicates tonality, you've heard it all. Use the curious tone, use the laid back tone, use this tone. But you always ask yourself, what does that even mean? Because what does it mean? How do you sound curious? And I learned this from Alex Hermosy, so shout out to him. I didn't invent this stuff, I just used it and it worked great. So I wanted to share this. There are five things you can do that affect your tonality. Three of them are constants, which create your sales tone. And two of them are variables. All right. And so the constants are volume. So you need to speak loud enough so people can hear you. You need to speak slow enough so that people can understand you. And you need to clear enough so that people can understand you. Right. They understand what you're selling. So talk loud enough. Then for speed, if you want specifics, just try to be between 135 and 185 words per minute. That's the ideal range. And with articulation, just make sure you say every word fully. Don't use abbreviations or anything like that. Just say every word in full before you say the next word. Simple as that. If you do these three things, you maximize comprehension, which means now people understand you. And that's good because if people don't understand you, they can't buy from you. Okay. And the other two are variables. Okay. So you have pauses which draw attention to certain words and you have your frequency. All right. You have questions. which either means your voice goes up or it goes down. That's it. And so the way you combine these things is how you can get a prospect to basically you can elicit a response from someone. Because if you go up with your voice, meaning you ask a question and then you shut up, then they know, ⁓ it's my time to respond. Okay, so in your script, if you just do this, Put dashes where you need to pause, put question marks where you want your sales reps to go up with their tonality. That's all you need. It's all you need. You don't need to get fancier than this. If you do only these five things, but you get them right, then you will have a good enough tonality to get really solid results. And also this type of tonality is repeatable. You can teach this to someone because it's always the same. Say every word fully, speak this slow, speak loud. And then just pause when I say to pause, go up when I say to go up. That's it. Because now you're not saying, ⁓ sound curious. And they're like, ⁓ but how do I do that? That won't happen anymore. That's what this is for. All right. And real quick, again, people are going to say, ⁓ but I'm going to sound unnatural. The truth is if you sound like you're reading from a script, it means you don't know the script well enough. So you need to learn it better. You need to learn the script in a way where you know every single word, with every single pause and every question mark, without looking at it. So now that you know that, tonality is also solved, so you know what to say and you know how to say it. But a lot of people still fail. And the reason for that, and that's why I left this for the last part, because it's the biggest reason, alright? Learning a script and learning tonality isn't hard. But a lot of people still don't make it. Why? Well, because they don't understand why people buy. Why do people even buy things? Fundamentally. So, people buy because of one very simple thing. Pain. People buy solutions to their pain. Okay? They don't buy TVs, for example. They buy their way out of boredom. No one buys just the TV. They're bored, they want entertainment, so they buy it. People don't buy marketing, they buy more clients. Fundamentally. And so this is a concept called the gap, gap selling. There's also a book on this, which I can recommend, but I'll just summarize it really quickly. Everyone has a current situation and a future situation where they want to be in. And so their current state, comes with problems, frustrations and consequences of staying in that current state. And then the desired state is basically where they want to be, right? And how they feel when they are there. And then all you need to do is create the gap by asking questions. So in your sales process, which means not only in a cold call, but also in a sales call, your only job is to either make them realize where they are or where they want to be. And with making them realize, I mean that a lot of people know their problems, but they didn't ever think about it because their brain just pushes it away. So when you ask questions about their current situation, like how's that going for you? How long has it been going like that? How has it worked? ⁓ it hasn't worked well. Why do you think that? You activate, like you bring them back and you make them visualize their current state. And then when you ask, okay, where do you want to be? Like how would that look like for you? Let's imagine you got there. How would that feel? If you do these things, you make them visualize a future that they're not in. And guess what that creates? Pain. And people buy solutions to their pain. So now that you've established pain, you've established the gap between where they are and where they want to be. you can present your product as the bridge they can use to get from like to cross over. And this is how you sell. right. And 90 % of your conversations should only be spent on either making them understand and feel the current state or making them understand and feel their desired state. And 10 % should be actually talking about the bridge, your product. But a lot of times it's exactly the opposite, which makes no sense. Because if you don't see a gap, then why would you need a bridge? Makes no sense. And the wider you make this gap, the more you can charge because the more pain you created. and you widen the gap by just asking more questions. It's so simple. It's so easy. So before I go into the next part of why people fail, there is a quote and it says, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate. Which means you need the right mindset. So there's something called a paradigm. And if you haven't heard of that before, a paradigm is basically like a lens, the glasses you have and you see the world through that. It's your beliefs. right? And the thing is how you see something, so what you believe, affects your thoughts, obviously. And your thoughts shape your identity, which affect your decisions, which affect your actions, they, like actions you take, and we can all agree on that. actions you take affect your reality, which essentially means following this chain that whatever you believe to be true will become your reality. And why is this important? Let's say for example your paradigm, your worldview, your belief is that cold calling is easy. This is what you think is true. Well, if you believe this, you will think that cold calling is easy. Great. Which will affect your identity, because now you think that you're good at cold calling because you think it's easy. So obviously you're good at it. And then because you now think you're good at cold calling, you will have decisions which are basically you're going to do more cold calls. That's your decision that you now take. based on the identity you have. So you will do a lot more cold calls. And in those cold calls, you will be more confident, more empathetic, more actively listening, because you do a lot of cold calls. So you learn that stuff, which become actions. You take actions in accordance with the identity you have and the decisions you take. And if you do a lot of cold calls, which are your decisions, and you do good actions, like being confident and actively listening and stuff like that, then you will actually be good at cold calling, which is now your reality. So you thinking cold calling is easy means you will get good at cold calling. And the opposite is just as true. If you think cold calling is hard, right? You will think you're bad at cold calling, which will lead you to make less calls where you're less empathetic, you're not confident, which will make you bad at cold calling. So if you believe your belief directly... affects your reality and they're self-reinforcing because you being bad at cold calling will make you believe even more that cold calling is hard. Which means it just gets worse and worse and worse. So how do you fix that? It's pretty simple. You probably have a lot of faulty beliefs around cold calling, for example, and that's what this video is about, but in general you can always use this. For example, people don't have time for phone questions, scripts make me sound robotic, I'm bothering people by calling, permission-based openers don't work, people don't buy over the phone, you can't call on Saturdays or after 5 PMs, right? These are all the least you hold. And let me tell you, they're all wrong, okay? Because people make time for things that matter, not knowing the script makes you sound robotic, right? If you think you're bothering people, you're literally offering a solution to their pain. Permission-based openers actually proven reduce interruptions and build more trust. People buy solutions. How they do it doesn't matter. So they do do it over the phone or in real life or over email. And with the time you just test everything and let the data decide. And so what you do, what I need you to do is write down all your beliefs that you have about cold callings. So sit down for an hour and just think, write down every one of them. Then next to it, write down where they came from. And then you just invert those and you have a list of positive actions that you can take to get better. It's so simple. Okay. Next. Another thing that lot of people get wrong is that they don't do enough volume. They try to test openers and flip words around in their opener in hopes that their booking rate will go up by 2%. So you have optimizers and maximizers. All right. There's a saying called volume negates luck. You don't need to be lucky. You just need to do a lot. So you can tweak your variables and spend months testing scripts to get maybe five or 10 % more conversion, which is okay. Or you can just triple the amount of dials that you do this week, which is less risky because you don't, you know, change the system because you could also decrease your conversion rates by doing that. It's way faster. You're guaranteed to get more meetings if you do more calls. It's so simple. So you want to aim to be the second one. Always. You learn the most by experience and you only get experience by doing calls. So do more first and then optimize once you have a ton of volume going through your system. Next, people talk too much. You need to talk less about your product and ask more questions. A good call, 80 % of the time should be spent like 80 % of the call, your prospect should be talking. You should only be talking 20 % of the time. A lot of times, again, this is inverse. You just talk and talk and talk and you ask a question, they answer with one sentence and then you talk and talk and talk again. The perfect salesperson says nothing and only asks questions. then there's nothing to disagree with. They just ask. And this works because people believe what they say far more than what you say. So you want them to say stuff. You want them to say that your solution is good, not you. You do that by asking the right questions. So you guide them to the right decision by asking the right questions at the right time. You need to talk less and ask more. They'll convince themselves if you do this right. Okay? Another thing that's important to understand is that motivation increases from deprivation. For example, when you haven't eaten in one hour, so you've gone one hour without eating anything, you won't be that hungry, so your motivation to find food is low. But if you haven't eaten for three days or three weeks, then your motivation will be extremely high because you're about to starve. It's the same thing. It's just a longer timeframe, which is why asking people, have you tried anything to fix this? How long did you try it for? To make them realize the first part of the gap that I talked about earlier is so extremely important. I just wanted to quickly cover that. So the more time they tried something that didn't work, the higher their motivation will be, which means they will buy faster. The next important part is to... use data over emotions, okay? If you ignore everything else I said, fine, don't ignore this part, okay? A 10 % conversion rate, meaning you call 100 people and you book 10 of them. A lot of people think that you will get nine no's and then one yes and then nine no's and one yes, but that's not how statistics work. All right? It could look something like this. You could get 90 no's in a row and then 10 yeses in a row. This is actually just as likely to happen as a previous scenario, but somewhere along call 50, you'd say, something is probably broken. I'm going to change the script and then you change everything and then nothing works again. And this is why you're in this constant loop of, this does work and then it works a little bit and then it stops working. It's because you changed too many things. All right. So stick to a script for way longer than you're sticking to it now, collect the data and then actually look at it once you have a lot of data and don't change anything before just because your emotions are going crazy if you're somewhere in the middle of this red zone. Okay. So track your numbers. and record your calls and you'll know exactly what you need to fix. And so these are basically the most important lessons I've learned over the last four years, doing over 50,000 cold calls, coaching over 80 salespeople on doing this exact thing. So if you just put all of this together, right? You put it, you make an email and call system. And again, if you need help with that, click the first link in the description. You learn to use the five parts of the cold call. Right? You keep everything stupid, simple. You learn your tonality. You learn the concept of gap selling. You fix the way you think. You fix your beliefs. You do a ton of volume and you track your data and make decisions based on that. Then you will become one of the best cold callers in whatever industry you are. If you just do it for a long enough timeframe. All right. And if you want more daily stuff like this, we have a newsletter where you can sign up. get like daily actionable stuff that we've tried. and test it based on 50,000 phone calls, over 10 million emails, right? It's stuff about lead generation sales that actually works, so you can copy and paste into your business. We send that daily, so you can sign up. It takes less than 10 seconds. I just need your email, so I know where to send it. So that's the second link in the description. And if you like this video, then consider subscribing, so I know you like this stuff and you don't miss future videos. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask me in the comments. I read every single one and I'll see you in the next video.