Every cold call you make to try to get a new managed services client should have a script that you follow. You should always be testing and refining your script based on what works for you. Try one script for a week and carefully record your results, then try another script that is slightly modified from the original for a week and compare the results. Continuously work this process and your script will continuously improve.

There are all kinds of ideas on how to cold call. Some of it comes down to personal preference and what feels comfortable to you, but it should primarily be based on performance and results; after all, most people find any cold calling uncomfortable – you can’t let that stop you!

The following script works. I first heard it from my friend Andrew Morgan, but I had always practiced something similar to, if a little less refined than, this myself. I’ve broken it down below to illustrate the specific steps of the call. These steps are critical; the specific language you use at each step is less so. It goes like this:

1. Get their attention

Use an opening line that will get them to pay attention to you. Just using their name is enough:

“Jim – Mike Cooch with Everon here.”

2. Lower their defenses

Humor is often a great way to get them to lower their defenses and be more receptive to your conversation.

“This is a sales call; I’m sure you’re excited.”

Or you may have something local going on that you could reference:

“I’m glad I caught you at your desk; most people are at home mourning that Patriots’ loss last night!”

Just find something that fits your personal style and gets them relaxed a bit.

3. Set an up-front contract

An up- front contract is a way of laying down some ground rules/commitments that make your prospect more comfortable and will give you a better chance of success.

At this stage of the prospecting call, an example would be: “Look, I know I’ve caught you off guard and I know you are busy. If I promise not to take more than 3 minutes of your time, could I ask you a few quick questions to see if it makes sense for us to continue speaking with each other?”

4. Ask questions that demonstrate your knowledge of their world and challenges

An example at this stage in a prospecting call is to say something along the lines of:

“Typically when speaking with other (Their title)’s in your industry, I find that they face the following challenges:

Challenge 1

Challenge 2

Challenge 3

Do any of these challenges resonate with you?”

This type of question is an opportunity for you to establish credibility and demonstrate your knowledge, while giving the prospect the opportunity to “raise their hand” by acknowledging a challenge.

5. Respect the up-front contract you made!

When you’ve used up your initial time say “Mr. Prospect, I’ve used up my three minutes, but it seems like we have something to talk about. Do you have a little more time to continue now?”

This shows that you do respect their time and keep your word.

6. Lower their guard even more and demonstrate proof of your capabilities at the same time

At some point, the prospect will most likely ask something along the lines of “How are you suggesting that you’ll help me solve my problems?”, to which you should reply with something along the lines of:

“Well, Mr. Prospect, I’m not sure that I can. But here is what we did for a similar company in your situation.”

By doing so, you keep yourself from going into a pitch about how you can make their world perfect without even knowing the details of their problems – a common salesperson affliction!

7. Set another up front contract

“Mr. Prospect, I think the best way for us to proceed is to meet and spend some time discussing your specific business needs. If I promise to keep it to 45 minutes, can I come to your office next week to meet with you?”

8. Set the appointment, if that is your objective.

Again, it’s the process behind this cold call that is most important, not the specific language you use. The entire call structure is designed to get a conversation and establish credibility with the prospect.

There are many other cold call script structures, and many of them will work for you. Experiment with several and use what works best for you. Just stay away from anything that is overly gimmicky, and keep in mind that the cold call is just the first step in an often long managed services sales cycle, so do everything you can to leave a good impression and establish yourself as a trusted resource.

Good luck!

MRC

I know people don’t want to hear this, but cold calling for managed services clients works and is a foundation of any small business prospecting campaign. Yes, other things may seem easier and more effective, but cold calling has been around for a long time for one reason – it works.

We built our managed services business for three years doing essentially nothing but cold calling. We had no money, we had no marketing people, and we didn’t have any of the ideas I’m about to share with you – all we had was time and a desire to get off the ground. So we picked up the phone and started dialing.

It’s not sexy.

It’s not easy.

But it works.

To this day, our salespeople make 50+ sales calls each and every day. I think this will always be the case.

You’ve got to learn to love the phone!

Have realistic cold calling expectations.

The reason most people dislike cold calling is because they have the wrong expectations. If you think that every call you make is going to result in someone being glad to hear from you, then you will of course be sadly disappointed.

However, if you understand that for every 50 calls or so you are likely to get one good appointment that may lead to business, then you will be able to find success.

50 calls for every appointment may not sound like a great ratio to you, but considering you can make 50 calls in one day, it’s not that bad. The way to improve that ratio is to “warm up” the calls you make, and every one of the additional techniques we cover will help you do so.

In my next several posts, I’ll share our lessons about how to make cold calling work for you.

MRC

In my last post, I talked about how to cast a net for managed services engineer candidates.  What happens once you have some good potential fish?

Sell the prospect on the opportunity, the company, and your culture.

Sell the prospects? Aren’t they looking for a job from me?  I am the managed service provider after all.

Two good questions and a huge reason companies often fail to attract top talent. The interview is just as much about you selling your company, culture, and team as it is about vetting candidates.

I am not talking about a long sales pitch.  What I am suggesting is that you have a process by which to introduce the opportunity you are hiring for.

You should be able to go through the following with prospects:

• Company history
• Why it is an exciting rewarding place to work
• What the prospect will be part of in the bigger picture
• What your company’s values are
• What your hiring criteria is

Doing this serves two purposes. One it gets the prospects excited to win the chance to work for a company that can articulate things at this level. Two it gives them insight into what you are looking for and you will quickly be able to tell who doesn’t get it as the process continues.

We use a group interview process to make this pitch to candidates and I highly recommend it.

I am able to put 8 prospects in a room and within two hours send half to two thirds home. Getting the process down takes some getting used to but once you have a process for the group interview it is an invaluable time saver. Think about how many times you have had a candidate get through a phone screen and within 10 minutes of meeting them in person you know they will never work at your company? The problem is that you feel obligated to go through the motions of interviewing them and even if you speed through everything it is still a waste of an hour of your time. Get comfortable with group interviews and use them to your advantage.

The group interview process has many other benefits as well:

• See how candidates interact in a team setting – your team works as a team after all
• See how candidates work to get their thought heard by the group
• Give group activates for them to work on – who leads, who doesn’t contribute
• Ask the group who the best candidate in the room is based on their understanding of the job – you will be surprised how much wisdom there can be in group mentality.

D0 a deeper dive into the candidates’ fit.

Once you have sent the unlikely prospects home it is time to conduct an abbreviated individual interview to really assess the candidate’s potential.

In this process you should have a shared language by which to rate people with the members of your team. An example of this is as follows:

Rate each candidate A, B, or C in each of the following categories:

• Cultural Fit
• People Skills
• Critical Thinking
• Tech Skills

In order for this to work your team has to have a shared understanding of each of these categories (they should look familiar at this point) and what they mean to the company.

By doing this you can assure that each member of the team is evaluating the candidates on the criteria that will make them successful in their roll.

Get started.

If you start to use this process in your hiring you will bring a new level of clarity to what you are looking for and it will cut time and money out of the process of hiring.

This is going to take some getting used to and you will have to create and document some new hiring processes but they will be worth their weight in gold once you start to use them.

Josh

Finding managed services engineers that are great at providing remarkable customer service can be a challenge but if you build your processes around this objective your will have much greater success.

Hiring is a process.

I think the most important thing to understand is that it is a process, not an event. You need to know that hiring takes time and plan ahead. If you wait until there is a burning need to hire before you start the process you will surely fall back into the old ways of just taking the best of what you can find.  Engineers are usually looking to get a job right away so it can be hard to keep a pipeline full of candidates.

On the flip side of this is when you lose an engineer because you are not quite ready and they get another offer, they will often come back to you when the time is right if you sell the opportunity well.

The most important part of the managed services hiring process to realize is that if you will need an engineer to start working for you the first of a particular month, you must start this process with enough lead time for success.

Cast a net for candidates

There is an unlimited number of places to post your employment ads. The key to success is testing a few of them out and measuring your success. We have some of our greatest success in these areas:

• Craig’s list – sounds too easy but we have great success here
• Internal referrals – A players like to work with other A players, they tend to stick together
• Career Changers – colleges, certification programs, people looking to get their foot in the door and bring a wealth of other experience to the table (possibly service related)
• Competition – there are a lot of big companies putting reps through extensive service and technology training that you can take advantage by luring them away

Go through what you have caught and determine what to keep.
If you have cast your net properly you will have a lot of resumes to go through, even if you have written your job post to try and weed out the people that do not fit.

You should have someone (HR if you have them) review each resume for characteristics you are looking for. Have the list of what you are looking for in a candidate and check off as many of them that can be identified from the resume and cover letter.

Do not screen resumes for tech skills only and I would even argue on the first screen you should not rule out anyone due to a lack of tech skills as long as they have some tech background or training.

Once the resume screens are done a phone screen should be completed.

The HR person can do this phone screen for you again as long as you have clearly outlined what to look for:

• Phone Personality – we work on the phones in this business so you cannot be a dud
• People Skills – were they able to keep the conversation going, did they have good questions, were they articulate
• Salary Range – why do you want to talk to someone that wants twice what you can afford to pay for the position? I worked with a hiring manager that would talk to everyone and tried to create positions for good people that didn’t fit the particular role he was hiring for. Sure he hired some great people but his budget was way out of whack and the roles that needed to be filled suffered.

Once you have these screens completed you are ready to move on to the next phase.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the interview process and how to “sell” your company to strong candidates.

Josh

This is the third post about the key characteristics of good managed services engineers.  Seek out people with these characteristics, and you’ll be on your way to building a strong service team.

5.  They love to learn

In the managed services business, it is impossible for anyone to know everything about everything, even though there are people you will run into that think they know everything. Great service reps do not need to know everything about technology or about how to provide great customer service.

Great service people are able to instill confidence in people that their problems are in good hands and will be resolved even if they have no clue how to fix the problem at that very moment. Even my most senior techs see problems each week that they have never dealt with before.

Using their critical thinking ability and their people skills they are able to provide a great experience to the customer while learning what it takes to address the situation.

I am not saying that they can spend all day tinkering with technology or reading articles to formulate a plan. They are adept at using the team and the resources available to them in order to learn in the most efficient way possible how to resolve the issue.

They must also be able to lean the technology need to do their job while being great service people.

Great service engineers love to learn!

6. They are enjoyable for you and your team to work with

I am not suggesting you ever hire someone because you like them. In fact, if you hire someone based on the fact that you like them they will almost always disappoint you because you have not factored in the other critical components of making the decision.

I am saying that after you know someone has all the characteristics and values you are looking for you should stop and think about how they will mesh with the team. In fact when hiring service engineers weather you like them or not is less important to how the team will enjoy working with them.

One of the biggest determinants of an employee’s longevity at your company is the perception that they have friends amongst their coworkers. If they are not enjoyable for you and your team to work with, they don’t belong on the team no matter how good they are at what they do.

Make sure you find people with all six of these characteristics

Hiring can be time consuming and it is often tempting to settle for the best of what we have seen. Just get someone into the role because we are buried is the mentality I often seen take over when decisions are being made.

You do not have to pick the candidate who is the lesser of the evils. You can run your process again and again until you find the right fit. Even though it will take more time and possible feel like more pain it will save you aggravation and money in the long run.

Josh