Cold call training 2: Darian Waite from PiinPoint

Welcome to the Cold call training series!

During these 20-30 minute sessions, I meet with SDRs from all over the world (our guest today is from Canada!) and have them mock call me and pitch me their product. After that call, I learn a bit about their product and cold-call them to pitch them their own solution.

Our guest on the show today is Darian Waite from PiinPoint!

At the end of the call I mention that I'll write additional feedback. It's all at the bottom of this blog post. If you need to improve at cold calling and want to join a training, contact us at podcast@altisales.com. I have a different series for top performers called SDR Superstars, training is for beginners, so that much of the audience that is new to SDR work can learn from the same mistakes =)

PS. If you're bored, scroll down to the index and jump directly to the specific sections that are most useful to you

Index:

0:35: Call context

1:35: The first cold call from Darian

2:25: Quick explanation of why Tito is so tough on cold-calling training

3:40: Darian's second try

4:20: Tito explains why he gives 1-2 pieces of feedback per week and no more

5:35: Darian's 3rd try

12:35 Darin talks about his background and training

13:45: Tito's thoughts on the call

16:00: Tito cold-calls Darian

20:20: Darian Analyzes Tito's call

21:00: Tito Explains what he did on the call.

22:00: How Tito as an SDR helps close accounts!.

Additional thoughts and comments for the audience:

First of all, I want to congratulate Darian and thank him so much for putting himself out there. Most people who sign up for this type of training are already good at it (Hector for example, and a few others that are coming soon). A person has to have huge courage, and a growth mindset, to be able to jump on these calls and get recorded while trying to do a call. Darian's willingness to learn is admirable and sets him up for success in the future.

Please take this seriously. To be able to help each other, we need to expose our weaknesses, so any form of online bullying is NOT TOLERATED. Having said that, I do want to give constructive feedback and help the audience think about the different areas where Darian could have improved and therefore learn from his mistakes as well.

1. Darian could do a better job of quickly explain the value proposition. Every SDR must know their "2 sentence pitch"
2. Asking questions as "does that sound correct?", "does that make sense?" or "Is that something you might find some value in?" or "does that sounds like something you do currently?" sounds very unconfident and disturbs the power dynamics of the call giving the prospect too much power. This will get the prospect to hang up after saying "we're not interested". It's an easy way out for them. The better way to do it is to ask the prospect a relevant question such as "how are you finding all your competitive information data?" or "What data do you wish you had, but you've had trouble finding?"
3. A few times the prospect gets cut off while asking a question or speaking, this could be seen as rude and get prospects to hang up. Always listen first and stay quiet until the prospects finished his thoughts.
4. Also, as an SDR, you must be able to ask questions that create a good conversation. In this case Darian sometimes answered my questions but did not ask something else back, or propose a meeting. It created some awkward silence.

If you liked training, and you believe your network would benefit from it, please share it!

Do you work as an SDR? Do you want to get better at cold-calling? Send an email to podcast@altisales.com, I want to feature you in the Cold-Calling Training series.