Software Business in the Middle East

First, I wanted to wrote “I couldn’t”, but then I changed my mind and wrote “I cannot” as I still have a lot of things to learn about how to sell.

While we were working on our demo and then the first version of our product, we thought that the only way to sell it would be the cold calls. I made an experiment calling dozens of doctors. Although we got a very positive feedback that motivated us to move forward, I couldn’t tell those calls was very easy for me to make. The majority of those calls were cold calls when you call somebody you’ve never met before and try to explain your points. It might seem that it’s very easy to make a call – just pick up the phone and call. Yes, it is easy when you call McDonald’s to make an order, but it is absolutely another story when you call somebody to make an order from you.

And one more thing to add – I am not a salesman. I am ordinary geek who’s been programming for many years, and who worked as a manager for the past few years. I got no sales experience at all. I guess this is common for the majority of IT startups.

Finally, I’ve summarize some of the experience I got from all my cold calls.

Duration of Calls

I’ve heard many times from the sales people that you have about 30 seconds to explain your points to somebody. This is approximately the time you have in a lift if you occasionally meet there a person you wanted to talk to.

To start with, I wrote down everything I wanted to tell over the phone to my potential customer, and then I trained myself to make sure my speech was clear and I talked smoothly and not too fast. I got about 45-60 seconds. I didn’t want talking faster, so I cut some of my sentences to make my speech 30 seconds long.

Another good way to train making a cold call is to look at your own reactions and feeling when other people call you – in this case you are the potential customer for them, and they offer you, let’s say, outsourcing to India. This way I understood that even 30 seconds is too long. When I was listening the salesmen who offered me their products, I started getting bored already after 20 seconds. Finally, I made my speech 15 seconds long.

Whom You Talk to

The majority of companies have a secretary who picks up incoming calls. Sometimes I was really surprised how easy it was to get contact details of the person I needed to talk to. But in other cases, there was no way to pass by the secretary as she refused to forward my call forward asking me to send an e-mail instead and explain what I wanted.

Time to time, when you talk, let’s say to Product Manager, you figure out that he is not the decision maker, because the only one who may make decisions is Sales Director. It doesn’t mean that your meeting with the Product Manager is useless – he might help you to convince Sales Director to accept your offer. Very often decision makers delegate the real decision to their staff, and only sign the final official decision.

Making Cold Call Warmer

It is a lot easier to talk to somebody if you have a reference to the third person you both know. It’s amazing how simple it might be to establish contact and good relationships just based on the fact that you came from somebody known to your potential customer.

If you don’t have references, you might use the situation to warm your called call a little. It happened to me several times when I talked over the phone with, let’s say, Mr. Smith and he replied that he wouldn’t be able to help me as it’s not his area, but probably Mr. Black is the right person to talk to. When I then called Mr. Black, I mentioned that I had a discussion with Mr. Smith, and he recommended me talking to you as you are the one who might help me. It makes Mr. Black feel that he got a call from a guy known to Mr. Smith, and hence this guy wasn’t Mr. Nobody from the street.

What is interesting for me, it’s the fact that it hasn’t been particularly difficult to make an appointment over the phone (the goal of cold call is to make an appointment, not to make a sell – although I assume there are guys, who are able to make a sell from the first cold call). Probably, it was easy with making appointments because of the nature of our product, or maybe it’s because of local people mentality to meet face-to-face (we have a potential customer in Saudi Arabia who said they liked our product, but they wouldn’t make any decision to purchase until they meet us face-to-face).

Although I have made hundreds and hundreds cold calls so far, I cannot say it’s very easy for me to make cold call even now. You get some kind of bad feeling inside when you are about to make a cold call. This feeling disappears almost immediately after you start talking. Probably it’s some kind of fear and injection of adrenaline into your veins. This feeling is very similar to what you feel when you come to the boxing ring on the training. You also get this bad feeling in the beginning, but it disappears as soon as you start the fight. And you definitely cannot find any trace of this feeling after you have missed couple of punches

Next time I will talk about the result of all our cold calls and about how we sell our product now.