I hear this from Sales Directors all the time:

"We are very good at getting in front of prospects but we don't convert enough. We have a closing problem."

While it is possible that your team needs to brush up on their negotiation skills, it is always important to look at how your meetings are being created in the first place.

Because nine times out of ten, you do not have a closing problem. You have a qualification problem.

The Anatomy of a Terrible Cold Call

Listen to the recordings of your SDRs or your Account Executives. If your team's cold calls sound anything like these phrases, you are in trouble:

  • "Let's just put in a placeholder..."
  • "I'm in the area on Thursday, can I come visit?"
  • "Let's just compare what we have to what you are currently using..."
  • "Let's organise a quick meeting and we can bring in the decision-maker later."

If this is how your team is opening doors, then your conversion rate will always be terrible.

Why? Because these aren't qualified meetings. This is a hit-and-hope strategy.

Sure, some prospects will say yes just to get you off the phone, or because they are mildly curious. But most of them will never buy from you. You are filling your calendar with the vanity metrics we constantly warn against.

Stop Booking Meetings. Start Qualifying.

Your job when cold calling is not simply to "book a meeting." Any order-taker can trick someone into a 15-minute Zoom call.

Your job is to book meetings with qualified prospects.

Before you ever send a calendar invite, your team needs to be uncovering the answers to these fundamental questions:

  • Do they have a specific problem that I can help with?
  • Is that problem actually worth fixing? (Is there a cost to doing nothing?)
  • Have they already tried fixing it?
  • Why hasn't their previous solution worked?
  • Have they given up, or are they actively looking for a way out?

This level of discovery requires confidence. It requires reps who aren't afraid to disqualify bad fits early.

Problems Always Flow Downstream

All of your sales problems come from upstream.

If you are frustrated with deals stalling in the pipeline, prospects ghosting you after the demo, or proposals sitting unsigned, look at the very first interaction.

If your conversion rates are poor, it is highly likely that your cold calls suck too. Fix the start of the process, and the end of the process will take care of itself.

This is the exact methodology we drill into teams during our SDR Sales Training and Account Executive Training. We stop the begging, and we start the qualifying.

Happy dialling.