Cold calling, soliciting potential customers who were not expecting to speak with you, is one of the least liked tasks in sales. A recent blog post by Soffront explains how to take some of the chill out of cold calls through planning, knowing your product and researching your prospects in order to make a convincing pitch.

In the planning phase, set clear objectives for what you want to accomplish. Making sure that you know exactly how much leeway you have beforehand if you plan to customize a deal to a potential client helps with building credibility and chances of success.

Second, you want to know your product thoroughly and believe it’s worth the money. You should easily be able to rattle off numbers and statistics backing up your company’s claims of fabulous, life-changing products and services, in addition to having some case studies on hand to illustrate the point. Those case studies will help paint a picture in your prospective client’s mind where you and your team alleviate bottlenecks, increase productivity, and generally make things less stressful.

Researching your prospects is a huge deal as well, because you want to ensure that there is a viable match before wasting your and someone else’s time.  You should be able to tell what their needs are, why your company is the best fit to address those needs and explain the challenges they face and how you can fix them.

You should also prepare yourself for objections. Objections are a good thing because it means your prospect is listening. The more objections you plan for, the better results you will have. After researching, introduce a product or service that most appeals to your prospects.

Finally, conveying a sense of genuine warmth and personality will help make you sound more trustworthy and like someone they wouldn’t mind having a second talk with. Strong conversational skills with genuine warmth can give you an edge, and you want to infuse it into every step of the process. In a corporate landscape where people are fast talkers and many transactions are sterile affairs, make an effort to sound like a human being who enjoys what they do, and who enjoys is solving other people’s problems.

The Soffront CRM application is comprised of marketing automation, sales automation, customer support, employee support, defect tracking, knowledge management, order processing, asset management, CRM portal and mobile CRM. The CRM application is completely Web-based and cab be deployed in days. Soffront provides the CRM products, services and the support to make your CRM initiative successful.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.

Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO. Follow us on Twitter.