I am 54 years old and I have been picking up the phone for technology companies since 2001. It works. It still works. And every year I get more convinced that most people have simply forgotten how to do it.
Let me tell you how a good call actually goes, because there is no theory in this. Only years of doing it.
There is no script
I don't have a script. I can't have one.
When I call into a manufacturing company in DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) and I get the Head of Tooling on the line, he doesn't want to hear my pitch. He wants to ask his own questions. "What are the largest tools you can actually manufacture?" And when it's the head of maintenance, he asks me something like: "How does dry ice behave in a really humid plant?"
No script survives that. You can't read your way through a real question from someone who knows his shop floor better than you ever will. You can only have a conversation. And a conversation needs rapport.
This is why cold calling is not a job for a 25-year-old who just wants to read his lines. Nothing against being young. But if you have never seen a production plant from the inside, if you cannot even picture the room the other person is standing in while he talks to you, and you answer with long, complex sentences you memorized the night before, then forget it. The person on the other end feels it in three seconds.
What I actually do on the call
I ask questions. Real ones. "I'm curious, how do you solve this today?" I am interested, I am not selling. There is a difference and everyone can hear it.
I admit what I don't know. I tell them straight: I am not the specialist here. That honesty buys me more trust than any clever answer would.
I say what we do not do. Being clear about what we don't offer sharpens what we do offer far better than any list of features. Specialization is credibility.
And I stay a person. "Can you still point me in the right direction? Who should I really be speaking to?" People help people. They rarely help a sales machine.
Often they hear my accent first. I am from Vienna, and you can hear it. Germans, and I mean this warmly, tend to like that dialect. "You're Austrian, aren't you? Whereabouts?" And there we go: I tell a story, he tells one back. Because here is the thing nobody wants to admit: almost nobody remembers my LinkedIn message or my email. Not one word of it. And that's fine. We're talking now. People remember stories. They do not remember the CO2 pellet size.
The small things that decide everything
Have your manager's calendar open. On the call. Right there. The moment you say "I'll send you a few times by email," you have already lost half of them. Every hand-off to later is a chance to drop out.
Don't be afraid, and don't be fast. Yesterday I called someone completely cold. He was not expecting me at all, it was the definition of an unwanted interruption, and we still talked for 25 minutes. No rush, no fear. I created curiosity, I asked the questions that matter, and I told him I would pass on as much as I could to my colleague so he shows up well prepared. By the end of the call the meeting was in both calendars, and both sides will walk in well prepared. Tomorrow my client talks to that same person. And I already know it is going to be a good conversation.
And honestly, the human line often does more than any of it. "Sorry for catching you right in the middle of lunch." That one sentence has opened more doors for me than any value proposition ever did.
That's the whole secret
Calling works when you go about it as a human being. Not as a technique. Not as a funnel step. As a person talking to another person who happens to know a lot about tooling, or dry ice, or injection molding, and who might just enjoy the conversation.
The phone never stopped working. We just stopped being human on it.
Martin Weiss is co-founder of BizXpand. We run complete outreach into DACH manufacturing, email, LinkedIn, ads and the phone, under one method: TrueReach™. Precise and human.