Episode 352: From Cold Calling to Client Conversion

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:01:13 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I have the pleasure of hosting Jennifer Frye today. She is a distinguished sales and marketing expert with a profound understanding of creating, building, and filling sales pipelines. I do not know one salesperson out there that doesn’t need that. That is amazing. Jennifer brings a wealth of experience from her work at Appreciated Asset where she helps clients transform their business strategies into measurable success.

0:01:44 – (Brynne Tillman): Today we’re going to talk about the impact of sales processes and gain insights into how leaders can keep their teams motivated and productive. So let’s get started. Jennifer, welcome to the show.

0:01:58 – (Jennifer Frye): Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here and have this conversation.

0:02:02 – (Brynne Tillman): I am really excited. I’m just going to start before we jump into all the brilliance that you bring with the one question that we ask all of our guests, which is what does Making Sales Social mean to you?

0:02:19 – (Jennifer Frye): As someone who’s built this entire business and many others on cold calling, I firmly believe cold calling is the fastest, most effective way to build rapport with your prospects. Wish list. But beyond that, I think you’re one cold call away from a completely different life. It could be a different introduction, it could be a different connection, or a different opportunity. But I think what that means to me is that there are so many different directions that having conversations in sales can go.

0:02:51 – (Jennifer Frye): It’s just about being open-minded and having that growth mindset to explore all of those different opportunities.

0:02:59 – (Brynne Tillman): So this is so interesting and I have so many things going through my head right now around cold calling. And what we teach is how to use LinkedIn to warm up cold calls. So that’s calling. So I can’t wait to talk about some of those strategies. But Where I want to start is probably one of the things that’s most confusing. In fact, they’ve created a whole role to figure out how these two play together. The chief revenue officer, now a company is over sales and marketing, where that used to be completely siloed, now starting to kind of come together. But talk about the difference because there really is a significant difference between sales and marketing.

0:03:43 – (Brynne Tillman): So if you can talk about, you know, kind of where you see the two of those as separate entities and how they overlap.

0:03:50 – (Jennifer Frye): So from my experience, marketing strategies are around casting the widest net to have as many eyeballs on your thing as you can have. It’s about trying to create messaging that resonates with everyone and that would be applicable so that you’re not alienating anyone. But in my experience that’s marketing has always been about just getting that top-of-mind awareness in front of as many people as you can.

0:04:20 – (Jennifer Frye): Sales strategy is about knowing exactly who your ICP is, your ideal client profile, and getting very, very targeted down to the, demographics, right. The easy things that you can filter for the radio button size, location, revenue, and industry, but then getting even deeper with that about the psychographics, knowing that you’re finding people who are like-minded, like-hearted, that have values, alignment with you and those are the ways that you’re going to create a sales strategy where you’re speaking directly to that avatar, that individual, you know, you are in their head, you know what they’re dealing with, you know what their challenges are. I don’t like to say pain because it’s so cringy.

0:05:10 – (Jennifer Frye): Right. But you know what? Right. But you know having a sales strategy is all about being incredibly highly targeted with your message and then having direct outreach to the people that are exactly aligned, with that target and just introducing them to yourself, introducing them and educating them about how you can help them. And really at the end of the day when you know you can help someone, it’s your responsibility to reach out and let them know how.

0:05:45 – (Brynne Tillman): You know, I’ve said that often my, my kind of my one-liner around that is if you can help someone and you don’t, it’s malpractice. Yeah, so, so I love what you’re saying and you know, I think that education, that insights piece is so important. When we pitch too soon, I think we lose people. But when we can provide value, we begin to earn the right to get those conversations. And so that kind of launches me into my next question and I’m going to start.

0:06:18 – (Brynne Tillman): Personally I have struggled. I started off Cold calling right out of college. Well, my promoted job, my first job was an inbound cold taker. My promoted job was to cold call. And so I had to cold call 50, 60 calls every single day. Like I had a minimum. And I did not love it. I really didn’t. So when I found and I loved sales, but when I found LinkedIn, I recognized I didn’t have to cold call as much. Right. I could warm it up, they could expect me, they could already know my name by the time.

0:06:55 – (Brynne Tillman): So I am like the perfect person that says, oh, I don’t want to interrupt their day. I don’t want to be the disruptor. But you know, that’s limiting opportunities. So tell me a little bit about how you can be a disruptor in a way that earns respect and gets people to want to talk to you.

0:07:17 – (Jennifer Frye): Sure. Okay, so I’m going to break that into two answers. The first answer is how do you reach out to someone without like blowing up their day and being disrespectful of their time? And what I would tell you is that, the intention of that initial outreach is not to pitch anyone anything, is not to have a discovery call, but is to introduce, educate, and set the next step, whether that is now or down the road.

0:07:45 – (Jennifer Frye): That’s the intention of that first call. So you’re not calling to take up 30 minutes of someone’s time unannounced and unscheduled. You’re calling to introduce yourself, explain why you’re calling, explain the value that you can bring, and then the next steps. Let’s set up a time to discuss further next week. The second part of that question is about being a disruptor. And I think, look, whoever you ask about what a disruptor mean, I think you’re going to get different answers. But for me, a disruptor is someone who stands outside status quo, who delivers above and beyond what the industry standard is, and is really committed to excellence for their clients.

0:08:24 – (Jennifer Frye): So a disruptor is someone who is saying, just because it’s always been done this way does not mean it always has to be done this way. You know, a great example, the way we disrupt lead generation. I’ll use us as an example. Most lead gen, they call, they pretend they’re calling from your business. They pitch, they sell. It’s, you know, oftentimes they’re kind of robotic, they’re scripted and feel really like over rehearsed and icky.

0:08:55 – (Jennifer Frye): Yeah, we call from appreciated asset. We recommend our clients. It’s consultative in approach. And the reason that that’s disruptive is because no one else is doing it. But the other reason it’s disruptive is I didn’t come up with this to be disruptive. It was in such integrity that it wouldn’t have occurred to me to do this any other way. It’s that simple. It never occurred to me to pretend I worked for someone else.

0:09:25 – (Jennifer Frye): Why would I do that? That doesn’t even make sense. It’s not true.

0:09:29 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. So that’s as authentic as you could possibly be. It’s trans.

0:09:34 – (Jennifer Frye): Right.

0:09:36 – (Brynne Tillman): And also, I’m going to say I’m just going to share because I think. I actually think that’s brilliant. And this is the first time I’m understanding that’s what you do. And so, like, I just had fireworks go off. Right. Like, I think that this is brilliant. When I was at my height of networking in person, I had a friend, Debbie Hancock, who worked. She did websites and had other things that were aligned a little bit with what I do, but not competitor.

0:10:09 – (Brynne Tillman): And our goal would be we would go into the networking meeting, and her goal was to introduce me to people, and my goal was to introduce her to people so we could get out of our own, like, heads about. I don’t want to pitch myself, but I could tell you a little bit about why I think Debbie’s awesome. And so what you are doing, I think, really breaks down the barriers of, you know, the. You know, where. Where can I pitch?

0:10:38 – (Brynne Tillman): It’s hard for me to, you know, but it’s much easier for me to pitch someone else than it is myself. So that. The fact that you’re doing this is genius. And I haven’t heard anybody doing this.

0:10:52 – (Jennifer Frye): Yeah, there isn’t. And do you see, though, how I didn’t do this to be disruptive for disruptive sake? I’m not just trying to blow things up. See how I didn’t swear there. Not trying to blow things up just for, like, shock value. Okay. It made sense to me to do it this way. And because I stayed authentic, it became a huge business because it was so genuine. And it truly is coming from a place where we truly do vet and recommend our clients.

0:11:30 – (Jennifer Frye): We wouldn’t have it any other way, really.

0:11:33 – (Brynne Tillman): This is. This model is absolutely, unbelievably outstanding. I love it. And there’s no, you know, there’s. There’s no hesitation. If someone called me and said, hey, I want to tell you about someone, I am so much more likely to talk to that person than if they want to talk about themselves. When Someone in my network makes an introduction to me, I take it. But if they were to just reach out cold, I’d be like on the fence, do I have time?

0:12:06 – (Brynne Tillman): But because it comes in from a third party, it feels vetted. It feels and it is. Right? I love this. This is really gps, really, really genius. All right, I’m going to get into a couple quick questions about the building and filling. Okay.

0:12:21 – (Jennifer Frye): Okay.

0:12:22 – (Brynne Tillman): Because creating a pipeline for, I mean, and this is something, you know, that we help people do with LinkedIn. But how do you do this for a client? Let’s say you go, okay, the client comes to you and said we need more sales. How do you, from that first conversation, like create a pipeline?

0:12:43 – (Jennifer Frye): Yeah. So we start with identifying who that ideal client profile is again, demographics or that one side of it. But then the highly curated side is the psychographics. So creating a pipeline is knowing. Start, starts with knowing, who do you want in that pipeline to have a pipeline? Okay, so say I’m a business that sells to million dollar businesses. Right. If I have a bunch of $100,000 businesses in my pipeline, that’s not very valuable.

0:13:24 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, yeah.

0:13:26 – (Jennifer Frye): So you have to make sure that your pipeline, what you’re about to start filling with are the right people, the prequalified, they are the people that you serve the best.

0:13:39 – (Brynne Tillman): Serve the best.

0:13:40 – (Jennifer Frye): Right. And I always really recommend that people go a little bit higher than comfortable for revenue because truly you don’t want anyone to blink at your pricing. You don’t ever want price to be a reason that someone doesn’t go forward with you. And if it is, they cannot afford you or you have not proven your value. We know you’ll prove your value because what we’ll talk about next is how you create build and fill your pipeline.

0:14:08 – (Jennifer Frye): So we know we can create the value proposition, but you have to make sure that it’s a no brainer for them.

0:14:17 – (Brynne Tillman): It’s great. So now filling or building?

0:14:21 – (Jennifer Frye): Building. Yeah.

0:14:22 – (Brynne Tillman): Creating and then building. So okay, so now we have, we know who our ideal client is, who we serve the best. What do we do to get on their radar? Right. Like that’s the building.

0:14:35 – (Jennifer Frye): So the building is the initial outreach with your messaging, you have to look at your value proposition. You cannot sell on being 5% cheaper or 10% faster because truly what that does is that will get you transactions that will never get you relationships. And relationships are how you grow, build, and scale your business. So we’re always focused on the value proposition and in our case focused on the disruption.

0:15:04 – (Jennifer Frye): What makes our Clients so vastly different. So coming up with messaging for your service or your product, setting you so far apart from the noise in the marketplace that you are apples and oranges. There is no one else to work with but you. So you can literally eliminate your competition from consideration because it’s so vastly different, the experience that they would have with you.

0:15:32 – (Brynne Tillman): I have a couple questions around that. So we try to do that with content, and actually, this goes back to a little bit of what you said, because we have five elements for every piece of content, and that includes messaging when it comes to sales, which is create curiosity or resonate with the buyer. Create curiosity. Teach them something new that gets them thinking differently about their current situation and then creates a compelling moment, a response. Right.

0:15:58 – (Brynne Tillman): So I. You know, I kind of feel like that kind of fits into that. But when you’re doing an outreach message, how do you create that moment of exclusivity? Right. Like, this is that we’re standing out without pitching too soon.

0:16:19 – (Jennifer Frye): You just want all my secrets. Is that how this works? No, I’m kidding. I’m messing with you. Okay, so, yes, that’s how this works. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Okay, so what you want to do when you’re trying to set yourself apart from all of the other noise out there is make sure, again, you’re pitching on value. And I completely just blanked. I’m so sorry.

0:16:45 – (Brynne Tillman): Value is pitching. Yes. Like, so you’re saying, hey, this is. Why are you saying, like, that? The first message is a pitch?

0:16:54 – (Jennifer Frye): Well, you know, the first message is an introduction. The first message.

0:16:59 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s what I mean. So how do you introduce yourself? In a way, but they don’t feel that it’s okay.

0:17:05 – (Jennifer Frye): Sorry about that. It’s been a long day, girl. Okay, so how do you introduce yourself?

0:17:11 – (Brynne Tillman): Nobody knows this, but it took me, like, 12 times to introduce you, so we had, like. So, yeah, it’s that kind of day.

0:17:19 – (Jennifer Frye): All right, so how you introduce yourself is based on. I would always say people focus way too much on their features as opposed to benefits.

0:17:33 – (Brynne Tillman): Okay.

0:17:33 – (Jennifer Frye): Right. So what you want to do is try to get some information about what is challenging for your prospect, what they’re dealing with, or just understanding that by understanding who your ICP is and then creating messaging, that really resonates for them. That word right, where that, like, you’re saying things that they’re like, oh, yeah, that. I’m dealing with that right now. And rather than talking about, you know, the 17 features of your thing, just focusing in on the benefits of what they’re dealing with right now that they will no longer have to deal with because of the benefits of your thing.

0:18:17 – (Jennifer Frye): Does that make sense?

0:18:19 – (Brynne Tillman): It does, yeah. And we. We kind of handle it slightly differently, but I think that that’s interesting. And I guess my question. So we would do, you know, here are those five ways to fix your challenge. And then after that, we would go into how we could be one of those five things.

0:18:40 – (Jennifer Frye): Right.

0:18:41 – (Brynne Tillman): But we start with the education piece typically.

0:18:44 – (Jennifer Frye): But you don’t really have that kind of time on a phone call, right? When you’re doing this direct outreach, it doesn’t. You don’t really have that time. So you kind of need to get right to it with, you know, a great prompt for this is it. This matters to you because.

0:19:00 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love that.

0:19:01 – (Jennifer Frye): Right. That’s a great prompt. Because at the end of the day, and whether it’s the gatekeeper or the decision maker, those are two different answers. Right. But this matters to you because. So if you can get that out right up front in a call, this is what I do. This is why it matters to you.

0:19:22 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, that’s brilliant. I love that. That makes so much sense. Yeah. And then I go like, does it matter or does it not matter? So it’s a qualifier. So if that resonates with me, I’m going to keep listening.

0:19:34 – (Jennifer Frye): Right. You could even have kind of two sides of that answer as well. So maybe one doesn’t, but the other does. And again, it’s always about. But, you know, I want to respect the integrity of this call. My intention is really just to introduce myself. I’m sure you’re busy. I know you’ve got a lot going on. I’m calling into the blue. Can we set up a time sometime next week? Can we set up a time in a few days?

0:19:56 – (Jennifer Frye): You know, will tell me more now. Well, you know, I’d love to, but truly everything I do is custom-tailored for my clients. So if we could set up some more time together, I could ask you some questions and really put something together that is meant specifically for you to address your specific challenges.

0:20:15 – (Brynne Tillman): Beautiful.

0:20:15 – (Jennifer Frye): Yeah.

0:20:16 – (Brynne Tillman): Poetic. It’s great.

0:20:18 – (Jennifer Frye): I’ve done it a few times. Yeah.

0:20:21 – (Brynne Tillman): So, you know, the last piece of this trifecta is filling the sales pipeline, right? So it’s. Do you buy lists with phone numbers? Do you know?

0:20:32 – (Jennifer Frye): So don’t do that. Don’t do that. Please don’t do that. Okay. Okay. So filling the sales pipeline is about the outreach. It’s about. It’s a numbers game, right? This Is not about, oh, make five calls today and life’s gonna change. You know, we work in increments of 50 which takes about, I’d say two hours to get through the list. Two to three hours depending on how effective you are. But we, we do direct outreach and you have to have enough numbers to be able to tip the scales.

0:21:06 – (Jennifer Frye): But not just today. You have to commit to following up over and over and over again. Truthfully, this is why clients will hire us because we do it. We have a done-for-you outreach where we do this because most businesses don’t want to allocate the time or they simply don’t have the time to allocate. So it is something that can be outsourced. But if you have the resources, you have the time internally to do this, absolutely do it for yourself.

0:21:34 – (Jennifer Frye): But commit to following up Cadence that I prefer that I recommend is every four business days.

0:21:42 – (Brynne Tillman): What software do you recommend for folks.

0:21:45 – (Jennifer Frye): That are doing so? Okay, so for data finding different names and numbers, I use five different platforms. I use Seamless.

0:21:55 – (Brynne Tillman): I use, I love Seamless.

0:21:58 – (Jennifer Frye): Yeah, I use AI, let’s see Seamless, Lucia, Rocket Reach, LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, and Zoom Info. So I use a bunch.

0:22:11 – (Brynne Tillman): I’m sorry, Rel Pro is a great one. Especially if you have clients that are banks.

0:22:17 – (Jennifer Frye): Yeah, I’ll look at that one. If you have a link to send me, please do because I’ll check that out. I’m always looking for new ones and I tell my clients I pay for the most. You don’t have to, but we really do. Like we have a vast extent for tech stack in that area because that’s important for us, for all of our clients for CRMs.

0:22:36 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:22:38 – (Jennifer Frye): I personally use Zoho for our clients. We use Google Drive because we use sheets and docs for our clients. And right now it helps. We are looking to create a more customized CRM platform that’s more of like an agency style but because it’s going to be a custom build. There’s a bit of a project management timeline on that, but we are working on getting that launched in 2025. And in terms of other tech, I mean there’s a lot of project management software you can use. Really the bottom line is whatever you’re going to use and stick to for your task management, it doesn’t even matter.

0:23:20 – (Jennifer Frye): Just it’s having the discipline and the follow through to stick with it and then creating the calendar blocks as well for yourself because if you don’t block the time, it doesn’t just magically appear. You don’t just magically get an extra two hours every day. It doesn’t work like that. So you have to really commit to creating that time block for yourself.

0:23:38 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. You know, when, when we’re doing prospecting, we always say the only thing that can take the place of your prospecting time is a prospecting call.

0:23:50 – (Jennifer Frye): Yeah.

0:23:51 – (Brynne Tillman): You can’t reschedule. You can’t. It’s like unless you get a prospect that says, yes, I want to talk. Like, even if a client wants to talk, treat it like you had you. You’ve got a time blocked. If you don’t do that, it’s very easy to, you know, to take, to put that off.

0:24:12 – (Jennifer Frye): Well, especially if it’s uncomfortable for you. Right. If it’s foreign and if you have some sort of like resistance around it. Yeah. You’re going to be very happy to take any distraction that comes along. So discipline is a big part of it. You’re right.

0:24:24 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, you know, I had one client, I said, so what did you do during that time when you didn’t? She’s like, I got my laundry done. And I’m like, yeah, that. Because people try to avoid it, but we can’t grow business without prospecting. It’s just 100%. So this was fantastic. And I think I could talk to you all day and you’re brilliant. But. So the second to last question is, what question did I not ask you that I should have?

0:24:55 – (Jennifer Frye): I mean, how to get in touch with me? Of course that’s the last question. See, I’m extra. I would say the best question that you have not asked. Oh, I would say, you know, what are the biggest opportunities that people miss?

0:25:18 – (Brynne Tillman): In creating what are the biggest opportunities people miss?

0:25:24 – (Jennifer Frye): It circles back to the follow-up. A lot of people, I think, create stories in their head. They reach out to someone once, twice, they don’t call back and they go, well, they’re not interested in my thing. But in reality, we are all so task heavy in our day to day in our lives. You know, I have four things probably right now waiting for my signature approval. Rubber stamp. Right. It’s not that I don’t want to do them or I’m not interested or I’m not motivated.

0:25:58 – (Jennifer Frye): I just am handling a lot of other facets of my business right now in personal life. And so I think that the biggest place people miss is by making up stories for themselves and not following through until someone says no to you or not now, because that’s super important. Being able to turn a no to a not now and create like a futures pipeline for yourself. It’s not a no, but if you’ve decided, then you’re putting all of that energy out there.

0:26:31 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah.

0:26:31 – (Jennifer Frye): I love that. You know, our brains do that to keep us safe so that we don’t get rejected. But seriously, I’ve had more people say no to me in my career than I’ve ever said yes. I’ve never died once from it. No. Right. I’m still here. And until you get those no’s, it gets you closer to the essence and it gets you better and better each time. And the better you get at knowing who your people are, the better you get at your messaging, the fewer no’s that you get anyway.

0:27:00 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love that. That’s right. So the more no’s you get, the more you learn to get more yeses.

0:27:07 – (Jennifer Frye): Yeah, it just gets you better. If you’re willing again if you’re willing to look at it, if you’re willing to make constant improvements and be you’re.

0:27:15 – (Brynne Tillman): Not, call Jennifer because they’ll do it.

0:27:17 – (Jennifer Frye): Sure. Yeah. Next question. Yep.

0:27:22 – (Brynne Tillman): How can people get in touch with you?

0:27:24 – (Jennifer Frye): You can go to our website, which is appreciatedasset.com you could find me on LinkedIn. It’s Jennifer Frye on LinkedIn. We are also appreciated to asset on LinkedIn. We are on Facebook, we’re on all the socials. But really LinkedIn is mostly where we live our website. And then you can always email me as well at Jennifer at. So would love to talk to anyone who’d love to continue that conversation.

0:27:54 – (Brynne Tillman): I love this. Well, thank you so much for the mic drop moments today. And I always love talking with people who love cold calling because I don’t. But then after I talk to them, I go, yeah, you know, there’s a time and a place for sure. And you know, I’m a big fan of warming up cold calls, but I get, you know, if you, if you’ve got that benefit statement down and you’re out there and your goal is really just to bring value, it just makes sense. So I appreciate it so much.

0:28:24 – (Brynne Tillman): Thank you. And for all our listeners, when you are out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro:

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