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go for it you have literally a live lead on the phone maximize whatever you can before hanging up that phone hello hello and welcome back to another video my name is Preston I run my own recruiting agency in the technology industry been at it for almost a decade did over multiple seven figures worth of placement and happy to give value to you all if you are as excited to get into this video as I am please consider support a fellow recruiter give us a like subscribe click these bells really means a lot as it takes a lot to make these videos so let's talk about how to cold call go over some best practice with scripts strategy so that you guys can absolutely crush it moving forward this is based on my experience what worked for me might not necessarily work for you so please keep that in mind and also apologies in advance for any spelling and grammatical errors if you're unfamiliar with who I am my name is Preston I joined an agency almost a decade ago to start my career I started from the bottom work my way up to one of the top producers join the startup team did not have any handouts for clients build over 500 000 on my own desk which is roughly 21 to 23 placements also hit the 100K per month club as well left that a little after a year joined at the corporate side and a fast growth early stage company unfortunately I ran out of money but I was tasked of hiring Engineers design marketing and sales folks found myself back on the market I'm like you know what I'm entrepreneurial sales Biz Dev is not new to me I have tough skin I know how to go out there and attack and get clients gonna you know bet against myself and lo and behold did little over 500 000 a year again on my own desk did not have any VA part-time full-time any of that and then of course since then I'm grateful to say that we did multiple multiples of seven figures with the placements over the years changed my life had no idea that recruiting even existed now I love it and excited to hear about other people going through the Journey or just starting theirs but in this video let's talk about cold calling so cold calling in 2023 it's still in my opinion a very effective tool to contact decision makers and should be really something that should be used if necessary I found find in my experience upon a successful like positive engagement and conversation the ROI if you know what you're doing is much higher and stronger than other methods right because you're talking to the hiring manager directly and you can control and navigate that conversation if you're afraid to cold call I'm sorry but like it's a basic skill that any business operator sales Biz Dev even a recruiter needs to know how to do we basically get paid to just talk to people talk to candidates and if you're on the agency side you're all still talking to people but it's also clients for companies and hiring managers as well and if that's for any reason they're comfortable for you hate to say a recruiting might not be the right choice for you but again it's something that you just need to do and I think recruiting aside it is going to be such a critical skill that you can develop to help you in all facets of Life develop confidence and stronger communication skills so and from my experience there are roughly five steps I'll talk about when it comes to cold calling applying that to recruiting so number one is research number two is engage number Japanese consult number four is present and number five is a CTA or call to action so let's talk about research so research used a lot of different plugins out there there's just so many to even list whether it's Apollo High or easy contact out or Jam like there's just so so many even like sites that you know are free as well where you can basically research decision makers find their phone numbers and then from there that's where you basically go and you can start calling right again when you when you're calling you can start out using your own phone number if you want to be Scrappy but there's so many other phone services that you can utilize for a small business if you don't want to use your own number A lot of times when you call in a lot of the companies will have their own number especially if they're on the larger side so typically you can transfer to the directory you'll transfer to the receptionist and you have to go around the receptioner so ask an intro to your decision maker where you can talk to them directly when it comes to directory you can typically find someone's direct access line by searching for the first or last name through the phone directory and then that's a way you can get direct contact with them if they don't pick up you can can leave a message you can call them again if you find the direct personal number using any sort of methods that we talked about now you're ready to call when it comes to calling tips right people ask me like what are the best times to have the highest probabilities of people picking up and I think it depends on your business I think it depends on the industry depends on your Market depends on what country you're in but best practices you do the first thing in the morning like right before you know they get to the office or right when they get to the office before they start real work lunchtime early afternoon maybe late afternoon right before end of day before they clock out you have to kind of test and try and you just got to put in that reps and then from there you can collect all the data and from there you can make an educated decision on what times work best for you if you try in the morning they don't pick up try again in the afternoon if they don't pick up try again one more time in the evening right it's all about repetition and consistency you want to really get into the right frame of mind so if you've never cold called before the worst thing is I'm sure getting cold called by someone else and you've probably experienced someone who either talks to slow or sounds like a robot or just doesn't sound human at all so you really want to be personable you want to be positive this again might seem common sense but it just has to be said like you have to have higher energy so amp yourself up I remember when I worked at my staffing agency before cold calling I would go into the bathroom look in the mirror and just like talk myself up to like raise that energy and something that you see a lot in TV shows movies and if you're wondering people actually do that I actually did that and it helps right a cup of coffee usually helps maybe some tea amp yourself up motivate up high energy right friend of mine Peak Performance and attack be positive a lot of times also what you might think it might not make a difference is just smile when you're talking because sometimes when you're smiling it it really affects indirectly the Nuance the subtleties of your tone how you word the speech and that can help a lot people can tell if someone's in a good mood or if they're smiling on the phone and I think people want to talk to people generally when they're positive nice and smiling versus like robotic mean and just inhuman it literally takes like 10 seconds 20 seconds to make a good impression to have someone decide whether or not they want to continue talking to you continue talking to them five ten more seconds or even just hang up on you so it's really really important to be personable and be okay with the rejection like no matter how hard you try no matter how perfect you come across there will always be a handful of people that would just hang up on you that would just say no and that's okay it's part of the game you have to expect it not be afraid of it and when it happens write them down try to follow up with them again call them again in the future email them in the future and maybe you might be able to get them later if not now don't don't don't please for the love of God don't sound like a robot you don't want to talk to robot other people don't want to talk to a robot they want to talk to another human being engaged so when you engage with somebody it has to be quick to the point again you only have 10 20 seconds to make an impression to make your point things to highlight when you first talk to them who are you why are you calling somehow establish credibility where did you see their open job position how did you learn about it all these things are basic stuff that is going to be running through their minds when they're talking to you especially from a cold call and from my experience there are a lot of things that you want to ask from the beginning two things that really helped me and help prevent wasting time is is the position still open because a lot of times you might find a position or a company hiring for a position or it might still show on their website but then when you talk to them like it's closed so you want to really find out not to waste your time is it still open and does it directly report to you or is that person like the of you know direct client manager because if they're not chances that you're talking to the wrong person wrong Department someone to Junior and they don't have the authority to make the decision on whether or not their team or company can utilize budgets or resources on a third party or external agency like yourself so typically like you want to ideally have yeses to both these questions yes the position is open yes it reports directly to me I am like the sole person with authority I can choose to work with Partners if I want to now you know you have the right person if you have a no to either of these you want to make sure that either you know they're hiring for other positions they can intrude your colleague hiring other positions that you might help with and most importantly like you're talking to the right stakeholder so an Engaged kind of sample script for example that you could use is my name is president team specializes in placing X we saw that you were hiring an X for x and one to see if the positions to open and does the drug report to you so my name is Preston I'm a team the flesh Rises and placing software Engineers or front-end engineer specific JavaScript we saw that you're hiring JavaScript engineer from LinkedIn and wanted to see if the positions open and reports directly to you you kind of introduce yourself establish credibility you understand the context or establish the context why you're talking to them how you found out about their position if the position is not open or doesn't report to them write a note in your leads tracker and then you can periodically you know follow up with them two three four six months down the line perhaps they might be hiring again you can re-engage if it doesn't report to them you want to try to find out who it reports to you and aside from going back to LinkedIn or whatever site to try to find the right hiring manager if you're talking to somebody from the company that's the easiest way to get a name so ask for the name ask for an intro getting a referral a warm intro is way stronger than a cult intro ask for their phone number ask for the email address just go for it you have literally a lot live lead on the phone maximize whatever you can before hanging up that phone why because as soon as you hang that up if you want to follow up with more questions there's a big chance they'll just ghost you or not answer your emails at all no matter how great you thought you came off on that phone conversation so while you have them you have this opportunity shoot for the moon if it's not then ask for the referral go further ask for the name ask for the contact and ask for everything so it prevents you from doing more work after you hang up that phone call if they say yes to both questions ideal scenario let's continue the call when you get the signal right then you want to move into the consult section so this is where you basically demonstrate you act like a consultant your knowledge your specialization your expertise and your position of authority the point of this is to ask now questions about that role basically the whole point is you want to ask questions that you're on the same page with them who they're looking for is crystal clear to you so you know exactly how you're going to source and Outreach that person another way to think about it is this is the time and point where you can figure out how you're going to source position if your go-to product or platform is Boolean search or LinkedIn or use dribble or GitHub or stack over or something you want to be able to come away from this conversation knowing who exactly looking for and what your plan is if you leave this conversation and you have no idea still what position they're hiring for you did not do this job effectively you're gonna then have to be forced to follow up with them wasting your time wasting their time their being hit up by other recruiters who are more effective and they're just like not gonna maybe want to work with it anymore because you're just taking too much time it's not going anywhere it's not starting and being efficient so the whole point here is to be like a professional consultant figure out what they're looking for what is their pain points why are they hiring where are other accounts lacking and then free to be like you know what I'm the man I have expertise I can help you here's a candidate for instance that can be perfect fit you want to work with me right that's like the whole idea here to kind of kick off this consult again it's just you asking a lot of educated questions and just segue right into the questioning so in terms of the questions again and really depends you can have complete control as to like how you want to do this but it should range from questions about you know the company so you learn more about who they are at the team what they're building on what they will be building on the cultural X Factor stuff the position itself anything else like submission ATS who else would be coordinating and so here's just a bunch of questions that I usually ask and you can ask and you can ask a lot more than that as well but the point here is that you want to take your time and ask questions so that you know this is for your own benefit you know what you and your team have to do to find the right person if you're not confident you keep asking questions and if for instance the clients like I have to go and run a meeting that's terrible you can just do your best with the questions that you get but I would always try to like set up another call so you can really go through this again dig deep and then just be even more confident right you know what they want and you should be in no business of wasting their time your time and of course the canvas time the main point here is to ask as many questions as you can to be confident and understand the position just what I talked about earlier if you don't do this well enough you won't find the right candid you won't do a placement you won't make money waste that much time they're probably going to drop you move on to other recruiters it's that competitive so again questions range from the title to salary what will they work on who are they report to must have skills deal breakers type of company experience like startup Legacy established educational degree how long has this position been open where have other accounts lacked what are the interview stages how do you accept Canada submissions or anyone else reviewed the cans aside from you Etc et cetera Etc once you do that then you want to be able to present a candidate right so this is where it's really really important that you're ideally Niche do you specialize you already have couple cans that you know could be a great fit and once you're confident that you know what they're looking for you should already have couple hot pitchable candidates that you have ready and you can pitch their background okay and you'll really want to tailor it to what you literally just heard the client say in the previous section of what the most important things that they want this candid and then you want to personalize your pitch candidate so that it fits optically invisibly and audibly like it sounds like the perfect fit like a two Lego pieces coming together right like wow okay so you want somebody with like X Y and Z well here's a can that we literally just spoke with that also has X Y and Z blah blah blah blah they also want this type of company they want a smaller team you have a smaller team is this a type of can that you think would be interesting for you not only do you establish your Authority from asking the questions but once you're able to present an actual human being a candidate that also is a great fit it's like you got one level of confirmation from your questions like oh this guy knows what he's talking about he knows the right questions to ask and then a second level of validation and Confirmation we're like oh wow this guy's already presenting Kent that's perfect right so if I was a client I'm like wow this guy's coming off super knowledgeable he's an expert he already has people that I can speak with right now things are looking good I'm feeling good I want to maybe work with this recruiter doing this it will essentially show the decision maker that you know what you're talking about you can you can provide value off the bat it's pretty straightforward simple connect to the candidates background to the must-haves what's important for the higher manager specifically and make it just sound super smooth and perfect fit so here's like a sample script that you can use wow so like this is a definitely positioned we can comply help with we've done this a bunch of times or we have a lot of searches happening right now one person that we recently spoke with that comes to mind his her name is X they've been working at X company they're specialized on X skills for x amount of years they're fascinated or passionate about X Market or industry this is the type of role that they want they have great leadership of mentorship like basically whatever their background is you want to cater it and customize it to your client end it with does it sound like the type of candidate you'd be interested in speaking with you want to make sure you research the position that the client's hiring for beforehand right when you are calling in you want to obviously have the company the hiring manager the contact info but also maybe have like another column notes of like what positions are hiring for what are their must-haves or a link to like the job page or copy paste somewhere so that you can easily reference that once you're talking to them so obviously if you do that adequately you can already pre-prepare two or three cans that could be perfect depending on the consult maybe one might be the clear winner of your pitch candidates that's the one that you use to pitch them the pitch candid of course you want them to interview them but the biggest thing is you want to come off as an amazing expert who can clearly demonstrate what the client wants finding candid that seemingly is the perfect fit live on the phone and then boom now they know or that are feeling like you're an expert there and you want to be someone that they want to work with so at this point here okay there's a lot of different ctas called the actions that you could do number one once that's done then maybe you can segue into the terms right you can quickly confirm like this is my direct placement fee payable guarantee window or things like that are you okay with does that work for you cool great I'll send it over to you you know please sign it as soon as we get it we'll get the search started or like if they want to negotiate maybe you can negotiate on the phone and then you can send it to them and then when you send it to them in an email or on the phone if I send it to you and we schedule another time to chat or if I send it to you are you okay with us starting our process and if they said yes maybe you can just end the phone call with like one or two minutes about your process like how to submission to work ATS email how do you send candidates over to the clients and just kind of outlining best practices of what they can expect working with you or number two you can try to set up another call right so before you hang up hey can we set up another call where we can go over maybe terms we can go over like the process or best practice and how we can work best together typically I call that like a recruiting launch call where you kind of go over any ass any questions you're on the same page with terms you know exactly how submission is going to go you can manage expectations I love to do this when possible or number three if you can right like set up a time or day you can meet them personally visit the office space have them show you around I did this when I lived in New York and my market was New York because meeting someone in person is a lot more powerful than virtually on the phone hands down any time of the day and if you can go in there see the optispace it will give you a better experience that you know exactly how to pitch and sell that company and job to the candidate not to mention opportunity maybe you can get some free merchandise eyes were swag but most importantly build that relationship with the hiring manager which is where the money's at in this game long term final tips right if you talk to a client and they want to just hang up on your you go through the consult and they're like you know what I'm we're actually not working with other recruiters any situation where you're confronted with no to me that never means no that means not right now just because they don't work with the recruiter now doesn't mean they're not going to work with the recruiter forever into the future so it's really important you stay organized you label them and you follow up with them in the future they might be hiring more they might be in a situation where they're scaling right they gotta they raise a ton of money they're scaling and now they need all the help that they can get so always be professional keep it positive stay organized and follow up with them I hope it becomes clear why it's more important now to be Specialized or focused on a niche so that you can come off as a consultant of credibility and expertise who knows what they're talking about if you're going out there and you're like I'm gonna pick up any job I can you're gonna fumble a lot on the phone call you're gonna come off not confident you know they're gonna start saying skills and stuff like that you're just not familiar with you've hearing for the first time tons of opportunities for you now to get stunted and fumble upon your words coming off just not professional at all or someone that doesn't have any credibility like that is the fastest way for you to lose a client for them to walk away if you're focused on one market you start to know it really well from the talent from the insights from the data to the market trends like the must-have skills the more that you can dig deep better that you can talk about it and end up better you can convey confidence with whoever you're talking about it really matters on how you come off on the phone call and and with me and my team even if it was myself in the beginning I would always practice or try to role play with myself try to like you know think of different objections and scenarios that you can experience and try to pre-pre-prepare different responses or how you can kind of navigate at the end of the day the best way for you to figure out what to do is just by going through the Reps in real time yeah you're gonna be horrible the first 10 20 50 times but then you're going to be collecting data then you're going to be getting better and smarter and know exactly how to navigate every situation so that when situations do arise you know exactly what to do and what to say last tip always try to get at some sort of confirmation confirmation on reviewing engagement letter so after the whole phone call if I'm going to send you the engagement letter would you be able to read it over and by a certain time or time range and sign it or let me know if you have any questions right confirmation on the next recruiting caller meeting so try to get a call scheduled before you hang up because if you hang up and you forget to do that then you have to email them again call them again there's a low chance that they'll respond to you or there's a low chance of get them on the phone again and you lost your chance so again you have them on the phone shoot for the moon and do whatever you can they extract as much value and confirmation as possible while establishing yourself as an expertise a consultant who knows what he's doing that can provide tremendous amount of value and be personable don't be a robot again I hope this helps cold calling is something that I think happens a lot less versus 10 years ago when I first started but there's still so many great tools and ways you can find somebody's personal or professional phone numbers it's still widely used even in sales and Business Development around the planet and so it's very much something that you need to embrace and have as a tool as part of your Arsenal than something to be afraid of because talking to someone live is the best chance to get what you want than having to send an email or follow up or do all these things where you can easily lose people when you get them shoot for the moon do your best practice role play and I'm sure you'll do fantastic so hope this helps you have any other questions let me know I hope I was able to provide you value thank you so much again for your time we'll see you on the next one [Music] thank you [Music] foreign