In this episode of Beer With Darren, I spoke to Ryan Pereus about cold calling techniques and how to get your sales and marketing teams aligned.

Ryan is from Philadelphia on the east coast of the US. He is the CEO, founder of two firms, one is Pereus Marketing and that led onto his other firm Superhuman Prospecting. The second is where he spends most of his time giving outsourced business development to companies. A lot of it is adding more to sales development reps. It ranges from marketing to insurance to finance, really any industry.

He has always been in the direct marketing role in some type of person-to-person format, so he has always considered marketing with sales functions.

Ryan sees good call pick up rates, dependent on the industry and market you are calling into. This can be the size of the company, position they are in, geographic location and each places specific needs.

Companies use Pereus Marketing for 3 primary reasons. The most popular is that they just don't want to do it in house. Ryan originally started the company for this exact reason - to advance sales as a whole as the telemarketing role has a stigma to it. The negative perception started after roles in things like 'The Wolf Of Wall Street' or 'Boiler room'. There's a natural resistance to cold-callers but then added in the scams that were produced from those sales techniques only worsens the perceptions of cold-callers. It changed from someone giving information to be helpful to automatically a nuisance.

Ryan looks to change this perception by generating leads by building trust with the prospects, rather than being aggressive or squeeze them into signing the deal. The way they deliver cold-calls will hopefully in time change the way people perceive them.

The second is they don't know-how. There's a serious lack of sales education. If you want to be a lawyer you have to pass the bar. If you want to be a doctor you have to pass the boards. Why isn't there anything like that for salespeople? Some standard to meet in order for you to enter the profession at some level. So it's interesting that many people don't know the best practices. A lot of the time, salespeople use techniques which are bad for both parties.

This is where we have identified processes and methodologies that work if you follow the steps.

Another major hump for cold-calling and prospecting is rejection. It is understandable why it is terrifying. So Ryan's advise here is to express emotion (sales EQ) but you need to approach the call as if you are coding or solving a math problem. If you can start to adjust your brain to do that, looking at each call as if it's a single puzzle, the emotion or rejection just becomes part of the puzzle. Look at it like that piece of the puzzle not fitting, so compartmentalise and take the emotion out of it, you can start to see why people might not go forward with you has to do with the way you responded or worked through their problems. It becomes each call is a micro improvement.

Ryan's tips to get around the 'gatekeeper' is to think about them differently or realise that they are a stakeholder in the decision. The way he goes about it is first 'pass through and engage' strategy. The strategy that you act confident and get through quickly. If they ask you questions of why or are they expecting your call, you still know that they know enough about the business.