If you’re in a professional sales role here in Australia or New Zealand, and you need to set a couple of hours aside each week to look for new sales opportunities, and you either don’t know how to do it, you’re resisting picking up the phone, or you’re pushing back against your sales manager, then please listen up.

You can have the best product or service in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Auckland or Wellington (or anywhere else for that matter). Still, if you don’t have a connection or rapport with the prospect you are talking to, you’re not going to get very far in that introductory call.

Connecting emotionally with your prospects during those first few seconds when you introduce yourself is the golden bridge that turns a guarded prospect into a curious, open one. Without having rapport, even the best pitch falls flat.

Here’s the thing, though; rapport isn’t small talk, it’s trust built at speed. In B2B sales, which I assume you do, your ability to build rapport quickly is what will get the person you are speaking to lean in and want to know more. Rapport when making cold calls is what separates all of the best account managers and Territory representatives from those who struggle to be successful on the phone. If you give me a moment, I want to break down what rapport really means in the context of cold and warm calling, why it matters, and how to master simple techniques that make your calls smoother, friendlier, and far more productive.

Start with Emotional Awareness, Not Your Script

Having trained thousands of sales professionals, I can honestly say that the account managers, reps, business development managers, and all those other people with sales titles that don’t do so well are those who open with a pitch before they’ve earned the right to be heard. You’ve heard me say this before in previous blog posts, but the first 10 seconds of a cold call are not about selling, they’re about feeling. How you sound, your tone, pace, and energy all communicate one thing: “I get you.”

When you call someone you have never spoken to before, you need to match their rhythm. If they sound rushed, be concise. If they sound relaxed, slow down. You’re not mirroring to manipulate, but to match their pace and style, and in doing so make them feel comfortable talking to you. A study by the Journal of Applied Psychology found that people are 70% more likely to respond positively when they sense similarity in communication style. In my experience, learning to listen before leading made my calls feel more natural rather than transactional.

Rapport Turns Conversations into Relationships

Making your prospects feel comfortable is the invisible thread that transforms a cold call into a real conversation. When you focus on connecting first, through empathy and curiosity, you’ll notice something powerful start to happen: people will listen —and even better, they’ll want to talk to you.

In the end, the best sales professionals who are good at cold calling don’t try and sell over the phone. Their goal is to make people feel comfortable enough to trust them and to want to learn more about what they have to say.
If you’re based in Australia and you’re either flying solo or part of larger sales team and you’d like some help knowing how to incorporate cold and warm calling into your sales week, then please reach out to me. We have affordable online and in-person training that can make an enormous difference in how you find new sales opportunities. We are here to help.