Cold Calling Doesn't Work Stop Wasting Everyone's Time

I got a cold call from someone this morning and ended up hanging up on them. I'll let you find out why by watching my 2 minute rant below.

In tough economic times cold calling is the first thing that sales managers tell their salespeople to do more of. "Pick up the phone and call someone we have no relationship with, that we've never called on before and ask them for the business. It's cheap and it is what sets the good salespeople apart from the average."

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In tough times people who have the opportunity to buy from you are being bombarded by insane cold callers like the guy who called me this morning. They are setting up barriers so they can't be reached and they are not returning calls because of the volume of calls they receive.

Rather than cold call, get an introduction, a referral, get them to want to talk to you. Warm them up first and if you do cold call, don't start pushing your product right from the beginning, understand what the other person needs and wants and then craft your pitch to match it. The idea would be to warm them up first and then on a second call even start talking about how you can help. Better yet, let your marketing warm them up so that they know you are going to be calling.

I'm going to be writing about this extensively in my new book on selling in tough times which will be out in May.

Watch this rant, I think you'll get something from it! (apologies for not changing into more professional business attire before I ranted, I'm in the middle of writing and these are my writing clothes).

Comments

[Jason Moffatt]

I actually enjoy a good telemarketer, but one that can't deviate from the script and have a good ole honest chat is worthless.

Ah the days of cold calling. Them were fun... NOT!

Check out what I did to these bill collectors who wouldn't stop calling for some dude who used to have my phone number....

http://www.jasonmoffatt.com/comedy/bill-collectors-wont-listen.html

Cheers

J-Mo

[Scott Thomas]

Dave,
That is absolutley fantastic. He called you and you are wasting his time! Classic. Don't bother sending the shoe, I don't believe he'd know what to do with it.

Thanks for sharing a providing a good laugh (intentional or not!).

Scott

[Karen]

Well Dave,
I think that it all depends on your product.
I sell pool design software and every pool builder is potentially qualified. I am straight to the point "Hi, my name is ... and I'm with ... Just calling today to see if y'all use anything for pool design (yes/no) - Have you ever considered using software? Can I send you some information about my product? Thanks for your time."
Many pool builders just haven't made the time to explore their software design options. Over the last 10 years, I have made many sales from a cold call. I know that design software can be of great value to the pool builder (as a sales tool and a time saver for redraws and constuction info)

[Dr Wright]

I cant wait for the new book to come out. Maybe you should market a shoe to go with it!

Dr.Wright
The Wright Place TV Show
www.wrightplacetv.com
www.twitter.com/drwright1

[LEADSExplorer]

Why not cold call on warm companies: those companies that have visited your website.
A web service revealing the company names of the website visitors limits your efforts.
Knowing the pages they visited and the duration of the visit plus background Internet digging into the visiting company will help too qualify them as raw leads or not.
Less calling. More chance to get an interesting call with an interested party .

[April Braswell]

snorkling with laughter. just tell the Silicon Valley VC backed start-up CEOs and Sales Managers who were sales trained > 10 yrs ago. It's all they know. Hmm, no wondering they are having problems.

Cheers Dave

[Brandon]

I'm no fan of cold calling, it's so highly impersonal. But I will say this. Those who've been at it for any length of time know that when they cold call, the numbers ultimately play out. Is it fun? No. Do you get called out by people occasionally? Yes.

But they know that for every 25 dials they make, they'll reach 12 people live and set 2 appointments if selling face-to-face, or close 2 deals if they're selling by phone.

Now, of those 10 they reached live who were not interested, four may be like you -- a little more hostile than the rest. But they know that going in.

It's extremely inefficient. It's a pretty undignified, powerless way to sell. But the ratios have been bad for years, just like direct mail marketing. And so the practitioners, so to speak, simply play to those numbers.

[Kevin Ireson]

Great post - very thought provoking
I think cold calling can be annoying, but a necessary evil.
I think there are ways to warm up the call first though. Some unique ways may be to send out business greeting cards first such as Prospecting greeting Cards
Also check out your prospect first using LinkedIn, you can quite often warm the call first by using this site.
Hope this helps
Kevin

[buy cialis]

Hi;

little bit late in the party :)

well i just recently update win 7, and i also update driver on gt220 from 7.15 to 8.15. and now i experienced first glitch screen then black death screen.

i reboot my pc, this time it happens during welcome screen.

i again reboot my pc in safe mode and went to device manager and roll back the diplay driver.

it works fine but when i try to go in nvidia control panel. i get this message:

The NVIDIA Dispay Panel extension cannot be created.
Possible reason include:
Version mismatch. Reinstalling display drivers may solve this problem.

i have not yet try 8.16 & 9.1.

[sildenafil citrate]

This was a little hard for me to piece together. I apologize if I'm misunderstanding any of it.

Sex is a really touchy analogy. Lots of really smart people have gone on at great length about it as a root cause for various things. With the advantage of our current cultural fixation on it, it's not too hard to see that this is terribly wrong. Sex is rather empty and kind of difficult to even pull off without attraction. And attraction is an effect caused by a rather wholistic view of someone. No single value is enough to make you think "OMG, I want, let's run off and SPAWN together!" Sex is not a cause at all, it's the reaction to the effect of being attracted. The root cause is your understanding of the person you're attracted to.

The parallels you're drawing with fantasy make sense to me this way too. The reaction is the power creep. The reaction has to scale in some fashion we can understand based on the original input (not many people would buy a D&D expansion called The Penultimate Guide to Being the Untouchable Godly Overlord of All You Survey, not even if the package included a Hostess twinkie). The root causes are creative impulses and the desire to share them. The effect is the game. The cooperatively told story. Structuring within the story is used to help convey more accurately, to make them easier to understand. Roleplaying games have this in
common with other forms of storytelling. The rule sets, which are unique to gaming, are there to help share the storytelling, because the game master tells the overall story and narrates but the players all tell the story of their characters.

[Nursing clothing]

Warm them up first and if you do cold call, don't start pushing your product right from the beginning, understand what the other person needs and wants and then craft your pitch to match it.

[Winstrol]

When will your book edited?

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