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Warming Up Cold Calls

Written by: Hugh Duffy

Article Overview: In today’s day and age, a cold call telemarketing call is about as smooth as vinegar. To warm up your approach and improve the effectiveness, use a little honey in a warm cup of tea and it will go much farther, and be more effective.

Warming Up Cold Calls

Are you going to the school of hard knocks with cold call telemarketing?

When it’s cold outside, those cold calls would be more effective if you “warmed” them up.

As the ole saying goes, “you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” In today’s day and age, a cold call telemarketing call is about as smooth as vinegar. To warm up your approach and improve the effectiveness, use a little honey in a warm cup of tea and it will go much farther, and be more effective. Yes, I clearly recognize that honey and tea are more expensive than vinegar but the value of a new client is well worth the extra shekels. Yes, I also know that you don’t like to part with your hard earned dinero.

Here are a few steps to catch more flies with your lead generation program:

1. Two-step marketing – generate interest before you call
2. Establish yourself as a “trusted” advisor
3. Know exactly what to say
4. Focus on their needs

In today’s day and age, it’s getting much more difficult and expensive to sell products and services (especially intangible services) using traditional direct response marketing. That’s because it’s hard to provide enough information and create any trust from a cold call telemarketing pitch.

With the proliferation of marketing messages, you will get a much higher conversion ratio and lower cost per new client by breaking down your lead generation process into baby steps.

Two-Step Marketing

The first step is to educate your prospects about better ways to alleviate their pain. For our clients, this initial step is a well constructed direct mail letter. This initial step is designed to address their pain and establish your service as the solution to their problem.
Also, the direct mail letter will start to position your “rain maker” as a “trusted” advisor. This is done by providing credentials, demonstrating expertise with a niche audience, and using testimonials. For those that are curious and interested, provide your website address at the bottom of your direct mail letter so they can learn more about your practice and expertise. If your website is done properly, it should act as a silent salesperson for your practice.

After warming up your prospect with a honey flavored direct mail letter, the second step is an outbound phone call which references the first step. Following up a direct mail letter with a outbound phone call shows that you care about their business and elevates their perception of your firm. It also adds creditability to your offer and provides a window to quickly address their objection. While this window of opportunity may be brief, it provides your telemarketer with the opportunity to expand on your capabilities and/or cross-sell into an adjunct service.

So if your lead generation is suffering from the school of hard knocks, warm up your approach with a little honey first.

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  Five Tips to Instantly Warm Up Meetings and Interviews
  Cold Calling

Article Tags: baby steps, bott, cold call, cold calls, conversion ratio, cup of tea, direct mail, direct response marketing, generation program, initial step, little honey, mail letter, niche audience, program 1, rain maker, school of hard knocks, shekels, telemarketing call, vinegar, website address



Related Forum Posts
Re: Cold Calling - Cold calling is an extremely difficult job to do and unless one learns that being told no by people is not a direct refusal aimed at the cold caller but at whatever is being sold, it can be very soul destroying work to do. One needs to have absolute confidence in themselves and a pretty thick skin. MichelleJ
Cold Calling - Cold calling is tough, but it is possible. Its a shame that your employer doesn't seem to be giving you any help. I would suggest that you learn everything about the products you're trying to sell to the retailers. It wouldn't hurt to have them close at hand while you're on the phone with a potential buyer. Learn what is great about the items. What do they offer the consumer? Why should the retailer carry them? Who would be most likely to buy the items? Once you know these answers, learn about the companies you are calling. Its hard to tell a retailer that your product is something they need - if you don't know anything about their business and/or the customers. If they have a website that would be a great place to research. Shri
Re: How to develop sales contacts? - Everyone has the right idea here. Depending on your business, there are different techniques that you could use. For consultants and sales heavy businesses, there are three tactics that I have found especially useful in my business: 1. Attend Networking Events 2. Cold Calling 3. Referral Program 4. Affiliate Program (most successful) The affiliate program was successful for me, as I hooked up with a franchise consultant, and he gave multiple unit businesses that needed my credit card processing services. I highly suggest you hook up with a sales partner, and give him a cut of the monthly revenue.
Re: Direct Mail Postcards - Post cards would be really expensive to send from Japan...but one way to advertise that is not expensive from overseas is by Cold Calling using cheap VoIP equipment. I know Japan has a really good internet connection, so as long as you are willing to stay up late, it might be an option. I cold call from Thailand far, far away from any city using a CDMA wireless internet connection and have had pretty good results. I find tho, that cold calling works best for business 2 business (b2b), rather than b2c products. --matt
Re: Cold Calling - As long as people are out of jobs, you'll probably have a lot of people who say they want to work for straight commission, but if they don't get paid fairly quickly, they usually move on. We've run into that and went through about 500 people (whose resumes looked really good) until we found about 3 good resellers. People just don't want to work for anything. Or they do a good job getting the business but don't do the follow up necessary to make the sale......so they move on thinking they need money NOW. Our business requires all cold calling as well. It's really tough for people to perfect that but there are a lot of good books out there. On is Cold Calling Techniques, by Stephan Schiffman


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