Can Cold Calling Kill your Company?

What would you call one thousand telemarketers on a sinking ship? A good start! Sure, we borrowed that joke from the hundreds about lawyers but the sentiment still applies. There is no group of sales associates more loathed than telemarketers except maybe used car salesmen. Telemarketing has one of the least effective conversion ratios, it creates ill will from the customer toward the company, and it wastes valuable resources such as time, energy and effort of the sales staff and money for the company.

If cold calling is so bad, why do so many companies still rely on it? The problem lies squarely on the shoulders of management, who refuse to believe business is changing, and with upper level management satisfied with tired old techniques and conversion ratios. Basically, you have a culture of ignorance promoting an outdated business practice based on a memory of success rather than the actual success. It's as if businesses that still employ cold calling like wasting money, and creating a bad name for the company and industry.

In today’s Internet age and with the use of direct response direct mailing there are far simpler ways to generate a customer base and keep in contact with them. Permission based marketing is a concept where the company becomes a valuable resource to the customer by providing information beyond the initial product and service, and create such a remarkable experience that the customer becomes an evangelist spreading the word about the company. This "word of mouth" advertising constitutes attraction marketing and converts at a much higher rate than any other type of advertising. So why wouldn't most business want to switch to attraction marketing?

It's simple. Ignorance. They don't know better, and they don't understand how to make their product remarkable. Quick, name the top three benefits of your product to your customers. Not the features, that's what's important to you, something you put in your advertising. Tell me how those features benefit your customer. If you can save your customer time (which is a cliché, since every "modern convenience" claims to save time) how is that a benefit to your client? A benefit is a specific measured return on an investment in a feature. One of the benefits of attraction marketing is the incredible amount of money it can save a company. Think of it as hunting with a rifle instead of a shotgun. A rifle is precise, a shotgun wide and scattered. Attraction marketing creates a niche, and identifies how your product benefits the niche specifically. No employee time is wasted searching for people who may be interested, but just aren't sure- and that energy can be turned to learning more about the product to be better prepared to solve customer problems.

Many old school managers will take new conversion ratios based on attraction marketing, and attempt to apply them to ineffective cold calling numbers. "If we convert 1 out of 10 on attraction marketing, then we can convert 1000 out of 10,000 using cold calling." Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. The key to attraction marketing is being remarkable, either through product, or superb customer service, or exceeding customer expectation at every service level. Be a company worth talking about, and have a product worth telling a friend about. Cold calling can kill your company. It may generate short term success, but at the sacrifice of a reputation. What people think about your company can help long term success by turning you into a valuable resource, a place where people turn to get the answers they need and their problems solved. The tools available on the Internet make creating and servicing this niche simple and easy.