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Are Your Salespeople Still Cold Calling? The Ugly Truth

Guest post by: Dave Kurlan

Article Overview: Cold calling. It sounds so...20th Century. Some industries still break-in their salespeople by putting them on the phone and having them dial - more than one hundred times a day - and attempt to schedule appointments. You still receive calls like this from new, and sometimes not so new salespeople selling insurance, investments, copiers, office supplies, commercial real estate and long distance phone services. Today, more salespeople are using...

Are Your Salespeople Still Cold Calling? The Ugly Truth

Cold calling. It sounds so...20th Century.

Some industries still break-in their salespeople by putting them on the phone and having them dial - more than one hundred times a day - and attempt to schedule appointments. You still receive calls like this from new, and sometimes not so new salespeople selling insurance, investments, copiers, office supplies, commercial real estate and long distance phone services.

Today, more salespeople are using the Social Network to find opportunities. Whether it's incoming leads from Blogs, researching and requesting introductions on LinkedIn, or simply finding the target audience from a Google search, salespeople are using these tools to connect more and more often.

Of course, one thing that will never change is word of mouth. Referrals and introductions from happy customers and clients will always be the finest method for generating new business.

Given all of the options, which salespeople are smartest? Is it those that are cold calling, those who are getting introductions or those that are using the Social Network? The answer depends on how you decide to measure what being smart means.

If smart is measured by the easiest method, with less work, and no human contact, then those using the social network are as smart as they come.

If smart is measured by following the path that most often leads to success, then those who ask their customers for introductions and get them are even smarter.

If smart means making sure that no matter what else happens during the course of the month, the salesperson adds the required number of new opportunities to their pipeline, then those who are cold calling are the smartest salespeople on the planet.

Cold calling isn't enjoyable (for those salespeople who are truthful about it). Cold calling isn't effective except for the most brilliant of callers. Cold calling isn't efficient anymore. One thing that cold calling will always be is controllable and manageable.

You can't control the number of inbound leads your salespeople will get.Of course, if you are generating more leads than necessary to keep the pipeline full of quality opportunities my argument doesn't work. But most companies aren't accomplishing that - yet.

You can't control the number of introductions you will receive from your clients and customers.

You can't control the number of introductions your social network will make on your behalf, even if you are asking for them.

You can control the number of cold calls your salespeople make.Even if the numbers are as ugly as this:

Attempts - 100

Connects - 10

Meeting Scheduled - 1

At least you can control that.

I don't think cold calling should still be the default approach for new business development. However, if a salesperson needs to add 20 new opportunities to their pipeline each month, and the other methods deliver only 7, then cold calling becomes a necessary method to secure the remaining 13 opportunities required.

Cold calling is slowly but surely declining in use but some salespeople have discarded it before its time.

Reevaluate what your salespeople are doing, how they are doing it, and make sure that the emphasis is on the result, not the method.

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Article Tags: cold calling, introductions, salespeople, Social Network



Related Forum Posts
Re: What to avoid when cold calling? - At the time of Cold Calling we should avoid price increases for products and unavailability.
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
Re: Hit or Miss: Dancejam - There certainly are a lot of these video exchange sites out there. There's another one I found out about just two weeks ago - probably because they paid big bucks to be on the TV show NCIS. Called...okay, I'm having a senior moment.... I Can Beat That .com or something similar. Rather than videos, people upload t heir best photos for Best Ugly Face, Best Air Guitar photo, and so on. I looked at it just to see if the NCIS guys were actually on it, and they are... but never bothered to go back as its not something that interests me...


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