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Cold Calling Techniques - I wonder if you can help me?

Written by: Peter O'Donoghue

Article Overview: Busy executives are sick of being approached and sold to in the same 'old skool' ways by pushy sales people. My recent experience hiiting the phones to sell advertising on behalf of one of my clients proves my ideas that there are a ways prospecting on the phone can be done.

Cold Calling Techniques - I wonder if you can help me?

A good client of mine got themselves in a hole recently and I got involved with them to bail them out. I was really glad I did as it gave some fantastic insights into the real current perception of using the phone to generate business.

My client provide large TV screens for Events and Conferences as well as providing the on site TV production and broadcast feeds. They are not a TV channel but take care of all on site work at Sporting events and Political Conferences. They are allowed to sell advertising on the internal TV network and usually have a dedicated media agency to do this on their behalf.

For many reasons that I don't need to go into the relationship with the media agency had broken down and my client was 3 weeks away from the big event with no advertising sold and no one on their staff capable of developing a sale strategy and then picking up the phone. They asked me to help out and I was glad to. A couple of days practicing what I preach is always a great boost and keeps my own skills high. It was a tough challenge as my client had no relationships with any previous advertisers, had no contacts and had no idea where to start.

First thing I got the company to do was some really in depth research into the marketplace with the aim of identifying who the likely target audience was. There were many ways I got them to do this which included online and offline. An example was to identify people advertising in current trade press, online portals based around that Industry because they were already indicating their willingness to advertise to reach the audience my clients TV channel was aimed at. This was one of a number of ways I got the company to research the market with the aim of developing a list of targeted companies where i could turn my cold call into a warm call.

I also then got the companyto research the company vis google to find out who the key decision makers were. This is extremely easy in todays technological sales environment. A quick search for "Marketing manager COMPANY NAME" or "Media Manager COMPANY NAME" quickly resulted in around 90% of the contacts names complete with a direct dial number.

This gave me:

1. A reasonably targeted list of people who have advertised to the intended audience
2. The relevant contact and their telephone number.

When I called the person I very often got through straight away. My approach was based on one that I have introduced my delegates to in my cold calling/telesales training. The approach is one based on being slightly humble rather than the old skool opening lines approach. I didn't use something like:

"Mrs Corporate Marketing Manager, I could show you a way to reach 70,000 targeted people in your intended market place you would be interested wouldn't you?"

No, I used a humble approach like "I wonder if you can help me?" and then explained the reason why I was calling was because they were existing advertisers, that we were the TV channel provider and realistically I didn't know if this was a fit for their company. "How does this fit with your marketing goals for 2009?"

As part of the conversation we had, I also mentioned that our speciality was the TV production side of the business and that we had never sold advertising before due to us previously having a media agency.

At least 3 marketing/media managers for some very large companies responded to this approach and my comment about us not having experience selling advertising with:

"I can tell and it's so refreshing. That's part of the reason why we are still talking"

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Article Tags: advertisers, aim, broadcast, cold call, couple of days, decision makers, google, insights, large tv, marketplace, perception, political conferences, sales environment, sporting events, target audience, tv channel, tv network, tv production, tv screens, willingness



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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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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
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