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Prospecting For New Business - Cold Calling

Guest post by: Peter O'Donoghue

Article Overview: Many people think business generation is about picking up the phone. Effective business generation begins with an effective prospecting plan. This article shows you where to start

Prospecting For New Business - Cold Calling

There has been a lot of debate in sales blogs and sales articles recently about the effectiveness of cold calling. Many people are taking a stance so that they can 'carve' out there own piece of the marketplace. Cold calling is dead screams one blog whilst another screams that cold caling is the best way too win business.

There are levels of cold calling - many of these are generally also referred to as warm calling.

When approaching someone who is a prospect to do business with you you are making a cold call.The most difficult kind of cold call is when the person you approach:

• Has never heard of your company.

• Doesn't believe he or she has any use for your product or service.

• Seems to be annoyed that you are bothering him/her

• Just doesn't like your approach

The best kind of cold call is when the person you approach:

• Knows your company.

• Knows something about your product or service.

• Knows that he or she has a need.

• Has heard about you.

• Had meant to call you.

This type of response comes from effective prospecting. Effective prospecting begins way, way before you ever pick up that phone to make the introduction. When you have an effective prospecting strategy in place you can have these golden moments when someone answers your hello with "I just meant to call you!"

Prospecting can start with the marketing efforts and brand building of the company. Never rely on this. The most effective salespeople know that they are the single biggest component of their business generation prospecting. The first step is this realisation. The second step is to have a sales prospecting strategy in place.

Check out the free sales resources on my blog and website to set you on the way to developing youjr effective sales strategy

Related Articles
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  Why You Hate Cold Calling But Shouldn’t: The Common Myths Exposed and Truths Uncovered
  Stop By All That Business Your Are Driving By If You Want to Increase Sales
  Sales Training - Is There Any Need For Cold Calling Anymore?

Article Tags: blog, blogs, business generation, cold call, difficult kind, effective sales, marketing efforts, marketplace, sales resources, sales strategy, salespeople, screams



Related Forum Posts
Prime Means of Selling - Prospecting and Selling aren't the same. Prospecting is finding the few within a target group who are prime candidates for your service. I don't think everyone will agree on what "prime" means but I'd say if the prospects actively want what you're offering and have the ability to pay for what you're offering then they qualify as "prime".
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
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.


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