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Sales Training - Is There Any Need For Cold Calling Anymore?

Written by: Peter O'Donoghue

Article Overview: There is much hype around at the moment that Cold Calling 'sucks' and that it has died a death. Never! In a business to business environment there will always be a place for cold calling.

Sales Training - Is There Any Need For Cold Calling Anymore?

Sales Training - Is There Any Need For Cold Calling Anymore?

Cold Calling had been with us for thousands of years and will be for the foreseeable future. That's right, I said thousands. No matter which name you give it the art of cold calling has been developed over thousands of years of networking, knocking on doors, town criers, street peddlers and hand written letters of introduction.

All of these time tested methods have one thing in common. They are forms of cold calling. They seek to identify other people who you do not yet have a relationship with and to initiate contact to see if there are areas of mutual benefit. It's about building relationships. That doesn't sound scary does it?

WARNING:
If you get a lot of inquiries from the internet or other forms of lead generation and think you don't need cold calling then think again. You need this more than most!! The skills you can acquire from picking up the phone and engaging someone in conversation are essentially the core skills of selling.
No other form of prospecting has such immediacy, such human contact and so much potential for winning long term business. Yes, I mean it. Google Pay Per Click (ppc), for example, is one of the greatest sales breakthroughs of the last 100 years but is only one way of prospecting and lead generation. You should never base your business on just one form of prospecting. Appointment setting largely based on cold calling has some fantastic benefits for your business:

It is instant. You can read an article about a local business in your Chamber Of Commerce magazine and be talking to the same person within 5 minutes. No other prospecting method allows this speed of contact.

You are constantly learning. A business consultant contact that I was once acquainted with, approached every call with the curiosity of a child. Even if it was immediately apparent that there was no potential for immediate business he would ask permission to have a conversation (you can't do that with ppc). He would be interested in the marketplace, the economy and how it affected their industry, environmental and legislation changes, the challenges the businesses faced - you name it, he was interested. Within the space of 1 day he could go from knowing very little about an industry to having an almost 'expert' intimate knowledge about what was going on. Did that help him 'position' himself on future calls --- You bet!

It's one of the most human forms of contact - When done professionally and properly. In this world of electronic communication it is very often the strength and quality of our human interactions that will distinguish you as a top performer.

Imagine for a minute, you have just been flicking through the trade press for your industry and a Director of an organisation has given an interview.

In that interview he talks about some of the challenges he faces over the next two years that could have a massive positive or negative impact on his business. As you read you understand because you have helped solve those challenges with other clients. You know the errors they could make that would cost them a fortune in time and money. You have the solution easily packaged up and ready to go. What would you do? Hopefully, you said something along the lines of "That's a stupid question Peter! I would be on the phone right away introducing myself." If you did - well done. Strip away all the hype and that is essentially what professional cold calling is.

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Article Tags: 100 years, appointment, building relationships, business consultant, chamber of commerce, commerce magazine, core skills, curiosity, doors, foreseeable future, google, google pay per click, human contact, immediacy, inquiries, lead generation, letters of introduction, mutual benefit, ppc, term business



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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
Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional - Hi Evan, I am noticing that many of the posts in the Sales/Marketing section deal with online marketing, SEM and and SEO and Affiliates. I was wondering if it might be a good idea to separate that section into two; 1) Online Sales and Marketing; 2) Traditional Sales and Marketing


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