There is a tremendous amount of debate in the selling world about cold calling and whether it’s useful or not. Typically sales managers love it and salespeople hate it. Let’s break it down and see who is right and why.
It’s essential when discussing any method of prospecting to understand what the purpose of the method is before undertaking it. Many a salesperson has misunderstood what they were supposed to get out of cold calling and because of that misplaced expectation, they quit doing something that could have been a really good use of their time. Getting appointments is not the purpose of cold calling (all of you managers who just fell off your chairs, get up and keep reading- you’ll like the rest of this). If you start calling thinking you’re going to get a high rate of appointments you’ll be horribly disappointed. The fact is, for appointment setting alone, cold calling is very ineffective. Really good callers only expect to get about 10% of their calls to yield appointments. Compared to referrals or other methods of prospecting, 10% stinks. Again, if you get the purpose wrong and think calling yields a high percentage of appointments, you’ll get frustrated and quit. Don’t.
The purpose of cold calling is to determine if the person you are calling has any predisposed interest in what you’re selling. That’s it. Cold calling is a really efficient way of separating your prospect list into the categories “yes, I’d like to know more” (this is where the appointment setting happens!) or “no, that’s just not important to me right now). If you have a really great introduction in your script and you really understand and communicate the benefits of your product succinctly and clearly you’ll find more folks in the “yes” category than if you just do the same old junk every other caller does. The better your script, the more effective your calls become. You can really separate the interested from the not interested and save yourself valuable time later in the sales process.
One big key here is to take whatever answer you get and move on. If they want to investigate your product more, then set an appointment. If they aren’t interested for whatever reason, accept that and move on. Don’t spend any time trying to talk them into being interested- it won’t happen. The best you’ll do is get an appointment you won’t ever close and the worst is you’ll tick them off and ruin any chance of every making a sale.
There is such a thing as just not being interested in something. I hate to burst your bubble, but most people don’t go around all day desperately wanting what you’re selling. Most people are too wrapped up in their mundane, day-to-day living to pay attention to the stuff that’s really wrong with their lives or their businesses. That means that you and your product just aren’t on their radar. So when you call out of the blue and want to get in front them for just a few minutes (we’ll talk in another column about why that stinks) they don’t want to talk because they really aren’t interested right now. You’re essentially interrupting things they care about – working, feeding the kids, etc- to talk about they don’t care about. It’s like a commercial break in the middle of the daily show they are engrossed in. It’s annoying and likely to make them change the channel and hang up on you. We’ve all been the victim of unwanted, pushy solicitors. Why would you want to act like them? Just don’t.
So what does this all mean and is cold calling worthwhile or not? I think it is, if you’re using it for the right reason. Cold calling is a very efficient way to go through a large list of potential prospects to find out which ones are likely to buy and which aren’t worth spending time with right now. It’s a fast way to fill your pipeline with reasonably good prospects and get your sales jumpstarted. If you do it well, you won’t irritate the not interested ones and you’ll be able to call them back at a later date to see if something has changed that’s made them interested. All in all, not a bad use of a few hours a week. So, Sales Managers, you can go back to your meetings and tell everyone I said cold calling was a good thing to do!
Cold Calls Anyone? - To learn more about this author, visit Laura Posey's Website.
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