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2009 Cold Calling Checklist

Written by: Wendy Weiss

Article Overview: If we listen to the media, 2009 is shaping up to be a tough year. People are losing jobs and homes and businesses are struggling. A tough economy, however, does not mean that no one will ever buy anything or that no business at all will be done in 2009. What it does mean is that business owners and sales professionals will need to adjust tactics to survive: They will need to become more proactive and more efficient at finding new opportunities.

2009 Cold Calling Checklist

There are only four ways to generate a new potential sales opportunity:

1. Marketing activities to generate prospects who will pick up the telephone and call you

2. Contacting existing customers or your circle of influence for referrals

3. Face-to-face or social networking/web 2.0 efforts

4. Cold calling

While all four of these types of activities will generate leads for your business only one is directly under your control. The first three of the listed activities are essentially passive in that once you undertake the activity you then must wait for the prospect to come to you. Because you have to wait for the results (prospects coming to you) these processes also take longer. When you pick up the telephone to contact a prospect directly, however, you are able to go to that prospect and initiate a conversation that can turn into a relationship which turns into a sale.

In today's economy, cold calling is also one of the most economical ways to generate new business. It does not require expenditures in new equipment or infrastructure or staffing. All you need is your list and a telephone. When done well, cold calling is a direct, targeted, efficient and effective way to generate new business.

That said, here is your 2009 Cold Calling Checklist:

1. Target your market. Answer the questions:

• "Out of everyone in the entire world who may buy my products or services, who is most likely to buy my products and services?"
• "Who is most likely to buy a lot of my products or services and then come back to buy more?"

The answers might be types of companies, a particular industry, the size of company in employees or revenue.... Or the answer might be the types of individuals, their age, where they live, their level of education.... The bottom line is that the more specific you are about your market, the easier it will be to find qualified prospects and the more they will resonate with your message. And, by the way, to be effective you need to target your market for any type of marketing or prospecting activity, not just for cold calling.

2. Create your message. On a cold call you have approximately 10-30 seconds to grab and hold your prospect's attention. And, bear in mind, it is harder and harder to get people on the telephone these days. It is therefore imperative that you craft your message before you start making calls. Winging it simply does not work. Figure out how you will introduce yourself, the key points you wish to make and the goal of your conversation. Your script does not have to be word for word, bullet points will do. Figure out answers to the objections and/or questions you are bound to hear. Write it all down.

Make sure that you write your script the way you speak. Written English and spoken English are different and if you write a script in written English and then say it, you will sound phony. If you have a hard time crafting your script in spoken English try recording yourself and then writing it down.

3. Practice out loud. If you are new to cold calling or uncomfortable with cold calling, practice your script out loud. Do some role playing with friends and/or colleagues. Call your voice mail and record yourself. The idea is to become comfortable with the words and the approach. Once you are comfortable you can simply be yourself, say what you have to say and most importantly, listen to what your prospect has to say.

4. Make phone calls. Nothing happens without action. Commit to making a certain number of dials every day or spending a certain amount of time every day. Put that commitment in your calendar and do it. Set yourself up to succeed by making your commitment realistic. It is best to make a small commitment and do it every day. Successful prospecting is not about making one phone call (or even sitting down one day to make 100 phone calls) it is about making many new contacts over time.

5. Track your results. If you are not tracking, you do not know what works. This is true for cold calling and every other type of marketing or prospecting activity.

For cold calling you want to track Dials, Completed Calls (meaning that you actually speak with the decision-maker) Appointments and then how many of those Appointments turn into Sales.

Tracking will tell you if the list you are using is a good one. Tracking will tell you whether particular approach works in a particular market. If you change approaches, tracking will enable you to know which one works better. If you have hired someone to make calls for you, tracking will enable you to tell if they're doing their job and how well they're doing their job.

© 2009, Wendy Weiss

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Article Tags: bottom line, circle of influence, economy, entire world, existing customers, expenditures, face to face, infrastructure, li li, marketing, nbsp, networking web, new business, prospects, referrals, relationship, sales opportunity, social networking, target, ul



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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
Re: Moderators on vacation - I will be on vacation from Dec 23, 2008 - Jan 5, 2009 - See y'all in the New Year! Happy 2009 to All!!!
Re: Cold Calling - Cold calling is an extremely difficult job to do and unless one learns that being told no by people is not a direct refusal aimed at the cold caller but at whatever is being sold, it can be very soul destroying work to do. One needs to have absolute confidence in themselves and a pretty thick skin. MichelleJ


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