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A Guide to Cold Calling

Guest post by: Nicolas DAlleva

Article Overview: Cold calling is a great way to generate business leads. Though it can be quite stressful and discouraging to place outbound calls to parties whom may not be interested in what you are selling, the sales advantages outweigh any possible damage to your ego.

A Guide to Cold Calling

Although often derided as stressful, discouraging, and annoying - cold calling can be an effective way to grow your business and tell people about your company. Cold calling gets a bad reputation at times, usually because people misunderstand its purpose or are not doing it correctly. By taking the time to get it right and following these steps, you can make cold calling work for you.

Cold Calling is a Numbers Game

Regardless of what you are selling, you need to keep in mind that most if not nearly everyone you call is not going to be interested in your goods or services. Your success rate with any calling list is further hindered by other things outside of your control, such as reaching voicemails, disconnected numbers, and busy signals. For this reason it is important to call many people and call often. If you have a list of 500 or 600 contacts, it might help to break it up into smaller, more manageable blocks.

Call a hundred people before lunch and another hundred afterwards. The next day, if you're feeling up to it, try and call 300 contacts over the course of the workday. Your response rate is probably going to be roughly the same regardless of how many people you call, but a 2% success rate means more sales with 300 calls than with 100 calls. Of course, you can always play with changing your pitch slightly, calling different parts of the country, or targeting different groups of consumers or companies.

Remember: Don't take it personally

Getting rejected dozens and dozens of times can take a toll on your self esteem. This is only natural, but you should try to remind yourself that it doesn't matter. You are not being rejected as a person, it's just business and you should continue to make calls with the same enthusiasm as before. If you sound confident, people will be more likely to listen to you and more likely to want to buy what you are selling. As for the people who have no interest, remember that is fine too.

Be respectful and polite to everyone you call whether they are interested or not. Your reputation is very important and you should be professional on the phone, even if it's only out of common courtesy. At the same time, it is alright to take comfort in the fact that you don't know the people you are calling and will probably never encounter them again. There are plenty of others out there you can call who may be interested. Your job is to keep calling until you get a hold of them.

Mix Things Up and Find Out What Works

If you call a hundred contacts and not one is the least bit interested, you should stop and ask yourself if you need to change your approach. You should also consider what, on a normal day, the response rate is for a list of calls. A good idea might be to use a different script or call from a different list. Oftentimes a change as simple as calling contacts in a different time zone will yield better results. This is not much of a surprise considering that people are more or less willing to talk to someone on the phone depending on their mood, which is dependent on the time of the day to some extent.

Becoming good at cold calling requires your time, patience, and persistence. If you talk to salespeople who are veterans at cold calling, they will tell you that over time you develop a sense about what works and what doesn't. After a while, you will hone your skills and become more adept at changing your pitch and approach depending on the caller. People have many different personalities and communication styles which, as a result, mean they make decisions in myriad different ways. By understanding and reacting properly to these differences, you can achieve great success at cold calling.

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Article Tags: business leads, cold calling, communications



Related Forum Posts
Re: What to avoid when cold calling? - At the time of Cold Calling we should avoid price increases for products and unavailability.
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
Need a book recommendation for writing better - I'm always looking for ways to improve my writing skills, so I was just wondering if anyone could recommend a good copywriting or copyediting book? I was actually thinking of reading "The Copywriter's Handbook : A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Copy That Sells" by Robert W Bly [u:w3cg00nn]OR[/u:w3cg00nn] "The Copyeditor's Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications" by Amy Einsohn. Would anyone know if these books are any good? Thanks


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