Say No To Cold Calling
By Andrew Shedden
There’s probably no aspect of selling worse than cold calling. Anyone who has been in professional sales for any period of time can tell you horror stories about rude, abusive, and even hostile responses to initial sales pitches. With the advent of voicemail I’m sure some of these veteran sales people would happily be abused just to hear a real living person on the other end of the phone.
Here are a few well-known facts about cold calling: Cold calling is a major pain. Cold calling is demoralizing. Cold calling is the worst aspect of selling. Life in sales would be wonderful without the hassle of cold calling.
If you’re in sales you may well be discovering another fact about cold calling, it doesn’t work.
What’s killing cold calling?
There are many factors making cold calling increasingly ineffective. Some of these are:
Technologies like voicemail and email, which were originally designed to assist communication, are being used as inexpensive and devastatingly effective ways of blocking access.
People are overwhelmed with communications messages and are noticing and responding far less well to intrusive marketing.
The Internet has made previously guarded information accessible. This has transferred transactional power from the seller to the buyer.
Quit selling so soon
In my experience the majority of companies try to initiate the sales process far too early in the relationship. This directly applies to prospecting techniques. People are busy and harassed and for the most part do not respond well to pitches on the phone. Annoying potential prospects hardly seems like the best way of starting the sales relationship.
What you need to do
The simple answer is to stop cold calling, revisit your entire prospecting process, devise a workable alternative, and be willing to make the change. You need to design a predictable and effective system that will help you attract prospects rather than trying to chase them down.
Recognize technological reality as it is and be willing to change
People will continue to hide from intrusions. Whether you call it cocooning, hiding, or avoiding, at the end of the day if someone doesn’t want to be spoken to there are many inexpensive and simple ways to shut you out. Rather than trying to fight voicemail don’t even bother with it.
Address sales reality
At any moment in any given market a small percentage of prospects are ready to buy from you. Since phoning is becoming increasingly ineffective you need to consider other methods.
Due to inbox fatigue and privacy concerns email marketing is losing some of its luster. It remains a great way of marketing your company through building relationships. As you know all email marketing must be done with a great deal of care to avoid abuse complaints. Be very careful about the source of your email rental list as many of these are being overused.
The most effective way to uncover prospects is with direct mail. This is the method used in our company and the method I recommend most for my clients. It is measurable, reliable, and allows you to tell your entire sales story. The trick to successfully prospecting through direct mail is not to try to sell your product or service in your initial mailing collateral.
Position all of your marketing activities to have people call you
Rather than initially promoting your products or services to your target market offer them free high quality information written to help solve the problems that keep them awake at night.
Once they have identified themselves and you’ve sent them the information many of these prospects will call you. If they don’t call you a simple follow up call in which you answer any of their questions will quickly be answered.
Make a firm commitment today to become an information marketer rather than a product and service pusher. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how quickly you’ll begin to attract new prospects.
