Shamus Brown:
Well, OK, the first thing you have to do…one reason why you do it, if you have to do it, is because if you have a list, if you have access to some kind of list you can call to, it’s a very fast way to get to sales. That’s why people do it, that’s why companies want people to do it, that’s why they have people hired in to do it.
The number one reason why it’s scary for people to do it is because they haven’t qualified the list. They are not familiar with who they’re going after. So, the reason why selling is scary for people is they’re afraid of all the rejection. Rejection goes up high when you haven’t qualified your list…haven’t filtered your list into likely buyers.
So, the first thing you do, to make cold calling easier, to make yourself more successful with it, is you have a strong profile. You have to know who you’re going to call is a good match with people that buy from you. That’s the first thing to do, to make yourself more successful, is to be profiling.
It comes back to the same thing we do in direct marketing. You don’t want to spend all your advertising spewing it out there to anybody that has a pulse. If you do the same thing in cold calling you have a high rejection rate.
So, that’s one of the first things I tell people. Once you get that figured out, then it’s similar to things we do in direct marketing. Get the message down that you’re trying to do. Have some kind of a specific offer.
My background was in business selling, selling business to business. A lot of what I did, and people like myself, was spend a lot of time researching the business before we ever made a call so we knew who was the target person. If we were trying to reach the Chief Financial Officer or Chief Information Officer or some kind of executive we did a lot of research into the company and a lot of networking trying to find out the right name of the person to call before we ever even made a phone call.
So, just making blind phone calls is not very productive. It’s a slow death… it can be very painful. One of the things I would do now if I was doing it and I was targeting a very set, focused niche of businesses, is I would use a combination of direct mail techniques and cold calling.
So, you can do things like, let’s say you have a very focused industry and you’ve got a very focused offer, I would send that direct mail package ahead, to that executive, to get their attention, and then follow up with phone calls. You can get a lot of power by mixing the two techniques together.
Great, thanks.