Cold calling. Feel a shiver move up your spine?
Too bad. It’s a shame that you, like many others, choose to dismiss cold calling as a lead generation tool (there’s that shiver again). I’m not saying that its reputation hasn’t been earned. I just think everybody is going about it all wrong.
I love this analogy from Mike Schultz, Publisher of RainToday.com:
Fail at something enough, and it's easy to dismiss the whole tactic. (No matter how many times I try, I just can't hit a Jonathan Papelbon fastball. Swinging a bat at a baseball must not work!)
Cold calling works…you’ve probably just never been shown the right way to do it.
If you’re interested in exploring how you can improve your teleprospecting, or if you just aren’t convinced it can work for you, check out B2B Lead Gen Roundtable’s next complimentary webinar featuring Josiane Feignon. She’s author of Smart Selling on the Phone and Online as well as the founder and CEO of TeleSmart Communications. Josiane provides consulting and coaching for Fortune 1000 companies, and she knows what it takes to find the power buyers.
Join us for this live webinar on “How to Improve Lead Generation with Prospecting 2.0." Josiane is going to show you her latest ideas on prospecting 2.0 including email and voice mail trends and how to outline a winning qualification criteria and more. As a bonus, Josiane will be giving away copies of Smart Selling on the Phone Online to three attendees. I hope you can join us!
View recorded webinar now and download the slides here
You may just warm up to the idea of cold calling when you understand how to use it properly.
The right way to teleprospect...
I’ve proven that cold calling works as a major part of a lead generation approach in case after case with many clients. Sure, you can argue that there are too many other powerful ways to build client bases to bother with the phone. It is true that what worked yesterday doesn’t work today. You can’t pick up the phone anymore and say, “Hi. Interested in something new?” Your prospect will just roll his eyes and then forget about you as soon as he’s hung up. But, just think of the possibilities if you could just hit home with that client on the first call. What if you gave them something to think about after you hung up? What if you came off as warm and engaging to help offset the discomfort of that first call? As an example, I’m going to quote Mike again:
Of course, not everyone is going to respond the way you want them to. But, if your list has been carefully planned and targets specific people that need your service - people that are already exploring versions of what you have to offer - a good number of people will give you a foot in the door.
If your problem is that you’re just too busy to do it, hire someone to do it for you. And, then once you get someone’s attention, don’t fail to stay in touch regularly and meaningfully. We can’t expect that first conversation to make the sell; Cold calling done correctly will achieve exactly what it’s supposed to: it will give your company an introduction that could turn into a fruitful relationship.
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