Monday, August 17, 2009

Cold Calling is Dead; The Myth: Part II

Since we concluded in Part I of this post that cold calling is not dead and is really a viable option for small businesses, lets examine some of the details of this tool.

Small business companies that provide products or services for other small businesses are prime candidates for benefiting from cold calling. In fact, it may still be the most cost effective way to build awareness of your business offering. This is especially true if it is used to nurture new customers. It is much more difficult to acquire email lists for small businesses than it is for larger corporations so this makes email marketing difficult. One campaign that can easily be used by small business marketers (many times that is the owner or a trusted employee) is to call into target companies for the purpose of finding out what email address is best to reach out to the company with. This allows the small business to email an offer that can generate an interest in the future. The offer should always be something of value to the receiving company.


For example, an IT service company may provide a free tune up of a computer or server. This may be something that the receiving company will file away until a time when it is actually needed. There are many other types of offers that can be used with this kind of campaign. This is a productive activity that can be done for a couple of hours each day. Within a couple of hours it should be easy to make twenty-five calls. One hundred calls a week could end up bringing in four new clients per month. Don’t give up if it doesn’t bring results right away; remember the term nurture.

Whenever cold calling is attempted it is important to realize that it is a numbers game. If you make x number of calls you can be assured that you will end up with x number of conversations. Realize of course, that the number of conversations will be much less than the number of calls dialed but, after you do it for a while, you will find that the statistics ring true day in and day out.

You can then begin to predict what kind of results you can expect. Eventually, you will serendipitously run into someone who has a need for your service at the very moment you call. But, if you work it well, you will find that you are actually building rapport. Many times, especially if you call a small business, the person answering the phone can be very helpful in getting your companies name and service in front of the decision maker, so, if you cannot speak to the owner do not neglect the gatekeeper. You will be surprised by the amount of times that a gatekeeper can actually get you a hearing in the long run.

Finally, there have been some recent studies done that show that you should make more attempts before you write off a particular prospective client business. While it used to be considered practical to give up after three attempts, new studies show that in light of how busy people are today, you should make at least five attempts and if you are trying to reach the owner or a C-level you can make up to seven calls before you reach them.

In Part III we’ll look at what you should say when you get a live conversation.

rijConsulting

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for the informative post.

    Business marketing is one of the most important parts that your business needs to be addressed with careful notice and positive thoughts. In last decade or so, the importance of business marketing has increased volcanically, as the advent of Internet and online business has ushered a whole new era in business. It should be noted that the competition and urgency among businessmen has increased due to the fact that Internet has rendered a whole world as a virtual world, and you never know when and from where a potential competitor has entered your territory unnoticed by you.

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  2. Hi,

    Like any kind of conversation, cold calling must be as natural as if the sales person is just talking with his friend. It does not have to sound too professional so that the customer will not suspect sales person of pushing him or her to buy products.

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