To cold call or not to cold call, that is the question!

As a sales expert I constantly hear how people HATE cold calling, and most small business owners are in that category.  If you are like me and went into business so you could do the things you enjoy, make oodles of money (well enough for you to be able to buy that Louis Vuitton Handbag or the cherry red Ferrari), and go on the holidays you have always wanted, then you will understand what I mean when I say that cold calling is HARD work, and frankly has very little return.

Having said that, I am aware how successful cold calling can be.  In fact, I started my sales career as an “inside sales rep (aka teletubby)” at a large multinational, and I loved my cold calling duties.  At the time I was living by myself in an apartment in Sydney and I would enjoy getting out of bed in the morning to get to work at 8.30am – I would start my calls at 9am and continue through the day.  I had a pretty good hit rate, achieved my quotas and started to make quite good money.  However, I often question why I enjoyed this role so much, was it simply the thrill of the chase….I loved it when I had a challenging client who never wanted to speak to me as it became my mission to get them to “show me some love”, or was it simply me having the opportunity to talk to people all day??  Whatever it was, I quickly burned out and needed to find better ways to sell and therefore moved to a “face to face” role.

Today in my own business I make the total of ZERO cold calls, and I still have clients coming through my doors.  The reason I do this is because I don’t have the staffing numbers that the multinational had when I worked there and therefore I need to be as efficient in sales as possible.  Reality is, I don’t have the name of that very well known organisation behind me anymore and therefore people on the phone that I have never met will have a tendency to be slightly more sceptical and mistrusting in comparison, so I needed to find a better way to sell, after all, I am a mere mortal that needs to be able to do multiple tasks and still have money coming through my doors – you know what I mean right?

The one thing I wonder is that are people asking about cold calling as a knee jerk reaction to not having the amount of clients and money that they are after….and if this is the case will cold calling actually help?

There are so many schools of thought out in the market place currently around cold calling, and in our new economy I believe it would be remiss of me if I didn’t mention some of them, there is Ron LaVine who is a cold calling specialist – and after reading his tips and techniques I quickly realised that it very much centres around being part of a call centre and part of a large organisation….not me……the other one I took a lot of notice from was the “never cold call again” expert Frank Rumbauskas and he outlined a whole strategy of increasing income without the hard work of cold calling – definitely my thing!

I could be wrong about small business owners not wanting to cold call – and I would love to hear your feedback on whether or not you do it, hate it, avoid it or is it your “knee jerk reaction”?

Look forward to your comments

Off to catch up with friends over a wine

Cheers

Naomi