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Is Cold Calling Worth It?

So how would you like to start your prospecting campaign today? It’s Monday morning at 9 AM and you say to yourself should I block out and hour for cold calling or should I go see the dentist for a root canal? For many the level of pain is the same. The majority of sales professionals avoid cold calling like the plague. The reason is they are convinced that it doesn’t work and they expect rejection just about every time. Many articles, books and blogs are out there today telling you that cold calling does not work, period! You’re better off networking, developing a lead generation program, a new CRM system and of course referrals are the best for getting new opportunities.

I will confess that years ago I made 1000 calls that led to one piece of business. Most of the calls went to voicemail and just about 50 were answered by the person that I was trying to reach. That one piece of business received was actually from someone who knew about our firm. With these statistics you would say cold calling is a waste of time. But is it? Did I have a technique? No.

In this day and age as we hopefully come out of the recession we need to have the best possible tools in our hands to meet the demands of better sales performance. Cold calling with a technique that works will make the difference. As Marc Harty from maintopic Media says, “if your ship hasn’t come in from sea yet, swim out to it”.

Barry Caponi, a friend and colleague is President of the Caponi Performance Group. Barry has developed a process for cold calling that works. Barry says that companies leverage technologies like CRM to address the efficiency issue and use scripts and objections handling concepts to address the effectiveness issue. You can’t have one without the other. You can say efficiency is driving from Dallas to Austin in 3 hours and 30 minutes, but the effectiveness was the point that you were supposed to go to Houston! At the end of the day the mantra uttered by sales management is “Make more dials!” Reality is that more dials leads to more appointments which leads to more new business-if you have a methodology that works.

Barry’s method for cold calling works. It’s called Coldcalling 101 and focuses on the Art(skills), Science(tools) and Best Practices(processes) for the pursuit of each group of targets. Just a couple of points for you to consider that Coldcalling 101 addresses;

·         What is the purpose of the call? It’s to get an appointment-period.

·         Understand that when you call someone-you are interrupting them.

·         They will lie to get you off the phone.

·         We must ask questions to gain control of the conversation.

·         We must share with the prospect a reason to meet-value.

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