Recently I was on the phone with a director of sales and marketing for a service company.
The conversation had to do with cold-calling and sales prospecting. The director of marketing had called me looking for strategies they could implement to gain new business that would not require cold-calling.
Yes, I had some ideas for him, but I started off the question by asking him what he meant by cold-calling.
His response was the typical answer that cold-calling is when a salesperson is trying to use the telephone to reach someone they’ve never met before. After he shared that with me, a told him what he was describing wasn’t cold-calling, but random calling.
Sorry, but random calling doesn’t work.
If you feel cold-calling is random calling, then you have every reason to believe it’s cold. I have a real problem with the term cold-calling and the process of cold-calling. In today’s environment there is no reason to have to make a random call. There’s simply too much information available you can share with prospects.
The key is to have a benefit statement or pertinent news update you can share with the prospect you’re calling. When you approach the call in this manner, it’s not a cold-call but an information call.
Cold-calling is what the salesperson believes in their mind. Remove the concept of cold-call and it’s no longer a cold-call. If you insist on making random calls and proceeding to spout off about how wonderful you are, then fine — go ahead and keep calling it “cold-calling.”
Your goal is to have 5 unique benefit statements and/or 5 unique pertinent pieces of news the person who you’re trying to reach would find of interest. The key thing is what you share must be of benefit to them and not you. And it must be information they can understand and in which they can see benefit without knowing exactly what yo do.
Copyright 2012, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.
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