Who taught you to earn American money? Who taught you sell? Who taught you to use cold calling to support these activities? In my case I learned the hard way. I began with what I mentioned in earlier blogs, doing door to door selling where there was no school for selling. There were no classes in high school or college for selling. Let alone and there was nothing to learn about making money with prospecting or in that fact, using cold calling. We also knew that sales people made great incomes and great livings from selling, whether in Insurance, home construction, vacuum cleaners, even fuller brush and a host of other products.But to do this, they needed to sell large volumes of people to get to closing orders. That made many to resort toknocking on doors. And these people had high turnover but the ones that remained made their livelihoods.
When I was in college, my mother got me a great job selling….to my chagrin; it was a door to door. I ended up working for anElectrolux dealer at the age of twenty-one knocking on 60-75 doors in July at 90 degree weather carrying vacuum cleaners with me. I also worked next to an older man who had a family and 3 kids and did very well. He was making $75,000 a year doing this. Which was a lot of money back then, and help make it an honorable profession. But most people still saw it as a poor way, almost a scam, to make money.
This blog is a bit of a story how I had a personal experience, and learned how to relate to strangers by literally knocking on doors. There was no application to use the phone. I think the reason most people, 99% of the people, never want to do this, is the fear of failure and rejection. Not a nice thing. How you can learn more (free “gifts of Knowledge”). Cold calling never went mainstream and stayed that way, with the advent of negative movies. The public did not see value in it and the movies reinforced that belief. With the likes of Death of a Salesman (all time classic), Tin Men (selling aluminum siding to unsuspecting homeowners using trickery and scams, Glengarry Glen Ross (all time bell weather, selling land in Florida to middle to elderly people), the public never saw a positive aspect to cold calling.
Most of all of us believe this is tough, and often demeaning work. Knocking on doors and making a multitude of phone calls to get meetings and appointments was not fun and required bravery for many. Though it was challenging and not widely accepted as a good thing, it still was done by millions of people who made millions of calls. They made money by selling driving product an old fashioned way. It was honest work, and was relatively easy for people to get work. It was a good thing. What does this have to do with modern-day prospecting, list building, Social? It has everything to do with it.
Cold calling is a valuable component of today’s selling and pipeline builds, because you’re bringing a valuable product and potentially valuable service to help business executives better run their companies. These executives don’t want to take the time but with persistence many will listen to what you have to say.
Of course there are many variables with technology that make this challenging, but the purpose of this blog is conveying a mindset of a valuable selling process no matter what vertical, company, or executive you are calling and regardless of the product or service you are selling. There is nothing better in the world when calling somebody on a Friday afternoon, they pick up the phone, and agree to set an appointment for next week. A great lead! So for cold calling to now produce, it needs to be surgical and not done in volumes of calls. Yes, it has changed but so has our prospects.
High volume dialing is dead. I personally do not prescribe to it, though I did it many years ago. Now I need to conduct research, know my prospects business, their pains, and how they go about fixing them. Build a great value prop and pick up the phone, and you will be rewarded. Don’t make 150 calls a day and throw things against the wall, make 25 calls and open new opportunities. Your peers will not want to do this, but will reconsider when you make many times more money than they do.
What do you do next? Send us an email and we’ll arrange for you to speak with Ed to chat about how these learnings can help build more sales just for your business.