“(Cold Calling) ¦ certainly isn’t anybody’s favorite activity of the day,” says Chuck VanGronigen, assistant director of branches at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. as quoted in a recent Wall Street Journal article:
“But (cold calling) really can and does work.”
In an informal poll of sales professionals we found that
many sellers unfortunately think of cold calling as being
as enjoyable as getting a vasectomy with a chain saw. Ouch!
One of our clients actually said that! Now, staying with
the metaphor and with a few new skills and adjustments in
attitude the seller can quickly come to think of cold
calling as better than sex!
Cold calling certainly does work and it works quite well.
Many top notch sales pros who cold call can and do:
Schedule appointments with 2-8 out of every 10 calls made
to prospects.
When the success rate is poor, meaning sellers neither
schedule appointments nor get call backs from voice mail
messages, they come a conclusion that costs them dearly.
Without collecting input from successful cold callers,
these sellers come to the erroneous conclusion that cold
calls just don’t work. When in fact, the failure comes from
the mindset and the verbiage used by the sales professional.
Sellers are wordsmiths with high levels of discernment and
phenomenal people skills. It is no surprise to sellers when
these talents come together and click into place like
pieces of a puzzle when those sellers are face-to-face with
the prospects. However, as these same gifted sales
professionals move to cold calling the pieces of the
selling puzzle no longer seem to fit. What works in person
does not seem to work well on the telephone. So, the
sellers figure cold calling is a mystery, can not be done
successfully at least by them.
Why do these sell-ice-to-an-Eskimo successful sellers
experience disastrous results with cold calling?
Because these sales pros consistently fail to acknowledge
and compensate for
The loss of visual cues taken in literally at the blink of
an eye during face-to-face meetings. That may seem like a
trivial matter but when you realize more than half of the
information we use in communication is visual then you
start to understand that adjustments must be made when
communicating by phone. Successful sellers are also
successful cold callers because they adjust to the loss of
visual cues by applying laser like focus to the tone and
pace of the call as well as every single word that is
spoken.
Sales professionals who to cold call and let their
emotional reaction stop them from calling prospects are
making a big, big mistake. If this is you, know you are
leaving a lot of money on the table and missing out on a
truly profitable practice. Know too that simple albeit
significant changes in your face-to-face presentations will
yield extreme profits in your cold calls.
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For your mini-course “Jealously Guarded Secrets to Cold
Calling Company Presidents” visit
http://www.ColdCallingExecutives.com ! Or call Cold Calling
Expert, Lead New Business Development Coach, Leslie Buterin
(like butterin’ bread) at (816) 554-3674 9-3 CST (that’s
Kansas City/Chicago Time) Find much more on our
http://www.coldcallingexecutives.com/blog/index.html
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