Never Cold Call?
In an ideal world, business would magically come to us. Our inbound lines would never stop ringing with eager buyers begging us to accept their fists full of dollars.Right. As if that's going to happen anytime soon, unless your name is Apple and you've just released another can't miss, highly profitable product.
For the rest of us, this means reaching out to sell people. We have to stand-out, to get our offers in front of them.
You could wear a sandwich board and parade down the street. Maybe a loud-speaker truck would work. Or a billboard or radio ad, if you could afford them.
But attention-getting is just the first part of selling success. We need to qualify our prospects, to assure they have the right motives and means to buy.
Then, we need to create compelling VALUE and release the right amount of urgency and scarcity into the proceedings.
And above all, when the cosmos align, we need to CLOSE, to secure the deals, in the here-and-now. (Or would that be, the HEAR-AND-NOW?)
Apart from selling door-to-door, I can't imagine a better medium for accomplishing these feats than the telephone.
So, why does it get a bad rap from detractors that tell us to NEVER COLD CALL?
Of course, they're appealing to our laziness, to our self-pit and to our self-importance.
You know what I'm talking about.
Outbound calling takes effort. One must typically sit butt in chair for prolonged periods and make other phones ring.
In B2B, we need to conquer screening and voice mail, navigating our way through various naysayers and interlopers until we contact the right people.
And, as they say in martial arts combat training, "YOU WILL GET HIT!"
Meaning: No one emerges from cold calling unscathed. You'll get nicked, dinged, bent and even mutilated.
You'll pity yourself because you're too important to do this grunt work.
But if you want the roses the thorns come with the package.
I believe hating cold calling is akin to saying communication, itself, doesn't work. It is blaming the messenger, the medium, instead of critiquing the content or the audience.
It's bumping into a beehive, getting stung, and swearing off of picnics for the rest of your life.
Those that contend that COLD CALLING SUCKS and you should NEVER COLD CALL are making a fundamental thinking error.
They're over-generalizing.
If you are given a terrible list of highly unqualified prospects, then contacting them by phone would be an utter waste of time. But the same can be said of contacting them by direct mail, email, or in person.
If your calling script rambles, or you come across as a cold fish, then dialing makes no sense, at that time, for you.
It doesn't mean the person in the next cube won't be thriving, with a better call path and a friendlier attitude.
In fact, if you absolutely know "I'm not a phone person!" I have two things to say: (1) The Oracle of Delphi would be proud because you're on the road to "knowing thyself;" and (2) Don't make calls!
You may have to get out of the sales business, but I believe those that urge you to never cold call are hostile toward selling, anyway.
They're self-hating. They feel a strong aversion to selling and to sellers and don't want to identify with them.
They feel too pure to sell, and they want to find an antiseptic way to do it.
Clean it up, get rid of the nasty bits, and it just might be bearable for them.
But there are times when selling isn't pretty, or easy to do.
Like business itself, it isn't perfect.
Often, I think back to what one of my clients said, a fellow in office automation.
"I've met no problems in business that a few more sales couldn't cure!"
An over-generalization? Surely, but it is a more profitable fiction to believe in than believing "Cold calling doesn't work!"
