There is nothing wrong with a good old fashioned cold call...

How many times over the last few years have you heard things like "no more cold calls" or "cold calling is a waste of time" or my personal favorite "cold calling is obsolete". I have never heard anything more absurd! The last time I checked, not many of us need to hire new staff to handle a massive influx of customers wanting to buy our product without making a single sales call. We are all too often sucked into this "get new customers without lifting a finger" gimmick. I am sure that some of the tactics presented by the "no more cold calling" supporters work to some extent. Having said that, I would challenge any of them to face off against a good sales rep making cold calls. I know who would be left standing.

The benefit to a great cold calling effort is most obviously, revenue but let's look at some of the forgotten benefits... Increased brand recognition, great company exposure and residual income. Residual income??? Yeah, customers that have had a positive experience with you on the phone will remember you first when they need something. You may be thinking... "how is this a positive experience? Nobody likes getting sales calls..." Well, you're right and you're not. Nobody likes to get a scripted, robotic sales call. Nobody likes to get a product shoved down their throat. What people do like is someone genuinely interested in their business and their needs. Building relationships with your customers instead of trying to find new ways to avoid them.

We all know making sales calls is the best way to help us win business, gain exposure and build relationships. So why don't we just suck it up and make the calls? Well, because most of us would rather spend time fiddling with these fly by night strategies that produce far lower results. Let's get back to calling our potential customers instead of crossing our fingers and hoping they call us....

Numbers game or not?

Auto Dialler's, burnout and quantity versus quality... Sales has become a numbers game because someone told us it was. This is not to say that making a hundred calls in a day is not going to yield any results because it will. The problem is that at the end of the day you have left a bad taste in several potential customers mouths. You have also decided that you are going to have a ton of turnover because of burnout and probably did not take the time with the sales you did make to give them the right solution. Having said all that, you can't make sales without making calls or visiting customers.

So, how do you know how many sales calls to make in order to be successful you might ask. I have a better question. What do we need to do to be successful? First we need to be deprogrammed. Then we need to look within ourselves and figure out how we buy and how we like to be sold to. Why do we think sales is a numbers game when none of us want to be treated like a number? Sales is about relationship and we have all heard this before but not many of us really apply that to our strategies. What if our sales calls were approached as if we just really wanted to understand what is working and what isn't within our customers environment? What if we approached our sales calls without having a product or service solution already in mind without having yet talked to our customer?

Understanding customer requirements, building relationships and waiting to provide a solution until we truly understand the needs and wants of our customers is the mark of a true sales person. The numbers game is only for those who cannot sell.