James Ashford
30Sep
2011
Written by James Ashford See James Ashford's Google Profile >>

Cold Calling May Have A Success Rate. But It Has A Much Larger Failure Rate.

If you ring 100 people to sell to, you might get 5 meetings out of it. From those 5 meetings, you might produce two proposals/quotes and from that get 1 customer.

That’s fine and has always worked. Call 1000 and you’ll get 10 customers, 10,000 for 100. It’s just a numbers game.

One problem with this is that it works on luck. It’s down to whether that person was thinking about your service when you called them.

However, by far the bigger problem with this approach is that it invariably pisses off everyone else you call. So 5 leads are generated from 100 calls, but 95% of people are pissed off with you. They don’t know you. You had no right to interrupt them

It’s a short term fix. It gets you a quick, small win, but prevents you from getting the much larger win over time.

A Different Approach

  1. Pick out just five businesses you would love to meet with and offer your services to.
  2. Do some research and find out who the decision maker is that you need to speak with.
  3. Research the company and the individuals.
  4. Follow their blogs, become fans on their facebook page, follow them on twitter, befriend them on LinkedIn and subscribe to the newsletter.
  5. Set up Google Alerts for anything to do with the company or individual.
  6. Comment on what they write on their social networks and get them to at least recognise your name.
  7. Write about their success on your website and across your social network.
  8. Get them to respond to you in anyway. Whether it’s a comment on your blog or a like on your facebook page.
  9. Now the door is open. Call them and introduce yourself with something like:

“Hi, i’m James Ashford from Rocket Powered. I’ve been following you online for a while and have been really impressed with what you’ve been writing about. I notice that you recently starting following us/me on twitter (or whatever) and think that it would be really useful for us both to have a coffee. What do you think?”

Try it with one potential customer, then come back and tell us what happened.

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