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Cold Calling (in)effectiveness

14 Aug

No sales rep truly likes cold calling, even the ones that claim to thrive on it. With admin assistants screening for their bosses and many businesses utilizing caller-id now, it’s very hard to get a prospect on the phone. Of course there’s the standard “call early, call late, call often” method of cold calling but it’s still hit-or-miss. And how many times have you heard someone say, “Hello” in a cheerful voice only to have them change their tone because they realized they accidentally picked up the phone to a cold-caller? So while cold-calling is good for a few things – good practice for your elevator pitch is the only thing that comes to mind – it’s quite ineffective in today’s world. And a recent survey by CSO Insights reflects this ineffectiveness. Their “2007 Sales Performance Report” pointed out several key survey results:

  • 18% of a sales rep’s time is spent on cold calling
  • 41% of their leads are self-generated even though
  • 70% of the reps say their own lead generation needs improvement

And many sales reps consider following up on leads transferred by marketing to be not much more than a cold calling exercise – 53% of them consider Marketing’s leads as poor.

So maybe it’s time to start pro-actively and systematically leveraging that sales network of yours!

Selling by referrals via your network

7 Aug

This blog is about sharing ideas on how to become better at sales – to internalize a selling process that you’re comfortable with, that’s repeatable and ultimately successful. The central idea to this blog is the concept of network-based selling – also called referral-based selling. Selling to new customers is hard work especially the prospecting part of the sales cycle. Why else would we get the big bucks if it was easy! Think how much better it would be to get an introduction to a new prospect by someone in your network that the prospect trusts and respects.

After 10 years of selling technology solutions for big companies I transitioned to selling at start-ups and learned that it’s a different sell. Where once I had the corporate marketing and business development staff behind me and a well defined market and product in front of me, I now had the heady job of selling new technology solutions to new prospects that had not ever heard of my company and were not eager to answer my phone call. Where I once had brand awarness, I now pushed value proposition. But thru these 20 years of selling, I’ve continued to improve my selling skills, learning from mentors, keeping what worked for me and throwing out what didn’t.

So I hope you find some valuable tidbits of information in here, some that you’ll think is obvious but a good reminder and others that you’ll think are interesting enough to try for yourself. And if you do try, please share your results with the community.

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