Tag Archives: “cold call”

Inquisix on the Business Insanity Radio Show

18 May

barrymoltz

Barry Moltz has a radio show where he will, “… talk about all the craziness of small business.” Last week’s theme was sales & marketing networking thru social media and he invited me to talk with him. You can listen to my portion of the show below.

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Barry had a few guests on his show along with me, including Alyssa Dver from my last post.  His show was also the inspiration for my post on why the cold calling process is like, “putting lipstick on a pig” which generated quite a few comments. If you’d like to listen to the whole 30 minute talk, go to Barry’s website here and listen to episode #40. You’ll find a wealth of information on his site so enjoy.

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You lost me at "Hello"

17 Dec

Stephanie Fox Muller, one of our advisory members, sent me this email along with her comments below.

Why would anyone take a salesperson seriously when their first communication – first! – offers a freebie of four hours of work? Let’s see, I don’t yet know what you do. That means I have to take my time to go to your website and figure it out. Then decide if I want four hours free.

If your fear of the economy is showing, maybe you need to take a step or two or nine back. If your product or service had value before the economy tanked, it still does. If you don’t believe that, you can bet that your prospects won’t. Good sales and marketing people know how to position their offering to meet the current needs of their audience. If you can’t figure out how to sell whatever the heck you offer in light of the current economic conditions, the last thing you want to do is give it away. If it ain’t worth anything to you, it’s worth less to me. And I don’t buy the little disclaimer at the end – if you try us out now, you may buy us later. If I don’t need you now, I won’t remember you later.

Instead of doing the email equivalent of cold-calling with a drop-your-shorts offer, how about asking clients who DO see your value and ask them for referrals?

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Even the Post Office wants to use email

12 Nov

I received a telemarketing call today.  When will telemarketers ever learn?  I first get the silence as their auto-dialing software realizes I picked up the line so it transfers me to a call center rep.  Then he mispronounces my last name and company name.  That’s 3 strikes right there.  But I’m usually interested in the pitches of others, especially cold callers, so I told him to continue.  He was pitching mailing machines.  I told him we do everything electronically and weren’t interested.  So he looked at his script and asked, “Can I send you an email about our services?”  To his credit, he laughed with me after realizing how absurd his question was.  If they don’t use their own service how can they expect their customers to?

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When a referral is not a referral

28 Oct

I read a great blog post this morning by Diane Helbig on the SalesDog blog entitled, “Don’t Use My Name!”

She writes about people who give out someone else’s contact information and tell you to call them but, “…don’t use my name!”  And they consider it a referral.  That’s not a referral, that’s an invitation to start a cold call.

What’s a true referral?  When the person making the referral makes the introduction on your behalf.

You calling someone and saying, “So-and-so gave me your name and told me to call you.” is not a true referral.  And Diane’s example is nothing like a referral. I agree!

Diane thinks this behavior is worse than a cold call because it damages the reputation of the person giving out the contact information and the person acting on that information.

Then she goes on to discuss what quality referrals really mean.

Please go read her article in full!

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