Tag Archives: “cold calling”

Other blog posts (and Tweets) I found interesting and starred this week

23 Jul

In addition to the blogs listed to the right under the Inquisix blog roll, there are many other really interesting blogs that I read on a regular basis. Posts at these blogs that I recently found interesting enough to star and comment on are below:

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Improve Your Message Before You Call

7 May

Since I have that fancy letter “C” as the first letter in my title as Chief Sales Officer, I get quite a number of cold calls.  Of course it just makes me cringe to be called by someone who hasn’t even spent a minute looking at our business and developing a message about their solution that I’d care about.  But I do enjoy critiquing in my mind their pitch.

Some would like to rename cold calling.  I recently heard it called “introductory calling” in an interview done on Barry Moltz’s talk radio show.  I don’t know, seems analogous to putting lipstick on a pig.

lipstickpig

Instead of just renaming the term, Nigel Edelshain of Sales 2.0 has written a 24-page ebook on turning cold calls into social calls.  He reviews the new Sales 2.0 techniques and tools to “…help you with the three most critical factors: talking to the right people, establishing relationships and using changes in your buyer’s environment.”

You can download Nigel’s book for free here.  Adding his blog to your RSS reader is also well worth it.

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Good Cold Calling Leads to Referrals

22 Jan

I’m a big fan of reading Geoffrey James’ blog, Sales Machine.  He gets to be edgier and more controversial than his articles in Selling Power magazine.

He posted a great letter from one of his readers on the value of cold calling.  The real value in cold calling is disqualifying prospects, much like panning thru dirt to find diamonds.  I’ve posted on the value of cold calling in a previous Inquisix post.

The commenter’s conclusion on the value of cold calling?

coldcallingreferral

Same as what I said; the benefit of cold calling is….referrals!

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Top Inquisix Posts of 2008

25 Dec

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to all. As the end of 2008 rapidly approaches, the Inquisix team hopes you are all enjoying the holidays with your family and friends. If you’re thinking of prepping early for 2009, here’s some of our most popular articles from 2008.

Why Cold Calling Doesn’t Work:

Cold Calling From the Buyer’s perspective:

Generating Referrals:

Pay or Play for Referrals/Reputation:

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Cup of Joe and Great Monday Postings

22 Sep

Wow, some of my favorite bloggers all wrote great articles over the weekend and posted them this morning for me to read over my afternoon coffee.

Brian Carroll wrote about top performers building relationships with the right people BEFORE they’re ready to buy. These top performers become trusted advisors.

Paul McCord wrote about why decision makers hate cold calls. He looks at answering a cold call from their point of view. And it’s not pretty.

Geoffrey James says that if you must cold call, try these 7 ways to make it easier. Maybe you can have some of your colleagues cold call your boss to get them to understand how effective (or not) cold calling is.

EyesOnSales has a great post from Lee Salz on why expecting a purchasing decision to be rubber-stamped by the boss is a bad idea.

And for another way to look at cold calling fun, take a look at this video by the HubSpot guys.

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1+4 Cold Calling Tips

1 Apr

Why would a blog posting from Inquisix mention cold calling tips? After all, we’re about exchanging referrals amongst sales people. Unfortunately, there are times when that referral is just not available and cold calling is required. This discussion came up in a previous blog posting, “Cold Calling Works?” where some sales experts chimed in with their thoughts in the comments.

I read a recent posting on DigIt! about a Cold Calling Tip. Just one! Elinor Stutz suggests the following to increase your response rate on cold calls –

“After leaving the voice message, immediately send a duplicate short email. But, here is where it will be slightly different. In the subject line, you can type ‘follow-up’. Begin the message from the reader’s point of view by stating, ‘I realize it is easier to press the reply key then to dial back. Per my telephone message…’ Keep your message down to one or two very short paragraphs.”

What do you think? Will this work effectively? I almost always follow-up a voice mail (cold call or not) with an email because some people prefer to return communications via email instead of phone. So I give them a choice. But to state, “I realize it is easier to press the reply key….” in your email? I’m not sold on that. Tone is often misunderstood in emails and this sentence can be read wrong too easily. What do you think?

Instead, I suggest that cold callers read this posting that provides 4 tips for cold calling from an inside sales rep that’s living it every day.

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Closing Ratio's

6 Feb

According to Colleen Francis in her blog, “Sell More, Work Less, Make More Money”

The closing ratio on cold calls is 75:1 while the closing ratio on referred leads is 4:1

CSO Insight’s 2007 Survey says that

Sales people spend 18% of their time cold calling.

With a 40-hour work week (yeah, if we only worked 40 hours), that’s over 7 hours of cold calling resulting in …. frustration.

In other words, if you spent those 7 hours working on referrals instead of cold calling, you’d close 18 times more deals!

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Cold Calling Works?

19 Jan

I found a new blog called SalesPractice today because there’s a big debate going on there about the effectiveness of Cold Calling. The author’s argument is essentially

If you have nothing else to do, why not get on the phone? What are you scared of?

The author is trying to counter the argument of the sales reps who’d rather do anything but cold call. He argues that if there’s not enough warm leads for them, instead of waiting for the phone to ring, they should pick it up and start dialing!

He then relates the story of a sales rep who cold-called Toyota and got a million dollar sale from it. I can relate my own cold calling success story when I cold-called a man who’s name I read in a magazine. He agreed to meet and within 5 months of V1 product release, I had my own million dollar deal from a F500 account. So does cold calling work? Of course it can. But I made hundreds (no, it was thousands) of cold calls to land that deal.

With success in hand, I was able to leverage that “halo account” sale into new customers, new referrals and new partnerships. Did I stop cold calling? Not right away but as my other sources of leads became stronger and stronger, I was then able to reduce my reliance on cold calling.

I agree with the author’s argument that you have to start somewhere. And you can’t use the excuse of “…cold calling does not work…” if you are not leveraging other lead sources correctly.

rotary phone

hiking

But does this mean cold calling works like the author claims? Sure, like walking from Boston to San Francisco is a fast method of getting there!

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