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Useful Commute: Cold Calling for Cowards

September 11th, 2007 @ 11:46 am

2 Comments

Categories: Podcast, Productivity, Useful Commute

Tags: Cold Calling, BNET staff

Picking up the phone and making cold calls is one of the biggest challenges salespeople face. In this show, we get some valuable tips on this process from Jerry Hocutt, author of a book and seminar titled “Cold Calling for Cowards.”

 
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    joe star

    12/17/07 | Reported as spam

    rate of rejection

    http://www.srbovanje.com/userinfo.php?uid=1015

    Cold calling is often very frustrating and difficult for a sales person or telemarketer because, naturally, they are often rebuffed, hung-up on and suffer a higher rate of rejection by those receiving cold calls. Business to consumer cold calls are often frustrating for the person receiving the cold call, since they expected upon picking up the phone to hear from someone they knew and care about, and instead deal with a minor nuisance in the form of a sales pitch. Business to business calls, on the other hand, are an accepted method of introduction.

    Some sales people cannot handle the rejection and therefore have come to the conclusion that cold calling is ineffective, inefficient and a waste of their time. They then seek to develop techniques to lower the rate of rejection. And many forms of marketing and advertising have been adopted to augment cold calling or replace this task entirely.

    Those who are well trained be they sales people or those employed in telemarketing, know that their approach needs to be based on one of discovery, to uncover whether a suspected prospect is interested and therefore a qualified prospect they can follow up on. Thus they build trust and discover the truth about whether there is a good match between the potential client and product or services offered.

    There are a number of ways in which cold calls can be effective. One is for the selling organization to start with a high quality, up-to-date database consisting of qualified prospects that they suspect will have an interest in the product or service being sold. Another is to use cold calls as a "step in the door", to simply make appointments. Face-to-face appointments require that the product or service must lend itself to such an approach. Clearly, low ticket sales would not be opened this way because a sales person cannot be sent over, for instance, to sell a newspaper subscription, there simply isn't enough profit in the sale to warrant adopting that set of procedures.

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    2

    joe star

    12/17/07 | Report as spam

    re:Cold Calling

    Read http://www.srbovanje.com/userinfo.php?uid=1015 Although one can never control who calls you, there are ways to limit the amount of autodialed calls you receive. Companies often procure your number from places you have displayed your contact information (example sweepstakes that promise a free trip will often lead to timeshare calls). While not giving out your phone number will help limit the availability of your number to outside sources, this is in no perfect way as autodialers can always find your info by randomly trying all possible phone numbers in the area. However as most cold calls are now made by autodialers there are ways to circumvent them. Autodialers automatically dial every number in a company's database. These databases are composed of lists taken from other directories (such as the phone book, or other companies client lists).

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