It’s easy to regard the telephone as a relic that serves no purpose but to clutter your desk and gather dust. Now that twitter, facebook and linkedin have conquered the internet, cold calling seems as primitive as clubbing your mate and dragging them into your cave.
The problem with cold-calling is that most people misunderstand its purpose. The purpose of calling up complete strangers is to ask them whether or not they’re interested in a product or service, NOT to sell them that product or service. You don’t make cold calls to build relationships or establish a community. You make cold calls because it’s one of the most efficient ways to generate a business lead from nothing.
Cold calling is more effective than social media because:
1. It’s faster
With social networking, you might be able to contact several people through your LinkedIn network, the blogosphere, or twitter, but the time it takes to narrow down qualified targets and message them one by one can take forever. After you send your messages to them, you might wait hours for an answer (if you get any at all). With cold calling, you can reach around 40 people an hour and get yes or no answers from all of them.
2. It’s impersonal
Many complain that cold calling is primitive because there’s no trust involved. But approaching a prospect that you haven’t established trust with is actually the easiest way to determine their interest. If a cold-calling prospect says “yes” to you it means they’re genuinely interested in what you’re selling. People who have friended or followed you through social media can feign interest and string you along before you figure out that their lukewarm “yes” was really a “no” in disguise. It’s much easier, and much more honest to sell something to someone who doesn’t give a shit about you. That way you know that they’re buying the product for the product itself–not because of your sparkling personality.
3. It’s simple
Social media (at least as far as marketing is concerned) is ridiculously complex. There are countless ebooks out there on how to leverage social media to get business, but as far as I can tell most of the folks selling these ebooks haven’t really figured it out themselves.
Although there are some “pro” tricks one can pick up along the way as a cold-caller, for the most part cold calling is simple:
- Put together a list of numbers.
- Write a script.
- Call the numbers and use your script to talk to prospects.
- Set appointments
You could have the persuasion skills of a Koosh ball and still be an excellent cold caller. All you have to do is have a good script, and a list of answers to the most common objections. As a cold caller, your job is to ask questions and determine exactly what the prospect wants and see if that’s in any way compatible with what you offer. If not, move on. There’s no way you could have sold that person anyway, regardless of whether you used twitter, facebook, or a megaphone outside their office.
4. It gives you access, if only for a fleeting moment, to that rare commodity called “other people’s attention.”
In the ADD world of twitter et al, how can you expect your voice to be heard through all the static, even if you do have 10,000 followers? When you get a person on the phone you have their attention. Because they don’t know you they’re much less likely to pretend they’re interested when they really aren’t, and because you don’t know them you have no compunction about asking tough questions to determine their interest.
Cold calling is not a tool for selling. It’s a research tool that you can use to find qualified prospects who have an interest in your product. It’s important not to sell on the phone, but take just enough time to determine interest so that you can set up a face-to-face meeting. It’s at this meeting when the real sale happens.
Social media is still a very poor way of getting new people interested in your business, but it does have its place. It’s a very good way to maintain existing relationships with people that you’ve already done business with. It’s certainly not, however, the end all be all of marketing.
So if you find that no one is responding to your tweets or emails, stop obsessing about whether you’re doing social media wrong. Pick up the damn phone already. If you can dial a number and read from a script, you’ve already done it right.
Photo by: Jamiesrabbits