|
|
| Sales | Telemarketing | Cold calling | tips | Information | Articles |
|
The Cold Calling Conspiracy
A consipiracy exists in the world of selling. A cold calling conspiracy. What I'm talking about is the requirement by most sales organizations to make cold calls on your time and at your expense. They say that cold calls equal appointments equal sales, but that's not true anymore. All sales managers are guilty of teaching it, believing it, and using it. "Increase your activity and increase your income" are the mantra. We're told to do the sales math to "motivate" ourselves. Have you heard this one? "If you make five hundred dollars commission per sale and it takes five appointments to get the sale and twenty calls to get an appointment, then each cold call is worth five dollars in your pocket." Did anyone ever really believe this? Hey boss, put your money where your mouth is! If that were really true, companies would pay us the five dollars per call! They don't because that equation never works in the real world... for anyone. The simple fact is that we are only paid for completed sales, not for attempts. Directing salespeople to make more calls and increase activity is a weak excuse for a sales manager or trainer to justify his or her job. Cold calling is an expensive waste of your time. The reason companies have you cold calling is because it is a waste of your time and your money, not theirs. You only make money when you sell something, yet over eighty percent of most salespeople's time is spent looking for someone to sell to. The bottom line is that we, as salespeople, cannot afford to continue fooling away our time on low-percentage activities like cold calling. It's a way for companies to save money at your expense. We must focus our attention on activities that get real results in this new Information Age economy, and the effectiveness of cold calling fell dramatically when we left the old Industrial Age and entered this bold new era. Forget cold calling and learn how to market yourself intelligently, systematically, and automatically. Self-marketing is the key to success in today's selling environment and the "secret" of all those top producers who obviously don't cold call and won't tell you what it is they're doing to make those huge numbers every month. Remember, Napoleon Hill's great work is entitled "Think and Grow Rich," not "Work Harder and Stay Broke." Don't become a victim of the Cold Calling Conspiracy - learn to market yourself successfully and join the elite club of top producers. I did it and you can too. Frank Rumbauskas is the author of Cold Calling Is A Waste Of Time: Sales Success In The Information Age. He is the founder of FJR Advisors, LLC, which publishes training materials that educate salespeople on how to generate business without cold calling. For more information, please visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com
|
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
4 1/2 Steps for Doubling Your B2B Appointments Cold calling. Most people hate to do it and there is a cottage industry of people making a profit by selling ideas on how to generate business without cold calling. They're making money because they are using a basic marketing tactic that most of us have forgotten how to use - give your customer what they want! Tell a salesperson that they can get appointments without making cold calls, tell them to buy your book, and you'll make money hand over fist. Why? Because it's a solution that fits what that market wants. Sales Therapy 101: Breaking Your Fear of Cold Calling Almost every day, visitors to my Unlock The Game? website click on my live instant-messenger chat button, which invites them to "Ask Ari a selling question." The Dos and Donts of Cold Calling Having your fingernails removed! Telephone Sales Basics for Start-ups Everyone picks up the telephone to do business. Yet the word "telemarketing" has many negative connotations for people. However, telemarketing is merely a term for conducting business over the telephone. Whenever you pick up the phone at work to make or receive a call you are "a telemarketer". Over the years telemarketing has evolved into the following applications: Get Instant Rapport On Sales Cold Calls Immediately establish rapport on cold-calls by matching your prospect's voice qualities - tone, pace, and emotion. Matching the emotion, or mood, of your prospect is key. If you begin your call sounding excited when she is not, you will be immediately branded as a salesperson, and the prospect's guard will be way up. 10 Tips for Telephone Success The telephone is an often under-appreciated and much maligned piece of office equipment. Have you stopped to consider how much business you conduct over the telephone? These 10 tips will help you improve your telephone presence and presentations. How to Make Sales with Noisy Kids in the House Kids play hard, and sometimes that means they play really loud in the midst of exploring their worlds and role playing with siblings and friends. How To Get Your Phone Call Returned When selling your product face to face with a customer, they have no choice but to hear you out completely. Ask yourself this question, If they were listening to you describe your product on their personal voice mail, would they hear you out, or would they delete you? Choosing a Phone Dialer that Works If you own or operate an outbound call center, you've probably heard quite a bit about various phone dialer systems. In fact, it's likely you're using one of the many systems currently on the market. While your current phone dialer may be adequate for your business needs today, you'll probably grow out of it shortly. Even if you're not anticipating high levels of growth in the near future, just staying competitive in the call center business means having the latest technology. Feel the Fear It sometimes surprises people when I tell them I get slightly nervous before a speaking or training event. They seem to think that because I've been doing it for years, nervousness would no longer be an issue. The Cold Calling Conspiracy A consipiracy exists in the world of selling. A cold calling conspiracy. This is a Sales Call: How to Begin Prospecting Calls with Integrity "Hello. I'm looking for Sharon Morgen?" "Sharon DREW Morgen." "What? Sharon Morgen?" "No. Sharon DREW" "Um. Hello. Are you Mrs. Drew?" "Ms. Morgen. That's me. Is this a sales call?" "Um. Hello. No. I'm with XYZ bank and I'm giving you a service call." "Regarding what? I don't do business with you. And you're not supposed to be making a telemarketing call on me. So what type of service are you offering for free?" "Well, it's not for free. But we thought you'd like to know about our new banking services." "Ah. So it IS a sales call." "We're not allowed to say that." 7 Cold Calling Secrets Even The Sales Gurus Dont Know More and more e-mails are arriving in my in-box from people who hate cold calling. Here's what they're saying: Cold Calling Does Not Generate Sales Leads It is a fact of life for most new sales people; they get the dream sales job with unlimited earning potential and expect to earn so much money that they can now enjoy the fruits of their coming wealth. Everything seems perfect until they realize that before closing a sale and earning the big commission, they must first prospect for new customers (read, cold calls). Cold calling is hard to do. People hate to make cold calls and people hate being on the receiving end of them as well. Closing That Big Sale With Conference Calling So you're in business. Whether it is micro, small, medium, or enterprise; you know the one key element you need to succeed in your business ? sales. Predictive Dialers - Human Interaction Maximized Predictive dialers are many steps removed from their predessors, the automatic dialers of the past. Whereas automatic dialing allowed callcenter agencies to dial numbers quickly and efficiently, predictive dialing also processes and makes use of a whole range of information, linking callers to live voices every single time. In fact, with predictive dialing, agents' 'talk time' has increased from an average of twenty minutes per hour to fifty minutes per hour. This is a fabulous rate of improvement - instead of wasting more than half of their time on listening to busy signals and answering machine messages, agents now spend the majority of their time engaged in producting interaction. The dialer also manages the line to agent ratio by pacing the call rate at the desired level. In this way, quotas are met, and agents are neither idle nor overwhelmed. In other words, because the hardware and software does its job, agents are able to spend much more time doing theirs. And of course, increased contact time means that the center's goals are reached much more quickly. Proven Two Minutes Magic Exercise to Conquer the Fear of Phone I got a confession to make! The little communication device used to scare me to death! Telemarketers May Have Ruined Everything I had to really look at things a little different when I started calling people. Now I am not a telemarketer. I call people only when they request it. Telemarketing Tips for Direct Sales Success Unfortunately, the DNC legislation has many small businesses that use telemarketers a bit concerned about their choice of direct sales tactic. However, there are still many ways to have your message get into the right people's hands without annoying them. And the fact of the matter is, telemarketing, as a direct sales tactic, works. Here are some tips and ideas to get your sales flowing and customers thrilled that you called them: How To Know Youre On A Winner The catchword today for business is flexibility.
|
|
|
| Home | Site Map | Salesmanship Ebook | Motivational Ebook | Job and Resume Posting| Affiliate program | |
|
| 2006 All Rights Reserved. by Mp.sg Term of use and service for the articles and information |