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Successful Cold Calling happens when you know how to play the GAME!
by Mr. Cold Call
I picked up the telephone today and realized how easy it was for me to just pick up the telephone and drum up new business opportunities. I'm so comfortable on the telephone and speaking with people that I've never met in my life. The yellow pages, membership directories, business cards posted on bulletin boards, senior-level executives profiled in magazines, it really doesn't matter what list I'm calling from--it's really no big deal to make these calls. Then, one day, I caught myself in a daze, a complete daze and realized that it wasn't like this all the time.
Looking back, I"ve come a long way, a very long way and remember a time when I was scared of picking up the telephone. I was scared of what my prospect might say. I was scared of being hung up. I was scared of what to say when my prospect picked up the telephone and said, "How can I help?" or didn't say anything at all. Maybe I was scared because I didn't know how to play the game? What game you ask? I'm talking about the cold call game.
For a very short time, cold calling and I didn't match very well. It didn't seem like my thing. In fact, there was a time when I joined the ranks of others who felt that cold calling was not a viable lead generation sales tool. Deep down, I knew that I could not consume these negative cold calling thoughts and be "part" of their crowd. I knew cold calling was a legitimate and respectable way to generate uncovered sales opportunities.
I began to push the envelope and learn from each call that I made. After each telephone call, I said to myself, "What can I learn from this call? What can I learn from what just happened? What can I learn my prospect? What can I learn from my prospect about their industry? What could I have done differently the next time around? How could I have been more creative? How did I sound over the telephone? If the roles were reversed, would I buy from someone who sounded like me?"
I continued to learn from each call and every call made began to build on future calls. My confidence began to multiply after each sale that could be sourced to a cold call. In time, I began to perceive cold calling as an eye of opportunity, as cost-effective, as strategic, as innovative, and finally, I began to perceive cold calling as a platform that I could use on-demand at anytime to connect with potential buyers. What does this all mean? This means that through testing and through call analysis, I began understand what techniques work well over the phone and which ones do not.
Cold calling was a learned process and I was beginning to understand what I needed to do to successfully win the game of cold calling. To win the game, I also discovered many other successful strategies such as attitude , telephone voice, product knowledge and scripting. Another strategy to win the game of cold calling is the fact that prospect's don't buy instantly. Rather, they buy over a period of time.
And as a result of this discovery, if Im calling a prospect and there's no interest, that's ok. And it's ok because I'm not expecting them to buy right here and right now. At this stage of the sales process, what I really want to do is to create interest. I want to create enough interest in my company so that they will remember me the next time I follow up with them. So as you can see, there are many ways to win the cold call game. I have found a few of them and as I make more cold calls, I'm guessing that I'll be able to add to my on-going list. Have you started your list? If you haven't, maybe it's time to throw out your first pitch?
Copyright 2008 Mr. Cold Call, Inc. - All rights reserved.
Behind The Scenes With Mr. Cold Call
Mr. Cold Call, author,
cold calling pioneer, speaker, sales trainer and sales software
inventor has made over 80,000 cold calls over his sales career--this
number continues to grow exponentially. He is one of the most
famous names in cold calling and sales prospecting. Inside and Outside
Sales Professionals have visited his website, subscribed to his FREE weekly newsletter and ordered his brand name of products and services from
every corner of the globe. Mr. Cold Call
has been quoted by numerous national publications such as Selling Power
Magazine and Investor's Business Daily and was recently featured by
Selling Power Live! in a CD audio program called "Turn Cold Calls Into
Gold Calls." Other accomplishments include his more than 65 published articles on cold calling
topics from A to Z, his infamous sales tracking sheet that automatically calculates your daily, weekly, monthly
and yearly sales ratios, his custom sales script service called "The Script Responder" and finally, his best-selling series of cold calling ebooks that include:
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