The Winner's Sales Strategy Blog

The Cold Calling Challenge

I continue to get nasty emails from people who claim to have made a ton of money by cold calling. As always, I respond to these emails with a request for documentation to prove their claims, along with my promise that I will publicly announce that this person has achieved success by cold calling if the documentation does indeed prove it.

In three years of doing this - and at least a dozen of these nasty emails each week - I have not received a single response from any of these people. They don't even write back again, let alone fax me the docs to prove their claims.

This is it: I'm now issuing the Cold Calling Challenge. If you have achieved success from cold calling, and can PROVE IT, I want to hear from you. I actually do. Because if NOBODY has achieved any success via cold calling, I'll need to edit my book to state that cold calling has a 0% success rate (right now I estimate it at around 1%).

Bring it on........................

UPDATE - June '05: It's now been one full month, and not one single person has been able to prove that they've ever sold anything via cold calling. As always, I had two people make wild claims that they earn over six figures per year cold calling, but I never heard from them again after requesting documentation such as sales reports. Big surprise, huh?

Loews succumbs to sales resistance

The main reason cold calling is dead is the ever-increasing level of sales resistance in today's world. Of course nothing triggers sales resistance more than cold calling!

The latest bit of evidence that people are sick and tired of sales pitches is the decision by the Loews movie theatre chain to begin publishing the real times movies will start. In other words, people are fed up with showing up at the published time, then sitting through 15 minutes of commercials before actually getting to the movie they came to see. So, in response to the frustration, Loews is going to start telling the truth about when the movie really starts, and it's up to you to come 15 minutes early for the commercials.

I'm astounded that people continue to challenge the idea that cold calling is dead when the sales resistance backlash continues to surge in today's society.