The Winner's Sales Strategy Blog

A 90% return on cold calling?

A reader sent me an email today about a cold call "guru," yet another of the new breed of coaches that have popped up over the past year or two claiming to have "re-invented" cold calling, and that this time it will really work. They say that cold calling only fails when you do it the "old way," but their way works.

The "revolutionary" method proposed is this: Call the prospect and compliment him or her on some award, achievement, charitable contribution, or whatever you can use as an excuse for the call. Praise the prospect for whatever they've done and try to build some rapport. Then you call back a week later and try to sell them something. This "guru" is claiming a 90% success rate with this method.

What's wrong with this picture?

Like my previous post, this talks about another way of attempting to trick a prospect into meeting with you. It presents a lot of problems. First of all, if you must find something to praise the prospect on, your list is pretty much limited to people you read about in the paper, and I can guarantee that LOTS of salespeople are calling them. The bigger problem, however, is that it's phony. No successful person in the world will be fooled by this. Strangers don't call and lavish praise unless they're looking to get something themselves. It destroys credibility, it's dishonest, and destroys any chance of a relationship with the prospect in the future.

The key to success is, of course, uncovering those little-known prospects who your competition isn't finding. That's where a smart self-marketing system comes into play. Why call someone who is in the paper and getting a dozen calls a day from your competition when you can get someone who hasn't been contacted by ANY sales reps to call you instead?

Fake your Caller ID?

About every two weeks or so I do a Google search on "cold calling" to see where my sites come up. I did one today and in the Google AdWords ads in the right colums was an ad entitled "Fake your Caller ID."

What does this say about the integrity of cold calling, that someone is actually running ads teaching salespeople who to fake their Caller ID, and that salespeople must actually be buying it if the advertiser is selling under "cold calling" in AdWords, a rather expensive keyword?

I'm beating a dead horse here but more and more evidence is coming out to prove that cold calling is dead, and that salespeople are becoming more and more desperate to make it work. Along with the "Fake your Caller ID" ad were ads from other charlatans with titles such as "Hypnotize yourself to love cold calling" and "A new way to cold call." Are you kidding me? Why cling to old, dead ideas when so many new ways to prospect, most of which are free or very low cost, are readily available to us all?

Cold Calling = Bad Odds

I was doing some reading today and found an article which states that 10% of cold calls result in sales along with an example of someone who got 30 sales in 18 months via cold calling. Here's the clincher: This article wasn't anti-cold calling. It was touting these numbers as GOOD!

Give me a break - first of all, 10% is a horrible return, and it's not realistic either. In reality less than 1% of cold calls result in qualified leads. (Not appointments. Qualified leads. There's a big difference. Most appointments that come from cold calls are not qualified.) And 30 sales in 18 months? That's less than 2 per month! No one could survive on those numbers!

Don't buy into the myth that cold calling works. The fact that the "cold calling works" crowd have to use such questionable numbers to state their claim is proof enough that they're not telling the truth. Remember, companies have you cold calling because it is a waste of YOUR time and YOUR money - not theirs. It's a way for them to cut costs at YOUR expense. Be smarter than that and learn how to use effective self-marketing and stop cold calling forever.