Cold Calling: Whats the worst that can happen?

bertbaby said:

It's a good people skill and it never hurts to hear from potential customers.

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With web dev, or any online service, it helps to talk to the customer. I hear all the time from clients and potential clients that "no one wants to talk on the phone, they only want to email." That's bad for business. Sure, you don't waste time on the occasional yokel who will eat up a couple hours of your time and bail, or the ones who just want to learn your secrets so they can assign a VA to do it (ugh), but the trade-off is worth it.

If you are offering a service, ask if you can just mail them some info for them to review. If that's a firm no, then they are probably not interested. If it's a yes, have a glossy colour flyer (or example site) printed at Staples/Kinkos (50 cents), a letter, and a pricelist. Invite them to call you "any time" to discuss.

Then use a Google Voice number to forward to your homeline during certain hours, to business voicemail other times. This keeps you from having to turn off your phone when you don't want to be interrupted with sales calls.

Griffin said:

If you are offering a service, ask if you can just mail them some info for them to review. If that's a firm no, then they are probably not interested. If it's a yes, have a glossy colour flyer (or example site) printed at Staples/Kinkos (50 cents), a letter, and a pricelist. Invite them to call you "any time" to discuss.

Then use a Google Voice number to forward to your homeline during certain hours, to business voicemail other times. This keeps you from having to turn off your phone when you don't want to be interrupted with sales calls.

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This is a great starting point to get higher conversions. Now, make sure the flyer explains the benefits of your services (each one preferably).

Your best customer is an educated customer. Remember, there's a boatload of these idiots that call these annoyed business owners and say, "HEY, DO YOU WANT TO RANK HIGHER IN GOOGLE?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?!!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!".

[/hang up]

Do what you need to do in order to stand out to your prospects.

Hi there, I have done cold calling although it wasn't to solicit SEO business. It was to get financial people to talk about stocks and stuff for free. The worst that could happen is someone hanging up quickly after saying not interested.

But you sort of have to have a thick skin to do this regularly. If you are the type who gets offended quickly, you will find yourself wanting to rip the phone off the wall.

But remember, success rate can be as low as 5-10%. You need a lot of numbers to get this to work well for you.

macdonjo3 said:

Cold Calling: Whats the worst that can happen?

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You can spend alot of time.

That's pretty bad - you can't get it back.

Better to somehow getting people to 'put their hands up' first - by something easy to do en masse (like email)

Then you only speak to people who are interested (plus you avoid all that rejection and rude people).

Use the phone to set up appointments (or even close the deal).

Use something else to do the initial contact.

(Not that I'm saying cold calling doesn't work - it is a numbers game. I'm just saying that there's less time-consuming media for making 1st contact)

I dont care what anyone says. Cold Calling is absolutely the best way to sell period. Play it as a game, chunk your time, have a goal on every call, small steps to get to the prize. B2B, 8/10 you will never get the owner on the phone, get the owners name, write it down, so yu have it to call back. Make as many dials as you can in a period of time. Then take a break, do over, until you have 6-7 hours in. Forget about making 10 scripts, formulate one quickly as it will always change, use it, keep updating it. After 2-3 days of dialing you will have your perfect script, not based on guesses, but based on true experience. Smile and dial , turn and burn those numbers my man. When you have sales and a full proof script, hire or outsource. Get lead generators to send you hot leads, then you turn from lead generator to cold blooded closer. Just do it! Because I just did it ! Lol