Is cold-calling effective?

A good place for telemarketing talk is - http://www.thetelemarketingforum.com/

As for telemarketing, yes, it definitely works. For 500 calls, you will get anywhere from 5-10 leads, with 1-3 exceptional leads. To get to that level though, you'll need to work on a script that has some "legs" on it. You'll find the guys over at TTF (above) have great scripts available and they'll even critique your script for free on the forum.

The single biggest problem I see from beginners is that they burnout in the first week. You gotta keeping pushing the stay consistent. That's the name of the game with telemarketing: consistency.

farlack said:

I just bought this book, thanks for the tip!

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Oh, I could have gotten it to your for free. But whichever version you got, ebook, audio book, or video book, pay deep attention to it and make sure you understand it before finishing it.

Wow all great advice guys, I am thinking of giving it a go as well.

Just signed up with the telemarketing forum. Thank you Voasi for that link

I thought I'd share some experience with my cold calling efforts the past 2 days. Yesterday I started calling business and the first call was devastating. I was shaking and very nervous, but after my 5th call i became more relaxed and started getting further down into my script.

The first day I got no appointments, so I refined my script early this morning, got some advice from a good friend and on my 3rd call today, I got a mini bite. The person wants to see what I can offer them, so I plan on sending an email and then calling them back tomorrow. Hopefully everything goes well.

Tomorrow, I'm going to call another 50 businesses and pitch my service. I think I'll keep pushing for the email where I can show them what I do/and presell them on the service. On the first call, we'll setup an call back time, so I could chat and close the deal.

Guys, cold calling works. You just need to be confident in what your service can offer. I'm going to keep at it and one day, I'll be legen...wait for it...dary.

Yea I did my first 2 cold calls the first one I got really nervous when I spoke to someone who started asking me unrelated questions. The second one i was pretty cool but I wound up completely messing up my script even though it was going as planned. I definitely want to keep doing this Id be paying for my phone bill regardless of IM so I dont consider it an added expense...... I wish I could just afford to outsource this to someone better at it

Yes. It is.

I've been involved in sales and business development for many years. Everything from cutting my teeth on calling random numbers in the phone book and selling insurance (a long time ago!) to business meetings with company CEOs.

For cold calling, here are a few things I learned over the years which may help:

1. Don't get caught up in trying to sell to someone who is not interested. Be polite, get off the phone quickly and call the next number on the list.

2. Don't take anything personally. It's a cold list, so most people won't be interested. Taking it personally will only put you off your pitch for the next call.

3. Out of 100 people there will be a percentage of them who are going to be interested in what you are selling. It could be 1, it could be 20. Your mission is to find those nuggets. The quicker you work out who is not interested (and therefore not worth pushing for a sale), the quicker you can move on and the sooner you will find those prospects who will buy.

4. REFERRALS! Always ask for referrals. If someone buys from you, they like the product and they are quite likely to give you names of other people who may also like the product. Even if someone is not interested, ask if they know of anyone else who could be interested.

When you have a list of referrals to call, that is going to be much more productive. Your ratios will be much better, the calls are better received, you will make more sales and you will enjoy the calls much more.

There's a lot more you can do to increase your hit rate, but I don't want to hijack the thread with a huge post. If anyone thinks it would be useful I would be happy to put something together and maybe start a new thread.

Trepanated said:

I've been involved in sales and business development for many years. Everything from cutting my teeth on calling random numbers in the phone book and selling insurance (a long time ago!) to business meetings with company CEOs.

For cold calling, here are a few things I learned over the years which may help:

1. Don't get caught up in trying to sell to someone who is not interested. Be polite, get off the phone quickly and call the next number on the list.

2. Don't take anything personally. It's a cold list, so most people won't be interested. Taking it personally will only put you off your pitch for the next call.

3. Out of 100 people there will be a percentage of them who are going to be interested in what you are selling. It could be 1, it could be 20. Your mission is to find those nuggets. The quicker you work out who is not interested (and therefore not worth pushing for a sale), the quicker you can move on and the sooner you will find those prospects who will buy.

4. REFERRALS! Always ask for referrals. If someone buys from you, they like the product and they are quite likely to give you names of other people who may also like the product. Even if someone is not interested, ask if they know of anyone else who could be interested.

When you have a list of referrals to call, that is going to be much more productive. Your ratios will be much better, the calls are better received, you will make more sales and you will enjoy the calls much more.

There's a lot more you can do to increase your hit rate, but I don't want to hijack the thread with a huge post. If anyone thinks it would be useful I would be happy to put something together and maybe start a new thread.

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Very helpful advice. I, for one, would like if you could/would put something together to tell us more.

Thanks

I just read this from the 4 Hour Work Week book "To avoid gatekeepers call between 8:30am-9:00am and between 6:00pm-6:30pm. "

It is VERY effective

Voasi said:

A good place for telemarketing talk is - http://www.thetelemarketingforum.com/

As for telemarketing, yes, it definitely works. For 500 calls, you will get anywhere from 5-10 leads, with 1-3 exceptional leads. To get to that level though, you'll need to work on a script that has some "legs" on it. You'll find the guys over at TTF (above) have great scripts available and they'll even critique your script for free on the forum.

The single biggest problem I see from beginners is that they burnout in the first week. You gotta keeping pushing the stay consistent. That's the name of the game with telemarketing: consistency.

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those figures sound about right from my own experience and ive got 30 years of direct sales experience. case in point, during june i was personally pitching a service at a new niche and something like 300 calls resulted in 22 conversations with buyers which resulted in 6 qualified leads which in turn has resulted in 1 new client (or at least they will be a client once they pay money into our account later this week) 2 very warm prospects and 3 luke warm prospects.

lessons learned from that campaign - i couldn't put a rookie salesman on it (the new niche) and im having a re-think about whether or not to persevere with this product offering in this specific niche.

telesales is a quick and dirty way of hitting a market and gettiing a rapid overview of what your the marketplace thinks of your product and its price point, but this isn't the nineties where you could cold call on an "its a numbers game" because as somebody pointed out earlier in the thread voicemails are a killer and youve got to find a way of getting through to the buyer initially, holding their attention long enough to get an ongoing dialogue going over a couple more calls / emails before you really start getting down to business to discuss what they need, what you can provide and how much it's all going to cost.

businesses are being hit every single day by anonymous gmail and yahoo emails offering "CHEAP SEO" / "FIRST PAGE OF GOOGLE" "etc etc" type services so if you think youve got something new to offer them that they havent heard before, youre going to be in for a rude awakening.

Be a consultant. Ask your prospect what they'd like to improve about their existing online activities. Educate them about your XYZ service and how it works. Explain the benefits it would provide for their business. Start small with a simple service they can understand and do not let them get into conversations about a variety of services otherwise you'll confuse and overwhelm them, they'll go back into their shell, you won't land them as a client and you'll be left wondering what you did wrong.

PS - good call by whoever it was about Brian Tracy's 'psychology of selling' - i bought that as an audio course many years ago and it is golden. strongly advise you to look at PITCH ANYTHING too (oren kleff).

Cold calling is very effective, if you get the right people to sell. People hate it, but a surprising number of people are sold by phone calls. In the UK cold calling is hugely successful and the people who run the biggest cold calling firms make millions a year. Get a team together low or no basic and then make them work the phones with a competitive commission and your in.

I think it depends on 3 things - who you are, what you're selling, and who you're calling. Since I fall outside of the demographic of most products that would use cold calls, they never have any impact on me. But I can certainly see them being a worthwhile thing if you know who your target market is and how to reach them. The inherent problem with cold calling is that it's essentially a "blanket" approach where you're really not seeking out specific groups of people who might actually be interested in whatever you're trying to sell (or maybe you are, in which case I would imagine it's significantly more effective). However, as time goes on and as more ways of generating leads are developed, I think that eventually cold calls will fall by the wayside. But I'm talking years (if not decades) away. Even then, certain companies may still use cold calls as that may still prove (for whatever reason) to be the most effective way to reach potential customers.

I get a 1-3% convesion on selling over the phone and around 3-5 on appointment settting pitching it as a "free consultation". Everyone sees through that but it still works if you make shit sound like honey. I have found that there is a fine line of how hard to push when appointment setting, especially if you are doing it for yourself and not getting paid by the lead for someone else. The quick appointment often makes for a horrible, uphill, on site battle for the sale. My numberrs might not sound great to some, but I use telemarketing as a qualifying tool as much as I do a marketing push. You want 3 quality appointments that you can close two of, instead of 5 that use up your gas and put you in the mood to kick the dog when you come home broke.

I'm a telemarketer, if you're good, have a good script (don't follow it use it as a guideline) and you are calling people who actually need your product you can do great. Most of you computer guys probably spend all day on the computer though and suck at talking to people in real life.

In my personal experience, cold-calling wasn't very effective.

But I was also really young when I tried. Perhaps a second shot wouldn't hurt.