There’s one area of sales that everybody hates to do…Cold calling – the dreaded task of picking up the phone and calling someone they’ve never spoken to before. Why? ?Because they’re afraid of being rejected.
So What!
Here are three questions to ask yourself:
1. What’s the worst thing that can happen? You get hung up ?on, or somebody could yell at you. (You could hang up on them!)
2. What’s the best thing that could happen? You could get ?an appointment, close a sale, and make some money.
3. What’s the most likely thing that would happen? You speak ?to the person and they aren’t interested. You get voice mail. ?You get blocked by a gatekeeper.
When I first started out in sales I was whining about ?getting rejected. Pauline Novak my trainer grabbed me by the shoulders, looked me straight in the eyes, and ?said, “Jeff, if you aren’t being rejected, you’re ?not trying hard enough!!!”
If you figure that only one of every hundred prospects will do business ?with you then your challenge is to find a hundred leads, work them ?as fast as possible, find the one person who buys, throw the ?other 99 names away, and find another list of 100 names.
When you speak with someone who says NO, ?that’s not rejection. It’s confirmation.
Three things happen when you overcome your fear of cold calling:
1. You close more of the phone-in sales because you respond to their inquiries immediately.
2. You create more opportunities from your warm calls because you follow-up with the people you met at your networking events.
3. You stumble on some very nice pieces of business because ?you called on someone who just happened to need the things ?you sold at the moment you called.
| Reprinted with permission from “Jeffrey Mayer’s SucceedingInBusiness.com Newsletter. (Copyright, 2003 – 2005, Jeffrey J. Mayer, SucceedingInBusiness.com.) To subscribe to Jeff’s free newsletter, visit www.SucceedingInBusiness.com About Jeffrey Mayer Related Resources More Posts by Jeffrey Mayer To discover the easy and inexpensive ways anyone can attract more clients and maximize their profits, sign up for your FREE Profit Now Report. |
January 10th, 2011 at 8:25 am
1% ROI?? That’s terrible- “No” is not the end of the relationship, but the beginning of closing upwards of 10% in cold-calling. But you know that, don’t you.
January 19th, 2011 at 3:57 am
I agree with you, the art of the cold call has lost a lot of luster with some of our sales people as well. There is nothing wrong with calling just to get your foot in the door. I have them now on a schedule where they have to make at least 10 calls a day to a new business. They were not happy at first, but since this has been going on for the last three months, their sales have increased and we are all happy. Just shows that making a quick call can sometimes pay in the long run.