The “Cold” Call

Sales people hate the “Cold Call.” Introducing someone to the sales profession by making them start with cold calls would be like Edison introducing electricity to the world by demonstrating the electric chair! With a cold call, you’re trying to sell to a person you never met, with no idea of what they need. Years ago, I was cold calling resellers for my computer company. One call was actually to one of my competitors. They laughed, and I felt pretty stupid. Cold calling is difficult and usually fails to deliver new business. In the world of complex sales of big-ticket items over long sales cycles, a cold call is simply the attempt to get a meeting and build a new relationship, not make a sale.

Several years ago, I tried cold calling to sell a two-day account planning workshop. I made 1,000 cold calls in one week to companies around the U.S. These firms had already been mailed a brochure on our offering. Of the 1,000 calls I got roughly 200 out-of-business or wrong numbers. I left 700 voice mail messages, and maybe 50 of those people returned the call to say they were not interested. One hundred live people picked up the phone. In the end, I might have spoken to 15 decision makers out of the 1,000 calls. I was able to close one piece of business worth $15,000 out of the entire week’s calls, and that customer already knew about us and had a relationship with our CEO.

We’ll never do away with cold calls, but my advice is to be selective, be prepared, and be patient. Target the accounts that you believe would have a need for your products and services. Do pre-call research on the Internet. Prepare a statement of your reason for calling and the value of what you are trying to convey to a prospect. Cold calling results in much rejection, but the more calls you make, the better your odds are of getting an appointment and the more polished you will be in making the call. You can read more on cold calling in my book, “Don’t Just Stand There, Sell Something.”

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