Contrary to Popular Belief Cold Calling Does Work! 2

There are several books and websites out there today devoted to the concept that ‘cold calling’ doesn’t work, or that it has become an obsolete or unnecessary discipline. If you read through the literature from those that say cold calling is obsolete, you’ll find a common theme; replace cold calling with ‘pull’ marketing programs designed around technology and other activities to eliminate the need for it. Ideas such as website optimization, staying in contact with newsletters, e-mail, networking, and asking for more referrals from your existing customers are good ones, and they all work. I suggest that you do as many as make sense to your organization to cut down on the number appointment setting calls , and certainly the number of cold calls, your team must make. But make no mistake, at the end of the day, whether the call is cold or warm, it almost always falls to one of us sales professionals to pick up the phone and dial the number to start the dialogue which begins the buying process. That means that the ability to set an appointment is still a critical selling skill. This book and its companion (Volume Two – The Science) will help you discover how to do it more effectively and efficiently. For most of us in sales, our buying cycles start with what we like to call an Initial Appointment. It may be a face-to-face meeting, it may be over the phone or through a web based technology, but somehow or another, we’ve got to convince someone (we call them Targets) that it is in their best interest to hear us out. Here’s what you need to know about this process. There are basically only three sources for an Initial Appointment with a Target. They are: 1. Lead generation marketing campaigns that are designed to get people to raise their hands and tell us they are interested (this includes traditional advertising like or direct mail, etc. plus social media) 2. Networking and referrals 3. Cold Calling And need I remind you, that just because someone expresses interest in our solution through some marketing medium doesn’t mean that when we call for the appointment we’ll get one. Even strong referrals tell us no in exactly the same manner that cold call recipients do, they’re just nicer about it because they don’t want to offend the person who referred them to us. Therefore, the skills, processes and tools we need to cold call are exactly the same ones we need to call referrals and those that indicate an interest through our marketing efforts. That means that almost everyone who must find new customers must be able to efficiently and effectively set appointments. Since founding the Caponi Performance Group, Inc., we’ve concentrated our focus on helping our customers get more Targets into the Pipeline. Why? Because managers have consistently told us that once in front of a Target, their teams were pretty good at scoring runs, to borrow a baseball analogy (closing their fair share of opportunities, if you’re not a follower of baseball). Their biggest barrier to success has always been getting enough ‘at bats’. So, since we already had one of the very best methodologies (The Appointment Making Formula™ or as we affectionately call it, The Formula™) for improving the effectiveness of setting appointments, and had also found the best tool on the planet to improve the efficiency of the process, why not concentrate our efforts where there was the most pain? And so our brand, called ColdCalling101™, was born. Very few of us like to cold call. So every so often there seems to be another solution that hits the market which claims to eliminate the need for it. We all tend to flock to it because we’re all hoping that this particular solution will finally be the one! Recently, it’s been the advent of social media. I can’t tell you how many sales managers and sales professionals told me in 2009 that they didn’t need our services anymore because they were going to be using social media to get those Initial Appointments. (They’ve all since then come to realization that it didn’t work.) But just like email, and appointment setting services before, while they all serve a purpose and do work (we use them both), neither consistently provides the results most of us need to hit our desired goals. At the end of the day (sorry for the use of that overused phrase, but I couldn’t come up with anything else that worked) us sales professionals are the ones that are ultimately responsible for getting in front of enough Targets to make our number. Emails are easy to ignore and even the best appointment setting services have their challenges with being too expensive, supplying quality appointments and turnover from time to time. At last count, I had nineteen different books on cold calling and appointment setting sitting on my book shelf, so I eat, drink and sleep this stuff. And I know, I should ‘get a life’, but hey, I love sales, and more specifically, I love a challenge! Of those nineteen books on appointment setting, there are only two whose methodologies and techniques I agree with. In other words, of the stuff that’s out there, most of it doesn’t work in the long run. The reason they seem to in the short run is that almost any consistently applied process is better than just ‘winging it’ as most sales professionals have been doing for years and still do today. The ones I disagree with are all based on the same foundation. They spend an inordinate amount of time trying to perfect the ideal opening ‘pitch’ and then attempt to apply logic in the response to the initial ‘no’ we hear when asking for an appointment. Since most of our Targets don’t believe they’re in the market for what we’re selling when we call them, neither of those approaches work as well as we think they should. Because of this, most of the, “No!” responses we receive have little to do with reality or logic as they are nothing but ‘conditioned knee-jerk’ reactions designed to get us off the phone. Therefore, logic doesn’t work very well until we can get them past that first panic reaction of, “Oh shoot, (fill in your own word there if you don’t like ‘shoot’) another sales professional! How am I going to get rid of this one?” This book and its companion (Volume One – The Art) is the first in a series we have planned that is aimed at helping us all get more effective and efficient at setting Initial Appointments. The perspective of this book will be that of the manager’s point of view. But what if you’re not a sales manager? What if you’re a small business owner, a sales professional reporting to a sales manager, or, what we call, an independent sales professional? This book is also for you, because like it or not, God has given us all the ultimate equalizer or a level playing field if you will. It’s defined by the same number of hours in each and every day. Those of us who are more effective and efficient, win. Those of who are not, lose. It’s as simple as that. And need I remind anyone that there are no monetary awards for second place in sales. So regardless of whether or not you have responsibility for managing a team, or just yourself, get ready to learn how to become more effective and efficient at the process of filling the Pipeline.