The Most Effective Ways of Prospecting

Have you heard of the term call reluctance? Well, it is where salespeople are afraid of making a sales call. Cold calling is a nightmare to many people because of the fear of rejection. Even for the most seasoned salespeople, the fear of the phone is common. 

The truth about prospecting via cold calling on the phone is that it requires a different skillset from selling. If you're a great salesperson, or even if you aren't, and have salespeople working for you, this is a great activity to have specialized, skilled people do in-house or outsource.

In the 90s, when we started a website design company, I was the primary cold caller and lead generator because it was just my business partner and myself. We were starting and living on a small number of clients we were bringing in. We couldn't afford most advertising because we called local businesses in the Phoenix area, and then went out in person on appointments. It quickly became challenging to do enough cold calls to close enough deals for the business.

We decided try to outsource the cold calling and lead generation. We took what was pretty much the last money we had in the bank at the time. It was about $6,000, and we hired two different telemarketing companies. What we got for our $6000 was about 10 quote leads full of misspellings and bad grammar. Talk about disappointment! 

I went back to cold calling myself. After a few months of getting some more clients and revenue in, we had the idea of hiring someone to work directly with us that we could rely on to do calls.

We ran an ad in the newspaper and found the girl named Mary. Since email on the internet was kind of a new thing and many people did not even have it, I dropped off call sheets on her doorstep on Friday afternoons for the following week. We used lists that were printed off from the library that info USA provided free to libraries at the time. 

Mary started booking appointments for me, and I started closing more clients. A year or so later, a client approached us and asked if he could use our callers to set appointments for him as well.

We had such success with his calls, we started soliciting other businesses in that industry - business brokerage - and soon that outsourcing service overtook our website business, and became SalesDouble, which today is a multimillion-dollar company.

A few years ago, I attended a Tony Robbins' business mastery seminar, and one of the speakers declared that cold calling does not work, and nobody dared to contest it. I disagree with his point of view. Our company is proof that it still works in B2B. We've made over 30 million B2B calls in the last decade alone, generated hundreds of thousands of leads and appointments. It does work for the right industries.

For online marketing, regardless of whether it's Facebook or Google ads, you need to know marketing fundamentals. Algorithms change, but the fundamentals of marketing remain.

Key Talking Points of the Episode:

How we got into cold calling and our frustrating experienceHow we finally got cold calling working for usAlternative online prospecting

Key Quotes from the Episode:

"When things get ugly, and it seems like you're not going to make it hold on, keep trying and refuse to quit. You'll figure it out eventually."

"Cold calling and B2B were effective then, and still effective now."

"The truth is prospecting via cold calling on the phone or in-person is a completely different skill set than selling."

Resources Mentioned: 

Grab the FREE eBook “Top 10 Secrets for B2B Small Business Owners” at http://www.growyourb2bcompany.com.

Website: https://www.salesdouble.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/YourSalesDouble