I know that most people probably don't want to believe this, but I'm almost convinced that it's true. I think that the main reason authors and speakers say that cold calling is a complete waste of time is because they know that's what the audience or readers want to hear. Nobody wants to prospect so it's kind of nice when 'an expert' agrees that it's not valuable, that way you don't feel guilty not doing it. The fact is, that some cold calling is a waste of time. The trouble is knowing the difference so you can leverage your time.
Let's talk about all the reasons you should cold call and start with the most obvious reason. I don't care how well you position yourself, how many referral sources you have, or how big your customer base is, you should always be adding prospects to your marketing funnel from a lot of different sources. It doesn't matter if you spend 10 or 20 minutes a day doing it, calling people that have never heard or seen of you should be a best practice for any sales professional. Even if you have limited time because of a large customer portfolio, then you should make a top 20 list of prospects you would like to do business with and put a plan together to contact those people regularly. Whatever your level, it's a salespersons job to be getting more and more people into your marketing funnel using all methods available.
I will agree, however, that cold calling is not the most efficient way of gaining business. There are statistics available that prove that referred business closes a higher percentage of the time and the sales cycle is much shorter. But just because one method is more effective than another doesn't mean that the other is a waste of time. Efficient cold calling is the way to go. What I mean by efficient is to stop calling on prospects that have no interest in doing business with you. If you've called on them for a year and you've never talked to the decision maker, then remove them from the cycle and move on. Maybe just put them on an annual mailing list so they see your name. If you have limited time available to prospect, then you want to make sure you are identifying the companies you want to do business with and putting more quality effort into your marketing efforts. Instead of the shotgun approach, come up with a more personalized way of reaching these companies and you're bound to see more fruits for your efforts.
As with everything, setting up systems is so important to make sure you are extracting as much value from each prospecting source as possible. So, in other words, make sure you have systems and a process in place for getting customer referrals and testamonials. Make sure that you have a system in place so backend sales are automatic and you are keeping in contact with existing clients. And make sure that you have a prospecting system in place so you aren't wasting time. Even if you decide to target 20 new prospects per year, that would probably work out to be less than 5 minutes per week of cold calling activity. If you convert only 1 of those prospects to a customer, you would have experienced a fantastic ROI for the time that you spent doing it. Plus, the great thing is that it has a multiplicative effect in the sense that the more quality prospects you call on, the more you will convert into customers, and the more backend sales and referrals you will get from those customers. Do that over a sustained period of time, and you'll see dramatic effects in your sales numbers.
Dave Roth is a sales coaching professional and operates a site which reviews various web based crm solutions. The site also provides free training for sales professionals on how to leverage CRM Software to grow sales.
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