Sales 101 Making The Cold Call
Sales is really all about making the call, that’s right the dreaded Cold Call, not once not twice but over and over and over and over again. Sales is a numbers game sure you have to be able to close the deal but more important you have to be able to find the opportunity’s and the only way to do that is using the Cold Call.
Sales people that find many ups and downs in their month to month business are not consistent about making cold calls. If you focus on the current deals and all of the daily needs of your existing customers you will not have any opportunity’s in your funnel for the future.
This does not have to be a painful process, you should do it so often that it is second nature. A cold call does not have to be to complete strangers, it can be calling everyone that you know and checking in. This means calling people that have said no 10 times in the past and just seeing if they might be willing to sit down and have a meeting with you.
I spoke to one of my top sales reps a few years ago and asked “how many cold calls do you make a week”, what do you think the answer was, 5, 20, 50? You guessed it 50 and that is in a mature territory, when it was brand new she was making 200 per week.
Yesterday one of my newer sales reps gave me a call after re-reading a book I had sent last year, “Red Hot Cold Call Selling”. She had picked up the phone and started calling customers from competitive accounts. One of the folks she finally got a hold of had said she was not interested many times in the past, but today she had a need and we had a product that could fill the need, so a meeting has now been set. This takes time and numbers, you should expect to call 10 customers to get one appointment and you may have to go to 10 appointments to get one sale.
To be successful at sales you have to master the Cold Call and you have to put it on your to do list every week. Don’t wast time thinking about the best time to call a customer, just do it.
