What is a cold call?It is a way of using the telephone to interrupt somebody. Email marketing is similar, you send emails to a stranger to interrupt them to try and sell them something.
This works up to a point.But the problem is that today people like to be in control of their own buying process. We have all been in that situation where sales people have tried to impress upon us something that has no relevance or have tried to manipulate us. All while the
salesperson has said that they were trying to help us.But here’s the thing.While I often talk to people about how the buying process has changed, how we as customers now like to be empowered and not sold to, everybody nods their heads. So, while we agree, we all do that.
It seems that your customers don’t.
It’s like when the price of all the houses goes down, ours do not. For some strange reason, we are different.
“Our customers are not on social” we often get told.
(At this point we usually get Alex Low our Sales Navigator expert to demo this is not the case, but more on this another day.)So, while we all get annoyed with cold calls and cold emails, changing the approach is for other people, other businesses. Rather like the mind-trick we play on ourselves with house prices, the world is changing, it just doesn’t apply to us.Yes Tim, I hear you say, we warm them up!Let me get this right, you take something that we have just agreed is annoying and keep doing it so the people are more likely to take a call. I recall, somebody telling me, we have to “touch” the client six times, so they become aware of us.At a recent conference, I did a demo where I went up to a member of the audience and said “tell me when I am annoying you”. It got to the third push, where he told me to stop. He was aware of me. In fact, so much he told me to “go away”.
Cold calls work. Kind of.
Cold calls do work, when somebody has been through a certain stage of their self-education on-line. Then they may take a cold call from a vendor that might help them with that search.But constant badgering, is surely more likely to get the brush off, than “warm them up”.
Related: How the Hashtag Became Ubiquitous Warming up people is “lazy selling”. You are putting the emphasis on the client to call you back.Cold calling requires many skills, an ability to tell a story, break things down to a simple granular level and have great interpersonal skills.But actually, there is a whole better way that doesn’t piss people off!It’s called
social sellingand we are the experts. If you’d like to find out more about how you can make customers warm to you and not get the cold shoulder, get in touch. We can show you how your people, not just your sales team, can tell a compelling story online that gets the customer’s attention and inspires them to act.
