Productive Cold Calls

I know very few people that enjoy cold calling. Yet, it is important to do and do right. Check this out:
The Goal of Cold Calling
The primary goal of cold calling is to find and qualify prospects. The only way to perform this task correctly is to measure prospects against a customer profile for your business. This means that before you make a cold call, you must have a clearly defined profile of who qualifies as a prospect.

This is important, because if you don't have a target customer profile, you'll be wasting time with cold calling. Think of it this way: If you are sent to the grocery store to bring back tomatoes, can you tell ripe ones from rotten ones? If you can't tell the difference, you aren't qualified to pick tomatoes. The same is true with trying to pick good prospects and determine if they are good or not.

If you went cold calling and came back with rotten contacts that don't match your customer profile, you will have wasted your time. And here is where it gets a little tricky, depending on your business. There is an expected ratio of who qualifies as an ideal prospect. In many cases, there are more duds than prospects when cold calling, which means you will need to filter through a lot of contacts to find good ones. This is perfectly fine, and the better you are at filtering your prospects the easier cold calling becomes.

Source: Sales consultant Steve Martinez (www.sellingmagic.com)

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