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Don’t you just hate it when you are driving somewhere or engrossed in some work and all of sudden your phone rings and a voice on the other end starts reading a script to sell you on new home loan deals? Yeah, Cold Calling Sucks! Sometimes I just feel like banging my phone on the head of the person calling me.
But guess what? We do cold calling at our company. Yes, we do it a LOT. But we do it with a twist.
In this post I am going to tell you the secret we use to make a killing by approaching strangers to sell our services and products. I am also going to tell you how you can customize it for selling web design services and replicate our success.
According to Wikipedia, cold calling is the process of approaching prospective clients, typically via telephone, who have not agreed to such an interaction. The word “cold” is used because the person receiving the call is not expecting the call or has not specifically asked to be contacted by the sales person.
It isn’t like that people hate getting commercial calls, it’s just that they hate getting it when they get it without asking for it. When you fix the second part, you have a killer marketing method at your hand — which, many prefer to call “Warm Calling”.
In more practical sense, Warm Calling is when you first throw a bait at your customers to have them ask you to call them.
You could send them a letter / email letting them know that you have just started your web-design business or started offering a new service. Another idea is to send them a letter informing them that their competitors rank higher than them for a certain keyword in search engines and you would love to discuss what they can do to improve their rankings.
It is essential that your first message does not contain sales pitch. Your subsequent meeting can (and should) have sales pitches. But not this first one.
So you get the point? The first contact is not about selling something to them but rather an innocent offer of genuine help or information.
This way, when you call up, you will not be unexpected and they will be a lot more receptive to your message.
To make this method work, all you need to do is to get creative with finding ways to make the initial contact. This method produces amazing results for us and there is no reason it should not work for you. =)
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July 12th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Warm or even just lukewarm calling does sound better than a call served cold. I hate it when I get a call from someone trying to sell me something that I didn’t ask for, and I just plain hate cold calling.