It Goes To Show That Cold Calling Is Effective

by Frank Rumbauskas⁽²⁾
http://www.nevercoldcall.com

I watched Wall Street, one of my 2 forever favorite movies, this past weekend again for the first time in quite a while!

Inherently, considering what I do for a living, I had to giggle when Bud Fox gets promoted to his new executive office and the sales manager says over the loudspeaker, "cold calling does work."

Naturally the irony of the situation is that Bud wasn't using cold calling scripts at all. (What he did is unlawful, but that's a different story altogether!) And just prior to that announcement, one of the cold calling reps was fired. Go figure.

This nonsense occurs in virtually all sales offices. Ask any sales manager what their best sales reps are doing and they'll tell you they're making cold calls.

No they're not. If they had been, they wouldn't be sales superstars - they'd probably be on probation, or out of a job completely!

I experienced this all the time when I was new to sales and working to find success. It's a fact that all sales managers - except for one - told me to make cold calls, but it was even more aggravating when I'd ask very experienced salespeople who said the same thing.

It made me crazy because I'd watch them and clearly know that they were not making cold calls.

Finally I started at a new job where the sales director was smart, and when he saw me making cold calls, because I didn't know what else to do, he called me into his office and yelled, "Frank, I didn't spend thousands to recruit and train you to have you doing the job of a minimum-wage telemarketer."

And then he let me in on the nasty little secret: Cold calling is a sham and is a time waster!

He paired me up with the top salesperson in that office. We attended our first sales presentation together where I could watch him doing his selling.

On the way over, he explained, "Calling prospects at random is a complete waste of time. Many people are already pre-disposed to buy your product. Your goal should be to let them know about you so they will contact you and you become their order taker."

That's when the light bulb went off for me.

He said that 20% of the market absolutely will never purchase from me, twenty percent will buy if they know who I am, and the other 60 percent are up in the air and need to be "sold."

The failure of most salespeople comes about because they fool away their days calling on the 20% who will say 'no' and the 60% who will say 'maybe' instead of spending all of their time in front of that twenty percent who will definitely say 'yes' and BUY.

By the way, that 60% 'undecided' crowd is the most annoying because they will tease you along and waste your time without buying! At least the 'no' people will say no and not waste your time. (I mention this because sales managers will instruct salespeople to go after that 60 percent, which doesn't make sense to me. Under my sales philosophy, you work with them only after they become part of the 20 percent 'yes' category.)

In any case, that moment was a HUGE wake-up call to myself.

From that point forward I only befriended top sales pros. I asked lots of questions, watched, bought them meals, whatever I needed to do to gain their secrets.

Finally I implemented all of their lead-generation tactics and started applying them to the point where I was getting leads than I could ever meet with, and since most of those leads were in the 20%, pre-disposed 'yes' crowd, my closing rate was an astonishing eighty percent, compared with the 20% standard in my company!

Frank Rumbauskas has taught over 50,000 salespeople how to stop cold calling forever. To download a free 37-page PDF preview of his system, please visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com or learn more at http://www.nevercoldcall.com/cold-calling/

Article submitted Thursday, January 05, 2012 & read 4 times.

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