Cold calling typically refers to the first telephone call made to a prospective customer. More unusually these days, cold calling can also refer to calling face-to-face for the first time without an appointment at commercial premises or households. Cold calling is also known as canvassing, telephone canvassing, prospecting, telephone prospecting, and more traditionally in the case of consumer door-to-door selling as 'door-knocking'.
Cold calling is an important stage and technique in the selling process. Cold calling abilities are also useful in many aspects of business and work communications outside of sales activities and the selling function.
Good cold calling - performed properly and not as merely an indiscriminate 'numbers game' - is a fundamental and highly transferable capability, whose basic principles are found in the behaviours and techniques of all great entrepreneurs and leaders.
In essence cold calling is the art of approaching someone, professionally, openly and meaningfully, with a sensible proposition.
All great entrepreneurs and leaders possess this ability or they would not have become successful.
Cold calling therefore enables success, chiefly because cold calling is strongly focused on initiative and action.
cold calling is how you see it
Since selling became a recognised profession a couple of generations ago, countless sales training organizations, sales gurus, writers, theorists, and sales people of all sorts, have attempted to create effective cold calling techniques and scripts. There is no magic script, and while there are many helpful frameworks and methodologies there is no single magic answer.
Successful cold calling - including the effectiveness of methods and techniques - essentially relies on your own attitude towards cold calling.
Viewed negatively or passively, cold calling is merely a numbers game, where the sales person's calling (sometimes called 'canvassing' in this situation) is no different to a junk-mail leaflet. Somebody might respond - maybe one in twenty, maybe one in a hundred.
This is the way that unsuccessful sales people see cold calling. No wonder for them that cold calling is a painful grind. Depressing, embarrassing, draining, exhausting, just horrible.
On the other hand...
Viewed positively and creatively , cold-calling is empowering and potent.
Cold calling actually enables the sales person to:
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supersede existing suppliers
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pre-empt the competition
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identify and create huge new business possibilities
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become indispensable as someone who can make things happen and create new business
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build (your) personal reputation beyond job title and grade
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establish relationships and a respect (for you) beyond normal sales responsibilities
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and be an entrepreneur.
So, do you want to be the human equivalent of junk-mail, or do you want to achieve entrepreneurial reputation and success that will take you anywhere you want to go?
Like so many other aspects of business, management, and especially selling, cold-calling is how you see it, and whatever you want to make it.
the enormous potential of cold-calling
It's worth making a big effort to see cold calling in a different way because it is both a key to personal success and to business success.
Why does cold calling hold so much potential?
Cold calling uniquely:
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positions you in a crucial pivotal role - you are an interpreter, translator, controller
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is the key to new fresh opportunities - business and anything else
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and more generally the cold calling capability empowers you to define and determine and take control of your own future.
Cold calling by its nature opens business opportunities that are new, fresh, 'shape-able', free of baggage and history, and not weighed down by unhelpful patterns and expectations, etc.
Also, cold calling situations can largely be of your own making.
You are in charge. You own it. You can define each situation as you want - even if apparently you are quite constrained.
Believe it - people who are successful at cold calling can very quickly become extremely independent and powerful.
Your cold calling activities can create effectively a new 'virtual' business for yourself, within the organization or project, as if it were your own. This especially applies in B2B (business-to-business), where business opportunities are unlimited.
This is because cold calling is the life blood of all business - and any organized activity. Without it nothing happens. Even in largely automated businesses the automated systems would not have first come into being without someone doing the necessary cold calling. And nothing would develop or improve without someone being able to use basic cold calling skills to instigate the changes.
Cold calling dictates what happens, to whom, when, how - and even if cold calling is positioned and managed as a lowly activity, as is often the case, two things are certain:
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cold calling alone can create and be a business in its own right - because cold calling is effectively the ability to make things happen - whereas every other business activity needs cold calling to start up and survive
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therefore successful cold callers can go anywhere and do anything - they are entirely self-sufficient and ultimately are not dependent on anyone or anything.
The philosophy applies in consumer businesses (B2C) too, where even if you are forced to work to a script or a strict list of prospects, you still have the opportunity to develop your own strategic ideas and style, which when successful can (if the organization has any sense) be extended into initiatives and campaigns for others to follow - placing you in a key role as a 'champion' or trainer or project leader. If the organization has no sense (some don't) then the successful cold caller can simply leave and start up by themselves, or step up to a bigger job with another employer.
Successful cold callers are always in demand. They can always make things happen - for themselves and for other people.
Contrast these opportunities and outcomes with those offered by existing or established business relationships, or where the selling process has already begun. In these more mature situations the scene has already been set, along with expectations on both sides. The project has a shape, a life of its own, along with the distractions found when supplier and customer are already engaged. The project managers or senior consultants who have to pick things up at this stage have very little of the freedom and flexibility enjoyed by the cold calling sales person.
As a cold calling specialist you will always have the greatest potential - because you are working with fresh open situations - making things happen. Making something from nothing. It's difficult to put any limited value on such abilities.
Significantly, cold calling situations are the natural preference of all entrepreneurs. Cold calling situations are the natural hunting (or farming) ground of all entrepreneurs.
This is another way to look at cold calling: it is the favoured approach of all entrepreneurs - and the reason most entrepreneurs choose to start up their own businesses - they recognise that the best opportunities are new ones.
Cold calling welcomes and makes the most of a blank sheet. Pastures new. No limits.
Seeing cold calling in these terms is 90% of the personal battle to be successful at cold calling.
To enable cold-calling to be this liberating - especially within an employed role - you have to make it so. You have to want to put your own personal stamp on things. To be creative, adventurous - to see beyond the script - beyond the conventional "we've always done it that way..."
Cold calling is an invitation to adopt the mind-set and ambition of an entrepreneur - to see cold calling as the key to opportunities and personal achievement, to independence and choice.
With the right positive attitude to cold calling then rejections cease to be problems. Resistance ceases to be insurmountable. All obstacles become instead welcome steps towards success and achievement. The challenges are now the essential experience towards inevitable success.
cold calling - controlling, strategic, empowering
The sales person's role between supplier and customer is the most significant and pivotal at the cold calling stage.
The sales person's influence in leveraging something from nothing is at its highest point.
Cold calling determines fundamentally whether something happens or not.
Cold calling can also then decide the nature of the proposition, the fit between supplier and customer, the way the relationship is defined and can develop - all these and more can be defined by the sales person at the cold calling stage.
When we examine cold calling more deeply we understand why.
More than all the stages in the selling process, the cold call enables the sales person to interpret, to define and to command the situation - just like the conductor of an orchestra.
The sales person at cold calling stage determines the interpretation, direction and cooperation between customer and supplier.
This - rather than merely delivering a script to a list of contacts - is the sales person's role and opportunity at the cold call stage.
why it's good that cold calling is so difficult for most sales people
Cold calling is traditionally the most challenging part of the selling process.
Moreover, for most sales people cold calling is becoming increasingly difficult - because the prospective customer's time is increasingly pressurised and therefore increasingly protected, and so cold calling sales people are increasingly resisted.
Prospects and decision-makers are increasingly difficult to reach, on their guard, and very sensitive and resistant to obvious 'sales techniques'.
Consequently the sales person feels extra pressures, not helped by scripted or contrived language, or an over-zealous sales management or system, which understandably creates a feeling in the prospect of being pushed or manipulated. In these circumstances any hope of forming vital trust is of course lost at this point, and recovery is virtually impossible.
However, sales people who adopt a positive and skilful approach to cold calling generally find that cold calling becomes easier.
This is because cold calling itself is influenced hugely by market forces, i.e., all the other cold calling sales people attempting to do it.
The more difficult cold calling is for the majority, then the easier it becomes for the successful minority.
If the cold calling challenge were easy, then it would be easy for everyone, and therefore very difficult to achieve differentiation or advantage, to stand out, to be noticed and respected and valued - to succeed.
Your aim is to be one of the successful minority.
Then you will be thankful for obstacles and challenges because they'll block the competition, leaving you free to focus on the business opportunities and adopting a solid strategic approach towards achieving the best outcomes.
© Alan Chapman/Businessballs
