First day of 'focused' cold calling - need input!

Today, for the first time I will be cold calling for an entire day.. calling restaurant after restaurant.

I live in Quebec, but I am from near Ottawa, and no I can't speak french.. I can only speak English.

My goal for today is to call at least 300 businesses, and I am hoping to reach an hourly call volume of 40.

I'll be selling ISO- and WQA-endorsed water systems that not only produce extremely health water, but also other types of waters that can emulsify oil-based chemicals off produce (pesticides/herbicides are oil-based so rain won't wash them off, and regular tap water can't emulsify water as we all know), plus the water is better for cooking and drawing out the flavors of foods, and other water for cleaning surfaces etc. Hence, the product I am selling as enormous benefits for restaurants of all kinds.

For the last 8 hours I have been reading thread after thread about cold calling on this forum, and I am extremely driven to pick up the phone, in my case an iPhone, and begin making calls. I'm not sure which city to begin calling first, but I'll have to begin with a city in the EST time zone since it will soon be opening hours.

Anyways, I have 2 years' experience in customer service Canada's largest mobile carrier, Rogers Wireless, and during this experience I had to upsell customers via inbound calls on many calls to try to sell another line at the end of the call even though they didn't mention anything about it. This was only a $12 per hour job, and I made a new line activation every 30-40 bridges (my supervisor referred bridges to the script for upselling) so in one day I would make 1-2 sales since I would take on average 80-90 calls a day.

Although it required determination to push that upsell to almost all customer who called in, with 95%+ of them saying no, it will require even more determination to pick up the phone and call outbound. However, with these products I am extremely confident I can make multiple times the amount I did before. Even if I only make 1 sale out of 300-400 calls I would be happy, since it would be a commission of $500-$1,000~+ in one day's work... rather than a measly $100 working at the inbound call center (well, I worked from home). I had to deal with a lot of angry customers, including a lot of swearing and cussing so I'm thinking that may help with me being able to handle rejection.

After reading about 20 threads - probably 50,000 - 75,000 words' worth of content -, many of which were started by well-known contributors and authors including Claud Whitacre and others, I've come to conclude that to succeed in cold calling, one must follow these principles: Do not give up only after making even 50-100 calls. Call a few thousand, and learn how to improve from rejection by learning how to handle objections. No matter how much time you spend on researching for potential prospects, building a list, perfecting your speach, and other 'activities', you won't be getting anywhere until you pick up that phone and begin dialing. Be focused not on your company, your products, or your services, focus more on communicating the benefits that what you are offering has to the business owner. One of the main reasons as to why most people fail in telemarketing/cold calling is because of the fear of rejection and hearing the answer 'no'; since it is impossible for everyone to buy your product, or to be interested, rejection is inevitible... but what is also inevitable is that there will always be a buyer, whether it be after 200 or 500 calls, as long as you are communicating WIIFT (What's In It For THEM, this is a major thing I learnt from studying business at college for 3 years). Take each 'no' as if you are getting closer to that 'yes' which will turn into hundreds or even thousands of dollars in revenue for your business.

Anyways, I have a few questions to ask even though I have spent a ton of time reading threads on here about cold calling.

- Say if I begin cold calling to US-based businesses (restaurants, health businesses etc), will it be difficult since I am not from the USA, and from Canada? The company I am a distributor does have about 8 offices in the US, 2 in Canada and about 10+ in other countries.

- Since I won't be able to meet them face-to-face for an interview, would it be difficult to close the sale over the phone? From this concern, I was thinking that it might be better to first focus on local areas in which the company has offices in.

- What is the best way to stay focused, motivated and dedicated to continue to make calls throughout the day in order to reach the daily call volume quota? I will be using an iPhone to make the calls, so I don't think it's possible to use an auto dialer.

- Since I have never really dedicated an entire day to cold calling - the most I've called in a day was about 10-15 business but most were calls straight to voicemail, 1 was to a owner who said he wasn't interested, and another 7 the call answerer said the owner wasn't in -, I have to ask, what is the best way to block against the fear of rejection?

Anyways, throughout the day I will be posting my results... since it'll be my first time I'm not going to be setting too high of expectations. Even if I get zero leads, zero interest and zero sales I will be happy since it'll be a major stepping stone, and since it has been proven time and time again that dedication, perseverance, and consistency works well with cold calling.

Chow!