Has The Internet Killed Cold Calling Forever?

Great line!!!!

Examples please, of ways to cold call without cold calling? You have a way with words.

I wasn't really talking about telemarketing per se, I was referring to door to door cold calling being on life support.

Best quote ever...

I received a cold call a couple of days ago. Wanting to promote a "product" I sell online by making it number 1 on the Google Search engines! When I told the person that all sounded fine and dandy, but that I didn't have the bucks to pay for it, he continued on. When I again repeated that the dollar situation is dismal, he then wanted to know how I could even afford my "product". As I have truly struggled hard to make ends meet and have made sacrifices that many wouldn't even consider to keep going, I found the call highly offensive. He must have intuited that he had me riled. I was about to tell him what I thought and he hung up on me! From the conversation, I know that he was targeting people with websites who had similar "products" for sale. What I wonder is how was he planning on putting us all number 1 on Google

If that cold caller happened to be someone from this group, an different approach might have found things a bit more profitable for him. I COULD have referred him to someone who has recently mentioned that they needed to optimize their website (same "product"). But by trying to cram what he was selling down my throat it made for a rather unpleasant experience. That's the first cold call I've had in a long time and quite honestly, I WILL hang up on the next one.

As with all products being marketed, if there's no respect for the potential client, eventually that comes back to no respect for the marketer and lost opportunities for future marketing.

Well... if you'd really like to know the process they are using then I would suggest thetelemarketingforum.com

Im one of those people you refer to here... we dont bite, and we will be joyful to help you learn.

4 days week I go to Google Places in my local city and cold call businesses and I am closing business every single week...no email no website...just me and my telephone.

You're grossly misinformed my friend. It is difficult to telemarket to consumers but not impossible. B-to-B is a whole different story. There is nothing prohibiting you from picking up a phone book and calling every single business in the yellow pages.

I have four people on staff right now who cold call. Walk in cold to businesses every day. Trust me it works, it works SMASHINGLY. That's a new business venture I'm starting. So far it looks absolutely killer.

In fact in my B&M we do cold calling every single day. Imagine I own a dry cleaning company(I don't). Every day someone is out in the community talking to area businesses, introducing ourselves. We aim to be belly to belly with around 1,000 area businesses at least every other month. We aim to be belly to belly with 25 businesses a day. So that every sixty days we are in front of that business. My phone staff is one day in the office, one day out. It works, it works REALLY well. We make it a point to get to know the community so that guess what they won't use any other dry cleaner, in fact they'll tell all their friends about us. Two sales a week pays for my "community outreach" program. Although I suppose by the 4th time we've gone to see them it's not really cold calling anymore is it?

Cold Calling dead. Thank God it's not. I freaking love it.

Marcos

Darrin, you're giving out incorrect information. It's not illegal. You cannot call residential numbers that are registered with the national DNS list. It's also not dead. There are numerous people on this forum and John's that will vouch for it. You absolutely can generate your own call lists. Businesses advertise their number in the yellow pages and elsewhere, INVITING people to call them. Now the nature of the call is not to make a dental appointment, but to sell a website or something. Far as I now you're not going to get in trouble for calling with a reason other than what what the proprietor hoped for.

Please don't post misleading information. If you knew anything about the Do Not Call list, you would know that businesses that conduct telemarketing/cold calling to other businesses are exempt (i.e. business-to-business).

This is so blatantly off base...it almost isn't funny. I've built a nice (really nice actually) wealth management practice with guess what...COLD CALLING. That's right. Picking up the d*mn phone, calling a business owner, and asking them to buy something. The people who say it doesn't work simply are not qualified to say this because they haven't done it long enough. And I don't want to hear about how you've cold called "big time" before because I know it isn't true. I am not talking about calling 50 people per day for a week. I am not talking about calling for a month. I am talking about picking up the phone every single business day for years and to keep doing it until the fruit of your labor pays for someone else who can do it for you. It typically takes three months to fill your pipeline and then closed deals (if you have a halfway decent followup process) start falling out. Being a grunt and pushing that rock up the hill has afforded me a lifestyle that I could only have dreamed of when I was a kid, but it is something that anyone can do. Nothing special about me at all, I simply followed the freaking formula and I can tell it to you until I am blue in the face, but most people simply aren't going to do it because it requires that small element that most people don't want any part of...HARD WORK.

Seriously though. Here is EXACTLY how I built my practice. I once read that if you present ten people your offer, one out of that ten will buy your offer no matter how good you are. Another one of those ten people won't buy your offer no matter how good you are. The other 8 people are completely up for grabs and you will close a percentage of those 8 people depending on how good you are. So, if I know one in ten are going to buy no matter what, my goal was to see how many multiples of ten people I could talk to in a day. I call it the low hanging fruit strategy.

So if I talked to 40 to 50 people EVERY DAY (decision makers, not sally gatekeeper), I knew I would destroy everyone else around me because while I was just beginning to break stride, everyone else was throwing their hands up in disgust crying and whining because they didn't get immediate results. We are doing the exact same thing in this space, and we are making significant inroads already and will continue to do because we are employing the exact same strategy we use in the wealth management space.

Bottomline, cold calling is only the first step in the sales process, but people use cold calling as if it is the entire sales process. This is why they set themselves up for failure from the beginning.

Hey Brucerby. I always get joy whenever I see you post man! Thanks.

Fads come and go, but principles endure for thousands of years, and the rules of cold calling are based on some of those timeless principles. It is incapable of failing, though HUMANS still are.

Any marketing tactic based on timeless principles will endure through hundreds of fads. Just like door to door, b2b cold calling will always be here, and it will always work.

Panhandling? I have never heard that. I have however met business people who admire other business people who take the initiative to create their own destiny. You can go onto Amazon and find dozens of books on cold calling. Of these, there are hundreds and hundreds of professionals who are battle tested and have left mostly positive comments about the information in those books. That's a tiny, tiny snippet of the people who are doing it day in and day out but never leave comments on message boards. It seems to me that many people will attempt to discredit what is one of the top ways to solicit new business for a variety of reasons, fear being the main one. Telemarketers don't disagree with post cards, networking, seminars, Craigslist and so on. It's puzzling that so many come out against the telephone. I wish they'd just say 'that's not for me' and leave it at that.