Cold Call Statistics

I have a list of 30 businesses that im about to start calling in 2 hours. ill let you know.

Hey @vernontheroar - What are you offering the businesses?

I think the best way to find out about the statistics is to find out
what your numbers are by cold calling yourself. Not everyone will
have the same results.

~Jean~

Other peoples stats whether good or bad mean nothing. You need to keep stats on yourself. When I fist moved to Australia in 2004 I was afraid to make calls but the fear of hunger finally gave me the motivation to do what I had to do. Now each hour I invest in making calls results in at least a 4 figure profit!

But I don't do cold calls... I use some of the strategies from nevercoldcall.com to generate dozens of warm, pre-qualified leads each week and calling them results in much better results than making cold calls.

Telemarketing is very effective if you have an easy way to get highly qualified prospects to give you their phone number. It's a lot easier than making random cold dials to people who you know nothing about and who haven't expressed an interest in your product or service prior to you contacting them.

But lot's of people do really well making cold calls, both in person and on the phone.
Check out Warrior John Durham's site: The Telemarketing Forum - Index

Once you know what your own stats are things will start to improve for you because now you can accurately predict what your income will be. Plus the longer you do it, the better you'll get and that will change your stats for the better.

Cheers,
Steve

First, right away only 1 in 4 people on average will be available to take your call and want to talk. Call back at a different time and that same contact could give you a different result.

Second, most people are so lousy at the opening of their call that they trumpet "This Is A Sales Call!" to the prospect and scare them into shutting down before even getting a chance to start.

Third, most people lack good questioning skills, so they don't know how to uncover the real reasons other people would want to do business with them.

So it's no wonder that typical sales stats (in a field where you don't need ANY training to get involved, and are often managed by people who have no better skills than you but simply know to persist) are poor. They don't even know about these roadblocks, much less how to avoid or overcome them.

When I call, I run into the same 1 in 4 rule; there's no getting around that. You cannot control what is going on in other people's lives. All you can control is whether you make the calls or not, and how well you make them. When the prospect is In, I get to them and have a real conversation. We find out quickly whether this prospect qualifies In or Out. It's painless and fast.

The main problem people have with prospecting is that they are emotionally involved. Every prospect who isn't in becomes a "hurt", which is ridiculous when you think about it. Every prospect who doesn't want to talk becomes a "hurt", too. Also silly. These people are not open to talking to their own mothers right at that moment; why would they talk to you, who they don't even know? Call back another time. Don't take it personally.

Then, if they do somehow struggle through getting to the decision maker and beginning a conversation, it typically gets shut down because the unskilled caller has informed the prospect loudly and clearly that they are going to get Sold now. The wall goes up. The prospect freaks out, backs away and hangs up. Caller cries.

Imagine, under this method, how long it takes to get to a real No. One where you and the prospect understand what each other has to offer and needs, and you know that there's nothing you can do for one another. Happens rarely, right? With all that other trash happening up front, how often can you get this far?

No skill = poor results. It's the same in every field, from engineering to boxing to cooking to horsejumping to firewalking to competitive eating. Why would you expect it to be any different in Sales?

Sorry but I have no numbers to give you but I do have some insight about nevercoldcall.com and although what he has to say sounds interesting, and much of it is true, save your time and money. His premise is that cold calling is a waste of time in terms of how sales organizations manage the time and talent of their salespeople. However, he does not dispell the fact that cold calling is still a necessary part of the marketing process. Although the sales text leads you to believe that he has some secret sauce that will allow you to sell without cold calling, basically he suggests that you find someone else to do it. He's got a few methods of generating leads but none of them are things we haven't all seen in this forum.

Even if these statistics were true, it should be motivating that you know what you need to do to get a sale. There are people that make 600-700 calls a day, and they get probably at least 2 sales a day.

Good thing that 98.5837% of statistics are made up on the fly.

Cold calling is an art like every other form of marketing that exsist. You do one of two things. Find a way to master it or higher another who already has.

Okay, some great replies, thanks guys.

vernontheroar - i hope you made 30 sales!!!

SteveSki - glad it's going well. I'm thinking about the warm call aspect. I'm also thinking of cold call just to send some information, then warm call (rather than 1 call sale).

I disagree however that other people's stats are meaningless. We're starting to get somehwere in this thread. From iAmNameLess and kaniganj I am getting that there is an accepted stat that it's around 4 calls to talk to someone properly. That's the type of stats I was referring to. Those stats would be out there, and those averages would be quite reliable, if done over enough studies.
I'm sure major telemarketing call centres know their averages etc.

I'm also wondering how product dependant it is. e.g. selling charity raffle tickets to residential no's I imagine would have a fairly consistent stat (possibly regardless of the charity). Selling business advertising (whether newspaper, radio, your online directory) would have some sort of statistical expectation.

A lot on here sell things like websites and other internet products via cold calling. Cold calling is always talked about as a numbers game. Well.....what are the numbers?

iAmNameLess has given me the closest to an answer. Something like just over a 1% sale rate to people spoken to (hopefully closer to 2%), and something like 3-4 calls to speak to someone.

David Miller - thanks for the heads up on nevercoldcall. I didn't have much time last night to check it out, and it seemed a bit "secret saucey" to me at the time.

It's still not that robotic. The skill of the caller is more important than anything when it comes to the end result. A lousy caller is going to be off the phone in 30 seconds, even if they do get to talk to the decision maker.

So you could give the same # of calls to a pro and an unskilled caller, and get completely different results for the reasons I listed above. Makes the difference between 1 in 16 calls or 1 in 40 or worse (remember 1 in 4 on average answer and are ready to talk; so that's 1 in 4 "real" conversations vs 1 in 10 to set an appointment). You can easily have a result of 1 in 100 and funny things start to happen like this fella--look for his video down in the thread--who cranked out about 80 calls with no results, and then got a banana bunch of appointments all at once. But if he'd given up and not stuck it out, No Appointments.

Also depends on whether you're trying to sell or make an appointment, and how targeted you are. On this project for the energy tracking firm which I've provided call recordings on, it takes me between 1 and 3 calls to get to the right person. Once I talk to them, I get a Yes, they want to schedule an online demo with my client almost every time. This is a very targeted market though...but...it's still selling something to a skeptical audience who can get annoyed and hang up at any time.

Hi,
No stats but tons of experience. I have done a lot of cold calls B2B and consumers in the past. I hate everyone of them but I had to eat from time to time! One thing I learned are simple techniques to avoid a real cold call (Cold meaning:don't know the person, don't know what he/she thinks, background...). I suggest you get your hands on solid sales/marketing training (Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham, etc) not the old very tired tactics of sales.
No room here to share more than few words. All sales/marketing start from a right mind-set. Then you need to know your product inside-out sitting on your head. Not so much what it does, but what it does FOR the prospect (The old WIIFM="what's in it for me").
Then know perfectly your market. Investigate, ask questions try to "know" the prospect before to call. For example I called several times the secretary and befriend her/him get names and learn of details about the company and the prospect ahead of time.
Hope that very short blurp helps. Have good courage. You get better doing it!

kaniganj, thanks....that was helpful info.
Things like the 1 in 100 and then a banana bunch of sales is well within the statistical norms for the type of strike rates being talked about.
Good point about appointment setting versus selling. Plus of course, different products/services and industries are going to have various results.

I'm thinking of 'prospecting' on the phone, simply to be able to send out a piece of direct mail (which makes the 'direct mail' campaign more effective as it's been invited) and (at the same time) arrange a day and a time to call. So in other words, I get the name of the person to send it to, he/she is expecting something from me, and we've already arranged a time in a couple of days for me to call again (they'll have my mail a day after I call).

For my actual local area I think I'd nearly prefer face to face, but possibly prospecting for an appointment.

You know what really happened in James' case, though?

It wasn't statistics. It was him finally losing his self-imposed pressure. Taking the pressure out of your voice does at least 50% of the work.

EDIT:

Take a look at the script I wrote in this thread. Compare it to the clunky things other people are suggesting doing. Imagine the difference in effectiveness. While the other guys are trying to bang down the prospect's door, I'm getting them freaked out about something in their business and wanting to take action to fix it.

It really is a numbers game, we are lucky to get 1 sale in 100 calls, and that isn't the norm. Some days you can make 300 calls with no sales, some days you make a dozen and get three sales. The trick is to not let the bad days get you down. Keep calling.

I run a copywriting company in the UK and in our very first cold calling campaign (nearly 4 years ago now) we had a 6% conversion rate but in a recent campaign it was about 1%. The main problem we've found with cold calling is that it takes so long to make the calls as the top people you need to speak to rarely take calls. Also, we used a telesales company to call for us and their results were similar to ours (around 3%) so as amateur callers we didn't do too bad!

I'd hire a specialist. The top companies can make 100 calls per day. They work best with a clear brief and a tight list of prospects such as gaining an appointment with known decision makers in a specific industry. On the 100 calls per day model, they will secure about 3 appointments.