Those who have followed my columns or blogs or listened to my sales seminars or resulting tapes and videos, realize that I am old school in some ways. For example, I believe that effective cold-calling results in more tangible leads than do the now-standard morning gazillion phone calls routine. Your sales manager won't want to hear that, but if the sales are blowing everyone out, I guaranteed that you won't get fired (unless you may be threatening his job by then--so be humble and respectful--no matter what. I never was, but I changed jobs a few times.)
First let me review why I think that cold calls are more effective than are phone calls, and in the same breath admit that good phone skills are also an integral part of your prospecting mix. I have always subscribed to a "System of Tens". This may become a "System of Six's, or "System of Thirties", all depending upon the geography of your territory, products, ability, knowledge and other variables. The point is that you should make equal numbers of different sales activities: phone, personal calls, hand-addressed mail pieces, and what have you. In many products a balanced number of demonstrations (or the equivalent presentation in the case of intangibles--are the most important part of the mix. Often the goal of the latter is to schedule the former--but in fewer numbers necessarily.)
Okay, I guess it is actually second; cold calls cannot be replaced with any other technique because during a physical call:
- You can use all of your senses and powers of deduction in sizing up needs and likelihood of buying upon which you learn to develop an approach strategy on the spot. My specialty was primarily office automation, and particularly high-end copiers and other print technologies back int the day. BTW, did you know that the first copiers that I sold came with a mandatory resident fire-extinguisher, others used electro-statically charged special paper which had to be imaged and then bathed in a mixture of kerosene, iron filings, and carbon--which leaked on the carpet and could not be removed. But the alternative was wither mimeograph, spirit duplicators (spelled great, like fine liquor--well liquor anyway) , stencil duplicators, or offset presses.) Count your blessings.
- You gain both a lot more information (usually), and you make a greater impact in terms of memorability. Hopefully rapport can begin to be made with at least the receptionist, office manager, and often the primary decision maker, and sometimes the entire buying team.
- In departmentalized businesses, you can treat each department as a separate entity with separate, and often internally competing needs, using names and referrals from each entity and using this information to strengthen your approach for the next department. Your reconnoitering is infinitely more effective than a mere phone-call, which most often which gains you very little for your effort.
- You often get to snoop around and see needs (you see the antiquated monster Xerox in the back mail-room that no one thinks to tell you about), competitive equipment, leasing agreements and expirations dates, unsupposed applications, which you can possibly convert into a sale of a myriad of related products, pretty girls (or guys), and all of this before you ever even approach the purchasing agents--who most often are merely acquirers of requested products.
- I have actually spent entire days roaming around large firms, going from department to department without ever being called on who I was and what I was doing there. I guess they all just assumed that I was a quality control consultant (or some kind of consultant), or visiting from the home office to determine whether there location should be shut down. Then I met everyone a the local watering hole while they got wasted and spilled their guts about everything (I only drink seltzer water.)
- You are able to ask questions to learn how their paperwork flows (copiers, office equipment), so that you can better understand how you, the consummate professional paper-flow expert, can provide solutions to bottle necks and other complaint areas, as well as how much is being spent to help you justify why they should buy your "stuff", to solve their problems. Good salesmen look for problems and ways to solve the problems. If you can save money in the process, it becomes a no-brainer (sometimes they actually have no brains and don't buy your products, but mostly they do.)
- You are able to learn personal commonalities that you can file back literally, or mentally if you are good at that, and have grounds for breaking the ice during this and follow-up visits with the movers who can make decisions to buy..
- Cold calls having fallen out of favor and being supplanted largely by phone-calls, become more effective and you gain a leg up compared to your phone-calling fool competitors (never assume this, however.)
- Even if you get thrown out upon entry, which happens less often as you develop a style. It never happens to me, and hasn't in a long time; this partly just comes with the innate respectability of age, appearance, presence,confidence and persona of wisdom of authority, but not entirely. Style and method is the main thing. But if you do, you still have a better sense of the relative prosperity of the business, the age and progressiveness or lack of, the business. Usually you can get a name. If they require an appointment, ask if you can make one right then, for later. If they still blow you off, and say make an appointment, ask whom to do this with, and go outside and call on your cell phone and try to get through to this person and make an appoint ment saying, "I happen to be right outside of your business at the moment and just wanted to stick my head in and introduce myself and share ways that we might mutually benefit one another's business."
- As you develop your style you will learn how to play the game and charm the gate-keepers into softening up. On a true cold cold call, there is a power struggle that begins the moment the gate-keepers catch sight of you whether outside the building are upon entering the door. You are being sized up from the git-go. You eventually learn techniques to win this power struggle in a non-offensive way, so that your body language, how you handle yourself, how you approach, speak, and the content of what you say, and even a curiosity factor into increase your chances of "winning". Innocent banter akin to flirting (but not flirting), is often part of the game. It is called charm, I think, if a label must be applied. sometimes you nail it, sometimes you fail. But you get better with each call, especially if you have an objective and review what went right or wrong, at least mentally, after the attempt or success.
There are other reasons but a good list of ten is usually compelling enough. You get the idea. Now, How do you actually implement this phenomenon? As a young (and terrified) beginning salesman. I would provide my huge list of forty or fifty or more cold calls and my sales manager would say, as if dubious of my report, "How could you have made this many calls?" It was not an office building environment, and this number was unheard of.
I simply said, "It doesn't take long to hear NO! and get kicked out." I wasn't joking. We were not trained then. We were given a price-list and maybe a few brochures and said go sell . As I learned more about what I was doing, My call volume went down and my closing ratios went up. I found myself getting in front of decision-makers and having meaningful conversations about their needs, problems, and my potential solutions. I started scheduling more demos.
Back then, it was not uncommon to leave at 8:15 in the morning with a Sales Maker gurney-type cart with a copier on it, and go around trying to show it to as many people as would look. Having a station wagon was mandatory to go to work. If the prospect/suspect liked it, you tried to close the deal. If you failed, you tried to leave it on a day long or more trial. This was called "puppy-dogging", and it was pretty effective. It was hard work too. This was especially done with mechanical and then the first electronic calculators and "computers", if you could really call them computers by today's standards. "Funny" stories about this process abound, but I will leave those for another less urgent post.
My point is that the demo/test drive,/presentation-making-the -intangible-tangible, or whatever equivalent action, is the bridge that may turn the suspect into a prospect and then a buyer.
Please read that again. Wake up and read. This is crucial. But let me qualify a bit. This process becomes less important in a replacement market, that is a "flat" market, not indicating anything negative, but the flattening of the bell curve on a graph of the acceptance of a product or technology, as the buyers become more educated, sophisticated, and familiar with the available technologies.
A new salesperson will find that many of his customers are actually better-informed than the salesperson. In this case, although you seldom get away without at least a quick look-see the product, it is not unheard of. It becomes a matter or other factors such as service, response time, and proofs of such, and cost-justification--also known as pencil selling. Not selling pencils, but using numbers and a feature here and there, presumably "penciled -out", to justify the purchase.
This happens only in a flattened part of the bell-curve representing the life-cycle of a product or technology. Still, the agreement to see a demo, or accept a trial, or attend a "seminar, or what-not--will still indicate a level of interest and generally will expedite the sales cycle. This is often also a matter of "churning" the current install base for upgrades and piggy-back product sales to existing customers.
The equivalent BRIDGE such as a demonstration, will virtually always be necessary in the beginning or steep upward incline in the graphed bell-curve of the beginning stages of marketing new product new technology acceptance. This may involve new customers or old customers being introduced to new technologies and products.
This is where you must be a salesman in the sense of convincing a targeted suspect that they need something that they may never have even considered. Or better yet, uncovering through your understanding and adeptness of your product and applications thereof, new uses which may solve problems and thereby enlighten the customer that she/he truly needs this product. In this case you become a true consultant bearing good tidings and you are regarded as the hero to the customer. Great customer loyalty comes from this type of evolution.
Proof in the form of demo or what-not is always required in this case and it is absolutely necessary to convert a suspect into a prospect and then nurse them along into becoming a buyer and overcoming the RC factor. Resistance to Change, quite often keeps a person or group from acting on a perfectly plausible solution.
So how do you transition from a cold call to a sales dialog? By gaining information until you have a problem with a solution to solve this problem and then demonstrating that solution effectively and powerfully. This is magic. It is the "thing" that has caused me to declare on many occasions that,
"It is much easier to find potential buyers who don't know that they have a need (read that again carefully), than it is to find people who are sitting on the edge of their chairs just waiting for someone to call them to sell them a copier--in other words, those who call everyone in the yellow pages and have dueling demos and a drop-pants price stand-off.
Salespeople have often complained to me that they were up against forty or so other competitors. You can't make a living that way. But what it means is that they are relying of call-ins and leads generated by other people usually than on their own creativity and hard work. The early sales-bird gets the juicy worm and the respect and allegiance (often reverence) and loyalty of their buying clientele. They are clients ion such cases, not mere customers. And you are a document specialist, not a mere also-ran salesperson.
Next post I will, by request continue this line of thinking about cold calls with actual steps of making the cold call blow by blow and taking it through the steps to becoming a happily served buying client, let me retire for the morning and ponder while I sleep a case history or two to draw on for the next post.
Doug Wright