The discussion to the last post brings me to write this explanation of cold calling.
As I said in the previous post, I think the heart of the debate about cold calling is a simple changing of the definition. Unfortunately, most of the nay sayers don’t define the terms.
To start I believe this circumstance and debate have come about because most people have no clue how to cold call effectively. The main reason for this is companies don’t invest the necessary time to teach people how to cold call for their product; they simply make the assumption that they know – a fatal error.
In over twenty years of active sales consulting to the high tech industry I found only a hand full of people who really had high level cold calling skills.
The starting point of the problem is the lack of a good and powerful unique selling proposition. Most salespeople think they know what that is but don’t, and most companies don’t do anything to help the sales team develop one.
Most cold calling is done via the phone and most salespeople don’t know how to use the phone properly. They don’t know what makes it tick and how to leverage what they do so it will succeed on the phone. One key reason for this is almost no one actually teaches these skills. Most telephone sales training is based on standard and classical sales theories and has nothing to do with what makes the telephone different – which is the key to succeeding.
Without real telephone selling skills, a powerful unique selling proposition, and some training on how to apply them specifically to the product at hand you can expect dismal results in cold calling.
If you are interested I have a telephone sales quiz you can take for your own entertainment and hopefully learning. Click here for quiz.
