This is not called “cold” because you decide to make it so, but rather because all or almost all the people picking the phone are not expecting your call, so it will be a bit of naiveté to not research these people before hand where possible. For example you should thrive to get information only on people interested in online business or second income.
You should have it at the back of your mind that coldness may result from the response of the receiver, so you need to develop some skills that will trigger warmness from your target and a prior research may be of assistance here or by sending/dropping a leaflet, brief letter, business card etc, with a promise to call by phone at a later date, in order to build a prior relationship before the phone rings.
Another important step to a better and maybe fruitful result in your conversation is to introduce yourself, your company and your relationship with it and how you think it will be important for his attention.
Cold calling is very challenging too, so you must be prepared to be a skilful and very professional sales person in understanding the nitty-gritty of this business, with some degree of eloquence and determination not to let failure discourage you from forging ahead, because there will be a lot of setbacks. As a result you need to understand that all calls are not going to be the same because different things work for different people, so you are going to be very dynamic in your conversation in order to meet the challenges of diversity.
You must desist from unnecessary persistence especially where the person has no time to listen to you or blatantly uninterested. However, there is nothing wrong from requesting the e-mail of your prospect and asking his permission to drop a message for details of your intention and promise a call back when he/she is less busy for example. Learn to politely call it a day if permission is not granted.
From my experience in this business, I will not rule out any legitimate method to target prospects, so yes, cold calling could be one of the methods , but the goodness or badness of it depends on your attitude or approach and the results. However, I advice you may want to do the followings:
1. Be very professional, articulate and well grounded in SFI business, in order to properly position your response to concerns, issues, queries and questions in your conversation.
2. You must plan in advance the strategy and method you want to adopt, for example make calls at the likely period you think someone will respond. For example, Monday mornings and Friday afternoons are deem bad periods, while holidays that do not attract too much merriments are deem good periods according to research, but there is no perfect time actually in my opinion.
3. Always remember to highlight the benefits rather than the costs
4. You must leave a message if no one answers the phone and make a plan to call back
5. Engage in self appraisal by evaluating the success and failures of this strategy, in order to recalibrate and be more successful.
6. You must be polite in all circumstances for many reasons; change of mind, for the benefit of the next sales person, in case you mistakenly call back, avoid been reported etc
At the juncture, you should give it a try but a lot of people do not like to engage in cold calling because of some inherent problems but what sets you apart from another sales person is the way you organise yours. Go Conquer!
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