Cold-calling potential clients: I hate myself.

Hey, just doing a bit of online reading. I might just invest in good ol' snail mail.

I think us Brits just don't do the whole sales patter over the phone.
 
I personally have no problem cold calling.. but thats just me :)
 
Years ago i used to work in telesales, took a while but you do get used to cold calling folk. Its still a viable method of marketing/lead generation imho!.
 
I'd always hope to generate leads through my website, word of mouth and meeting people. I struggle with cold calling, but that is something that you'd get used too (generally speaking) I suppose.

Maybe you could employ Geoff to do it for you?! ha
 
@ Chris - The only cold calling do nowadays is for myself :) ... well unless anyone is going to make me a millionaire within 12 months for a bit of phone work :)
 
To be honest I don't it work, especially in the UK. I mean if you do it long enough you certainly will get SOMETHING, but that's like saying even a blind squirrel will eventually find a nut.

I spent something like 120 work hours only to generate 3 leads. Even if I was paying myself minimum wage that's £720 down the drain.

I use a new emailing platform which seems to be bringing in a good stream of queries, and it costs less than £720 a month. Generating sales is a thankless task, but someones' gotta do it!

Call me if you want to natter about the platform or anything else geeky 0203 051 2789.

IT Support and SME IT Support Services London, UK | Online Backup | Remote Access | VoIP Internet Phone Systems
 
hey MichaelKR,

Why not share the email platform on here? so that all members can take a look? :up:
 
I'm not sure if an email marketing system would make your hit rate higher, but it would make it easier on you. It is a lot easier to ignore an email than a phone-call, although there are of course a lot more factors involved.
 
Hey boys and girls, I don't have an issue sharing it here. There are a number of solutions out there. The big players are Eloqua, Silverpop and the like. The one I use has been scaled down to SMEs and it costs about £600 per month. There's of course the added cost of the data to feed the system, but if you're doing cold calling already, then you can just feed that list in the beast.

It's not just emails, it has analytics code for your website and the emails it sends out, so you can see who's read your emails and checked out your website. There's also facebook, linkedin and twitter integration, which means you can see how visitors get to know you through your social media as well. It's pretty neat.

If this sounds interesting to you, then by all means get in touch and I'll tell you how I'm getting on. Not sure what the prices are at the moment but if you're keen I can put you in touch with the dude who cut me a deal.
 
MichaelKR said:
Hey boys and girls, I don't have an issue sharing it here.
Whats it called then? So we can google it and research ourselves?

MichaelKR said:
If this sounds interesting to you, then by all means get in touch and I'll tell you how I'm getting on.

Why not share with the community? id say that 90% of the regulars on here have shared both time and money for nothing in return, feel free to add to that 'community spirit'

look forward to reading more about this.
 
@ leelovesbikestoo - Hey Lee. I checked out Mailchimp. Looks pretty good, especially if you're just dipping your toes into the automated marketing world. Couple of key things missing though:

Unknown mail server sendout.
No spam filter checker for the free version
No social media integration for the free version

To be fair $50USD for 5k records is a great deal, but it always goes back to what mail servers is sending the email. We have been taken to court before over spam and thankfully we did it by the book so the dude didn't have a legal leg to stand on. You pay that amount to ensure emails aren't going out on blacklisted servers.

I sound like I work for them. I work in IT, not email automation, honest! :p
 
Sunburn said:
Whats it called then? So we can google it and research ourselves?

look forward to reading more about this.

Hey Geoff,

Sorry for not making myself clear. I personally used a scaled down version of Eloqua. As mentioned in my previous post there's also Silverpop. Do check 'em out.
 
Cold calling is good Idea for getting new business but it depends on the quality of caller. If the person doesn't have the qualities of good caller results goes negative.
To grow my business I made calls almost every day from 9am till 3. My first month was not good. Then I studied about cold calling that how to make it productive. Then I started it proper way, consulted to script writer, attended some training to improve results.
I make more than 150 calls a day in my idle times in office. I always focus on follow ups because if you don’t call right person at right time you lost the deal. As I am using android my sales dialer so I also can follow up when I am out of station. And today I am making 1-2 deals/ month.
 
How long would you say each phone call lasts on average?

So, 150+ calls per day, for lets say 5 days a week, and from that you're generating 1-2 new jobs a month?
 
dtamala said:
Cold calling is good Idea for getting new business but it depends on the quality of caller. If the person doesn't have the qualities of good caller results goes negative.
To grow my business I made calls almost every day from 9am till 3. My first month was not good. Then I studied about cold calling that how to make it productive. Then I started it proper way, consulted to script writer, attended some training to improve results.
I make more than 150 calls a day in my idle times in office. I always focus on follow ups because if you don’t call right person at right time you lost the deal. As I am using android my sales dialer so I also can follow up when I am out of station. And today I am making 1-2 deals/ month.

Squiddy said:
How long would you say each phone call lasts on average?

So, 150+ calls per day, for lets say 5 days a week, and from that you're generating 1-2 new jobs a month?

Hmm, yes... That does sound a lot of time for not much back in return..?
 
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