Warming Up Cold Calls

Somewhere in this world there are seven or eight salespeople who really enjoy making cold calls. The rest of us would rather stand under a cold shower, fully dressed, ripping up $100 bills. This article is for the tens of thousands of us who hate - and sometimes fear - cold calls.

There really are salespeople who enjoy making cold calls. They are usually the ones who enjoy the thrill of the chase. However, once they've opened the door, they tend to lose interest and often fail to close the sale.

The rest of us are faced with the challenge of making cold calls if we want our business to grow. We need to constantly find new prospects to replace the ones who die, no longer need our product or service, or who are wooed away by our competition.

I used to think that the best way to warm up a cold call was to send a letter in advance. Unfortunately, too many prospects don't remember getting the warm-up letter. Some prospects actually consider it a 'warning' letter, warning them of your impending call. A colleague of mine, lan Cook, feels that paper doesn't cut it anymore. It doesn't matter what colour of paper you use, people are getting immune to the warm-up letter. However, a gimmick along with the letter, does get remembered.

lan markets a simulation game titled, "Gold of the Desert Kings." In his warm-up letter, he includes a small plastic bag of sand. When he follows up his letter with a phone call, the prospect often doesn't remember the letter but does remember the sand and it becomes a talking point.

A client of mine who sells advertising tried this approach. She included a small bag of grass seeds labelled, "Instant Customers." Her letter pointed out that customers don't grow like grass but have to be cultivated with advertising, etc. It got her salespeople in the door.

lan Cook's view about paper notwithstanding, at SalesForce Training we've developed a four-letter campaign for warming up a cold call. The prospect may forget the first letter we send, but by the time the fourth letter gets to him or her, our name is usually remembered. We do this by mailing the letters three to four days apart and including something of value for the prospect in each letter.

For example, in our case, anyone who is hiring salespeople is a prime prospect for our services. Our first letter includes a sample copy of our Sales Interview Questionnaire. The second, an offer to do two free Sales Temperament Assessments. And the third, a sample copy of $alesTalk, our newsletter for professional salespeople. Each letter refers to the previous ones to establish continuity.

In our last letter we say that we may have some other ideas that would be of value ... that Paul Crozier, our director of sales, will be calling them ... and would they please take a few moments to talk with him when he calls. The coup de grace is the P.S. we put in this letter which says: When Paul calls, be sure and ask him how you can get a FREE copy of our special report on "Sales Management Secrets for Increasing Sales Staff Productivity." Of course, they get their free copy by giving Paul an appointment.

A word of caution. Don't wait too long after mailing your warm-up letter to make your follow-up call. Three to five days maximum. Ideally, your timing will be perfect and you'll call just after the prospect has finished reading your letter and it's fresh in his mind. If that ever happens, immediately run out and buy a lottery ticket because it's your lucky day.

Most salespeople's fear of cold calling stems from their concern about "screwing up" the sales call. So they put it off or don't do it at all. For some, the warm-up letter technique will help. But what do you do if you can't use this technique? Here's a method I suggested to my salespeople when I managed a paging company. To help them get started, I would tell them to select an outlying area and then go out and destroy it. To go to a part of town or to some accounts that we might never do business with and to destroy them by making cold calls.

In other words, I took the pressure off by giving them permission to screw up. What they came to realize was that, after the fourth or fifth cold call, it wasn't nearly as bad as they'd imagined and they hadn't screwed up at all.

A word of advice. Making cold calls is like getting into a cold swimming pool slowly - the longer you take, the more painful it is. Don't delay making your cold calls. Get them out of the way early in your selling day. Just jump right in.

Like it or not, cold calls are part of professional selling. Unless you're selling $10 bills for $5, don't expect new prospects to beat a path to your door. Cold calls, warm calls, or whatever kind of calls, someone has to open the doors to new accounts. Better you than your competition.

Brian Jeffrey (a.k.a. The Sales Wizard) is president of SalesForce Training & Consulting Inc.; author of The Sales Wizard's Secrets of Sales Management, a book full of common-sense techniques for managing the small business sales force; and publisher of $alesTalk, a newsletter for professional salespeople. He can be reached at 613-839-7355, fax 613-839-1842, or email: saleswizard@SalesForceTraining.com.

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