1. Cold Calling Is a Game

About 10% of us like to make cold calls the rest of us don’t like doing it at all. You can get better at making these kinds of sales calls and they don’t have to be drudgery. This is the first of several tips from Joe Friedman on how to make your cold calling more effective.

Transcript:

In this segment, I want to talk a little bit about cold calling or prospecting or making introductory calls. We don’t distinguish between any of those three. And yet it is a part of the sales process that most people really don’t like.

I would say in our experience about 10% of people that we come into contact with love prospecting. And 90% of us really don’t like it at all. We teach it. I do this as part of my job in selling. But it is not one of my favorite things on the planet to do.

Why is that?

1. Number one, it’s hard work. 
2. There’s the amount of rejection that we all get and nobody likes that at all. 
3. People think it just doesn’t work.

Well, I can tell you depending upon the sales cycles that exist for your products, it does work. It takes time. It takes effort. And you have to look at it as a game. In most cases, the behavior that you will use when you get face to face with someone is 180 degrees different from the behavior you use when you’re prospecting or cold calling.

It is a game. You have to be tenacious. The game is cat and mouse. They are the mouse. You are the cat. Our job as sellers is to pursue those people to force our foot into the door to find a way to get face to face with them. And as a result, you have to look at prospecting as a game.