At HubSpot, we’ve spent the last nine years demonstrating the power of inbound to improve lead generation and customer acquisition. But the grim reality is that many salespeople don’t have enough inbound leads to fill their pipeline and hit their numbers. Cold calling -- working your way through a purchased list or even the phone book -- seems like the easiest way to compensate.
So how do you cold call effectively?
Step one: You don’t.
Cold calling is hard, has an extremely low connect rate, is usually a negative experience for the prospects you manage to connect with, undermines your status as a trusted advisor from the first call, and can even have a negative impact on your brand.
It’s also a terrible experience for salespeople. We all have awful stories of our own worst cold calls, some of which were the “Aha!” moment that made us realize there had to be a better way to do sales.
My seminal cold call moment was in 1985. At that point in my sales career, I was an outside sales rep at Businessland, a computer retailer company, but we had to do a lot of inside prospecting to generate business. Every day followed the same routine.
My colleagues and I would get into the office a little late, because we didn’t truly want to be there. We’d look at our lists of numbers and sigh -- we knew we were in for another day of pain. We’d flip through a few pages of it, scanning the names and numbers of the people we had to call but didn’t want to.
Then, a little voice whispered in my ear: “Dan, you have to make payments on your car.” It was time to get down to business.
I started making my calls at 9:15 a.m. that day. For the next 70 minutes, I left 22 voicemails. I was bored out of my mind, trying to keep awake after reciting the same robotic script over and over again. read more here if you want
