Cold calling
Monday, December 8, 2008 0:10
Lonely cold calling
Cold calling is something we internet marketers rarely have on our plate. I had an interesting conversation today with a fellow geek. This old man is relatively handy Linux guru. The thing is that he is an Argentinian who has lived in Israel for decades, but now lives in Finnish country side. Duh, when you take a good look around at Finnish country side, you spot few cows, lakes and lots of forest. Not your ideal environment for Linux starved customers.
UPHILL
Like I said, man has a background, which is not well suited to doing sales in Finland. His broken English was only adequate for light conversation and he spoke only few words of Finnish. Being new to Finland he didn’t have ready pool of clients. What did he do? He started calling.
COLD CALLING RESULTS
He told me that for every one thousand phone calls he averaged 45% interest rate. With these people he discussed further and gave some kind of quotation. From this patch of offers he then averaged about 4% of new customers. So to keep it simple and neat, calling to 1 000 companies produces about 20 new customers. In an hour he was able to make less than 10 calls, because complex topic, lack of language skills and the normal gate keeper hassles. So making 1 000 calls took over 100 hours and with his calling tempo that in turn took about 15 days. Calling took half a month and the other half he spent working with his new customers. Would you have what it takes to kick-start your business with cold calling?
