wheel - 2:02 pm on Jun 8, 2008 (gmt 0)

I'm in an industry dominated by cold callers, and I (now) do direct sales as part of my business. Yet I would never cold call (actually, now I've done sales, I probably could, but would prefer not to).

Cold calling as a business function means nothing specific. What matters is leads. Flip your thinking around and look at it strictly from a lead generation function. How do I develop leads? And is there any reason it needs to be tied to sales? Sales reps love to sell and hate to prospect. If you can create a semi-automated way to generate leads to feed your salesreps, they're going to love you.

Here's some examples:
- I generate all my leads off my website, and probably get 10X the number of leads of the rest of the industry who can successfully cold call. This would be the first place I'd be looking. Everyone - including B2B and execs use Google.
- second behind that is to hire a telemarketing firm. There are companies that specialize in this that seem to be reasonably priced. They look after the cold calling.
- direct mail or door hangers. Much lower response rate than other methods, but easy. Create a compelling piece and start dropping it by area businesses. Then you have a reason to follow up in a few days.....

It's important to wring every possible conversion-to-sale out of the leads. One way to do this is to 'drip' on prospects. Even if there's no sale or immediate contact, regular emails will keep your name in front of them and eventually lead to higher sales numbers.