Walking Does Not Work - Kenny Madden Article
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Some thoughts:
tThe traditional numbers-focused sales and marketing model has fallen apart. Especially when selling or marketing technology products to savvy, tech folks. They don’t care about our products and services, they care about what those things can do for the businesses they run. The old school strategy of hiring more “feet on the street” or hiring 100’s of inside sales people to cold call 100’s of times a day looking for sales growth or generating volumes of leads is proving wildly inefficient.
Here are 4 easy tips to help you get above the clutter and noise in less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee…
Go to the website of the company you’re calling before picking up the phone. You are now in the TOP 10% of sales/marketing people in the US.
Go to the website and actually read something about the business you’re calling. Congrats you just made the TOP 5% of sales/marketing people in the US.
Go to the company’s website, read something , tailor a specific message that fits their business OR tell them something they don’t know. TOP 1% (Read: Exceptional credibility. ) -
@Breffni-Potter
You're looking at this from the perspective of a nice person who wants to make friends and shake hands and do good business. This is not the perspective of someone who cold calls (at least in my experience).
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@MattSpeller said:
@Breffni-Potter
You're looking at this from the perspective of a nice person who wants to make friends and shake hands and do good business.
Nothing as nice as that...I just want to make money.
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@MattSpeller i suppose i am Matt
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Is the 1% who listen to cold calls my target market?
100% are your target market, it's your job to keep them on the phone, invite them for lunch, offer them deals, occasionally be a jerk, bait and switch, beg, borrow, steal, promise and anything else you can possibly do to get them to be your customer. How far you go with it depends directly on how bad you want their business in my experience.
The people I anger, Will I not be making my customer base smaller?
Yeah absolutely. There's also an argument to be made that you're intentionally sorting out the wheat (dumb rich customers) from the chaff (smart fiscally responsible ones). You want the wheat.
How much does it cost for me to be making those calls? If I take on a sales guy to do it, how much is he costing me for a 1% success rate?
Well, to start an hour a day of your own time. I suggest getting some real hard core sales training first. There is quite the knack to it.
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@MattSpeller said:
@Breffni-Potter
You're looking at this from the perspective of a nice person who wants to make friends and shake hands and do good business. This is not the perspective of someone who cold calls (at least in my experience).
Right, making sales and doing good work is often at odds with each other. No good answers around that. But that's why you rarely see awesome products making tons of money, you see mediocre ones with great sales people.
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@aaron yep. I have found being upfront honest and really straight to the point works well.
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@kennym said:
@MattSpeller i suppose i am Matt
Prepare yourself for 110% top quality absolutely disgusting human being, but good lord the man can sell over the phone.
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@kennym said:
@aaron yep. I have found being upfront honest and really straight to the point works well.
More than most things
Once the buyer gets that used car salesman feeling, it's fight or flight in most cases. -
@MattSpeller said:
@kennym said:
@MattSpeller i suppose i am Matt
Prepare yourself for 110% top quality absolutely disgusting human being, but good lord the man can sell over the phone.
The problem with sales products like this is... they are sold by an expert salesman. The training is probably crap but you'll buy it just because he is so good at sales!
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@mlnews said:
@MattSpeller said:
@kennym said:
@MattSpeller i suppose i am Matt
Prepare yourself for 110% top quality absolutely disgusting human being, but good lord the man can sell over the phone.
The problem with sales products like this is... they are sold by an expert salesman. The training is probably crap but you'll buy it just because he is so good at sales!
Absolutely true, but how better to show successful tactics than to watch a master at work
(please FTLOG do not buy anything that sleezy creep is selling, ever, even if he has water and you're on fire)
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@aaron said:
Kenny defines cold calling as "You are calling someone not expecting your call - It's cold mate"
Yes, an unsolicited communication is cold calling. Unless I have reached out to you via phone/email, it's a cold call because I am not interested.
Scenario #2 happens to me and I entertain it because you reached a superior or someone important, but I am still not buying. If there are phrases like "Not sure if it's appropriate" or words like assumption/traction/goals means it's going into the junk mail bin.
I make it easier.... my extension is not public and no one on the team is a direct buyer. So if you want to sell something, you have to get through to someone and then get that someone to convince other people that they aren't just swallowing a sales line. We get just about zero cold calls through to anyone that would consider buying something. Works really well.
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@MattSpeller Ha. i know i know.
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I've mentioned several times... why cold call when someone could, for example, hop into ML and engage with me here? It's so easy to establish a relationship if you want to actually connect to clients. Pure cold calling seems exceptionally lazy.
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Scott Nails it i think. The beauty of a conversation.
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I think that the conversation on this one dovetails nicely with the one here:
http://mangolassi.it/topic/8625/what-is-gated-vs-non-gated-content/13
It's email, not phone calls, but spam is spam.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I've mentioned several times... why cold call when someone could, for example, hop into ML and engage with me here? It's so easy to establish a relationship if you want to actually connect to clients. Pure cold calling seems exceptionally lazy.
I'd be interested to know how many clients members here have actually got through ML (or other forums). I'd be surprised if it was very many. I imagine it's more successful for vendors than service providers, but still pretty low. Anyone want to give their experiences?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I've mentioned several times... why cold call when someone could, for example, hop into ML and engage with me here? It's so easy to establish a relationship if you want to actually connect to clients. Pure cold calling seems exceptionally lazy.
I'd be interested to know how many clients members here have actually got through ML (or other forums). I'd be surprised if it was very many. I imagine it's more successful for vendors than service providers, but still pretty low. Anyone want to give their experiences?
You mean MSPs getting clients? Not a lot because this is a community for the MSPs more than the clients (because most MSP clients are not IT people themselves but companies without IT that would not be in a community like this.) So the total number as an absolute value is low, but as a percentage of IT pros I think that it is very high.
For vendors (the HPEs, Dells, Webroots, Xen Orchestras and so forth) I think that the value is extremely high. Value meaning rate and absolute number of customers picked up or retained.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Hi @kennym
If cold calling does work, why do so many vendors lose my business when they do it?
I've got a company, I want to generate more sales, how do I do it with cold calling then without
- Turning people off
- Annoying people
- Getting added to a phone black list.
I don't answer my phone any more, but when I did you're probably the kind of caller who I would be receptive to - a senior IT guy not a salesman, and a small business owner. Companies like that have been succesful with me in the past.
What I really hate is firms who outsource their cold calling to specialist marketing firms (which is about 90% of cold calls). If you can't be bothered to talk to me and outsource it, why should I. I've thought about outsourcing my call answering to someone else so two call centre monkeys can have endless conversations with each other.
