Rocket Fuel: Do I have to do cold calling?
Let's talk about another way that you can generate sales for your business other than just picking up the phone and cold calling.
Hi, everybody. Julie here from the Sales Ace, bringing you a sales tip to help skyrocket your business.
So this week, I've been having a really interesting conversation with a new business owner. They’ve set up a business, a very exciting time for them, but they were a little worried about how they were going to generate sales for their business.
They sent out quite a few email shots but were a little bit disappointed about the amount of non-responses (ie. nothing had come back). And I was having a conversation with them about how email shots can work, but it's all about the follow-up, and this led to a conversation about them not being comfortable about doing the follow-up calls, and my response was well, don't do them!
Let's talk about another way that you can generate sales for your business other than just picking up the phone and cold calling.
Now, don't get me wrong. It does work. It's very successful. I train people to do it. I have clients with telemarketing teams that do that and telesales teams and sales people that do that. It does work. But if you're an individual who isn't what you might class as a “natural salesperson”, or doesn't want to do that then there are lots of other ways and I was discussing that with them: there are things like networking, which brings great results.
People get to know you. They build a relationship with you and then they'll either buy from you personally or refer you to people.
There's Referral Partners. These are people that have the same type of target market as you but different types of services. So for example, I have referral partners that are HR consultants, I have an accountant, I have a marketeer that I refer to and a web designer. All these people that refer business backwards and forwards to each other because we know like and trust each other and we know that we can help the clients collectively.
There's also LinkedIn, which is a great tool now.
So my message to you is that if you don’t want to do cold calling, if it's not for you, then don't do it. Don’t feel that you have to, because there's plenty of other things you can do, and I'll let you into a little secret: my businesses have all been built on anything BUT cold calling.
So, little hint and tip: it’s not that I didn't want to do it because I can do it standing on my head (whoops, that’s a bit big-headed. Sorry about that!).
It's because I wanted to prove to people that you can build a business without having to cold call.
