Kiss to Sell mailed personalized letters to 30 LinkedIn prospects, then called them all on a scheduled day. Result: three appointments booked, two asking for follow-ups, and four interested but not ready for months. Cold calling works if you do the prep.
Chapters
Hi everyone, it's Kiss to Sell. I'm blogging this morning from my car, just about to go into a networking meeting, but I wanted to share with you something that I have been doing for the last week. Someone said to me, you know, what's going on with cold calling? Can you still do it? So I thought instead of just telling them what I thought, which— and I haven't cold-called forever— um, I'd run a bit of an experiment. So last week, my personal preference with cold calling is to send a letter first and then to follow up that letter. So what I did was I jumped onto LinkedIn and I thought about the types of clients that would want to work with me. And I put those criteria into LinkedIn and did a bit of a search. I'm not a paid member of LinkedIn, so this is all available free. Um, and then I got hundreds of responses. Um, I didn't— I chose 30 that seemed to be the most interesting. Either they had an interesting name or an interesting business. I got some addresses And I wrote a letter saying why they should talk to me. And at the bottom of that letter, I said to them, I will call you on Wednesday the 17th of June, and I specified a time. So yesterday was my calling day. So I promptly sat down with my phone and my list and my phone numbers, and I called everyone. Um, So I have to say, I, I don't know exactly. I think I spoke with 12 people out of the 30. A number were overseas in France and Spain, which I was very jealous about given it's the middle of winter here in beautiful Melbourne. Um, but I spoke to about 12 people. So of those, I've made 3 appointments, and I had 2 other people say, oh, I'm interested in such and such, can you send me some information on that and call me next week? And 2 other people saying, I'm interested in what you're talking about, but I'm not going to be ready for 4 months. And the other guy said 6 months. So, um, from that I can tell you that cold calling is not dead. It's about being smart about how you do it, about being clear about what you can offer, and sitting down and eating your greens, as I call it. Getting on the phone, connecting with people, doing the things that um, get you out there. Um, and that's also what I'm doing today. I'm off to do some networking. So just thought I'd share those results with you all, and I'll keep you updated as to how I go. All right, have a great day, and, uh, for the love of selling, I hope you all get out there and have a beautiful sales day. Thanks everyone, see ya!
