Before I teach someone my system and strategies for cold calling, I first eliminate the myths about cold calling and instill a process that works every time. If you must make cold calls, make them right and you will learn a great deal from the experience to increase your prospects. Cold calling is a task every new salesperson must learn until they have a steady flow of referrals and contacts in a sales pipeline.

I used to love cold calling because it was so much fun and filled with adventure. My rejection ratio was very high and what I mean by that is that I rejected about 85 percent of the contacts I was calling on. My tactics and strategies are different than most people, they work! I learned how to turn the tables on the companies I visited, so I was the one who was in the rejection role instead of the receptionist or anyone I was calling on.

The Goal of Cold Calling

The primary goal of cold calling is to find and qualify prospects. The only way to perform this task correctly is to measure prospects against a customer profile for your business. This means that before you make a cold call, you must have a clearly defined profile of who qualifies as a prospect.

This is important, if you don't have a target customer profile, you be wasting time with cold calling. Think of it this way, if you are sent to the grocery store to bring back tomatoes, can you tell ripe ones from rotten ones? If you can't tell the difference, you aren't qualified to pick tomatoes. The same is true with trying to pick good prospects and determine if they are good or not.

If you went cold calling and came back with rotten contacts that don't match your customer profile, you will have wasted your time. Here is where it gets a little tricky, depending on your business; there is an expected ratio of who qualifies as an ideal prospect. In many cases, there are more duds than prospects which means you will need to filter through a lot of contacts to find good ones. This is perfectly fine and the better you are at filtering your prospects the easier cold calling becomes.