Cold Calls: How to Reduce or Eliminate Them in Your Business

Top Secrets of Marketing & Sales

If you want to reduce or eliminate cold calls, you need to recognize that there are other, and very often more effective ways of doing this. More leveraged ways to be able to do this. More ways of being more focused, more specific... David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing how to reduce or eliminate cold calls. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey David, I'm so glad we're talking about this. I hate cold calls and who loves them? Right? I mean, if anybody comes on and says they love cold calls, wow. I mean, maybe if you do it enough and it's successful enough, I can see how you would love them, but I'm not to that point yet. David: I've always been skeptical of that too, Jay. I've always been skeptical of people who say, I love cold calls. But I know they exist. And I've had conversations with people like that, and they tell me why they love them and how great they are at them. And when I hear that, I'm like, congratulations, that's awesome. I'm extremely happy for you. I've never actually learned anything from them, though, that I could really share with other people that would get other people to change their minds. And so for that reason, I've never been one, at any of our trainings, to sort of teach cold calling. Now, have we done it over the years? Absolutely. But it's not something that I feel like, oh, okay, I'm going to put together a course on cold calling because I feel that strongly about it. I don't. I feel more strongly that there are other, better ways of getting recognized and getting noticed, and that's why nearly everything we do in our material is focused on allowing people to do that without necessarily making cold calls. And it's not even really just cold calls. There are certain things that some people hate. Cold calls, posting on social media, engaging in paid advertising, different people hate different things. Now, if you hate all of those things, if you're not going to do anything, then it's going to be more of a challenge to get clients. But generally speaking, you don't have to do everything and it's very likely there are things that you don't like to do, that you won't have to do if you take the time to think things through and come up with a strategy that works better for you. Jay: Yeah, and I think you made such a good point there. There may be somebody who loves cold calls, there may be somebody who's successful, but that's really like a character trait. That's like an individual skill set. So if you think Oh, because this person can do it, then that means I can have five people doing it. I don't know if that's reality, finding five people who love cold calls and are successful at it. And the other thing is that because there are so many other ways to contact people now, a cold call is very surprising to me. It's like, if you didn't send me an email first, that's very strange in today's world. It's changed. David: It really is. You touched on something and this is a bit of an aside from what we're talking about, but I think it's important, which is that there are some people who are wired to do things. There are some people whose personalities are geared toward doing things extremely well. There's a sales trainer that I've known over the years. I met him in a number of trade shows. He's kind of a bigger than life character. He's tall and he's really good looking, very well spoken, very smart, makes excellent presentations. And every time I've seen him, I thought, this guy is made for this. He is built for this. profession. But what I've also noticed is that not everybody's him, right? Not everybody's as tall, not everybody's as good looking, right? Not everybody is, and the list goes on. So I think for the rest of us, for those of us who just need to be able to generate clients, qualify them quickly, get them sold into our process, and keep things moving in our businesses,