If you’ve been selling for a long time, you’ve heard, and perhaps repeated, several excuses not to cold call:
“It’s hard!”
“It does not work!”
“Prospects hate it!
“It’s a waste of time!”
“I’m better at closing deals than opening them!”
These rationalizations are silly at best. Seasoned professionals know that cold calling is really easy and unbelievably simple, it works wonderfully, those who buy forget they bought through cold calling, it saves time, and opening deals is just as critical to sales success as closing them.
But there may be another reason people are hesitant to smile and score, a deeper motivation standing in their way.
They might just be afraid of talking to strangers.
My parents warned me to “Never talk to strangers!”
I bet yours did too.
And of course, they were doing us a favor at the time, but they were also sowing the seeds of shyness and aversion when it comes to sales practices.
Where else but by greeting and meeting strangers will we find our future sales and revenue? We can only upsell, cross-sell, and up-sell so many things to our existing customers, and while today’s buyers should theoretically be able to give us unlimited referrals, they don’t, for a number of reasons.
This leaves us to find new business for ourselves by beating around the bush.
Always talk to strangers!
If you know what you’re doing and put the best cold calling techniques to work, trust me, they won’t be strangers for long!