Article-Jet

“Rumors about my death have been greatly exaggerated,” a famous man once quipped.

The same can be said for the business of cold calling.

By now, you’ve seen the ads, and very possibly one of them will be placed next to this very article, proclaiming: “Cold Calling Is Dead!”

During the 2005 Atlantic tropical hurricane season we saw many areas, which were struck by large category hurricanes and the power was out for weeks on end, gasoline supplies were short and for the most part non-existence. Worse off all the cell phone power lines were down and all land line phone lines were out also.

Sales pros frequently ask, “What’s the #1 change I need to make, as I prospect by phone instead of face-to-face?”

Here’s the emotional truth behind this seemingly innocent question …

There it is again. Your biggest hurdle to getting appointments. The telephone seems to be sitting there on your desk mocking you as if it knows you just hate to pick it up and use it to ask for an appointment with your prospects. You wish you had some way to make the experience of lead generation more enjoyable by sending something out to your prospect first and yet you know that most of your efforts have been costly, time-consuming, and ineffective. It’s now another Monday and you have to fill your week with appointments or else you’re out of a job or out of business

We all know the benefits of cold calling and its ability to gain new clients and take additional market share. We also understand that with such success comes a price and this price is called “Cold Call Frustration.” The constant rejection, the number of calls, the amount of repeat calls to the same prospect and the voicemail messages that you leave can be very mentally draining. It can consume you and strip you of your motivation. As a result, your attitude becomes affected and you turn to a pathway of negativity. If you allow cold calling to consume you then you will not last at your job very long. In this case watch out for Donald Trump because he may say you’re “FIRED!”

Telemarketing plays an important role in today’s marketing campaigns. The right strategy used in the campaign results in huge profits. For the attaining of right results, the company must target the right customers. Telemarketing lists are therefore prepared well in advance before the launching of a marketing campaign. Good telemarketing lists help to generate maximum results out of a marketing campaign.

You’re probably a lot more effective over the phone than you think you are.

And potentially, you’re great, even if your voice is a little raspy or you don’t sound like one of the mellow DJ’s on a jazz station.

Predictive dialers are many steps removed from their predessors, the automatic dialers of the past. Whereas automatic dialing allowed callcenter agencies to dial numbers quickly and efficiently, predictive dialing also processes and makes use of a whole range of information, linking callers to live voices every single time. In fact, with predictive dialing, agents’ ‘talk time’ has increased from an average of twenty minutes per hour to fifty minutes per hour. This is a fabulous rate of improvement – instead of wasting more than half of their time on listening to busy signals and answering machine messages, agents now spend the majority of their time engaged in producting interaction. The dialer also manages the line to agent ratio by pacing the call rate at the desired level. In this way, quotas are met, and agents are neither idle nor overwhelmed. In other words, because the hardware and software does its job, agents are able to spend much more time doing theirs. And of course, increased contact time means that the center’s goals are reached much more quickly.

I walked into a call center the other day, a small one, and something amazing hit me.

There is absolutely no high technology present in the calling areas.

Sales reps use paper printouts of customer names, make chicken scratches to note who says yes, no, maybe, call back later, and not in.

Telesales personnel are a growing number across the world in an ever-widening range of fields from Insurance, Double-Glazing and Healthcare, to Advertising, Building, Manufacturing, and National and Regional Newspapers. And the list becomes more and more extensive. Even Charities now employ Telesales personnel to increase donations.