Just this morning, the amiable Sales Director of a 24-person salesforce admitted his job is on the line at the end of the financial year if sales don't increase.
Global HQ wants to see improvement, but despite all the resources given to his salesforce, he struggles to work out why sales remain stagnant.
"I should just give it all away and go fishing," he said to me.
Now that I identified he loves fishing, I asked if he had ever tried fishing withouth using bait.
He responded with: "Why would I do that? It would get me knowhere unless i was extremely lucky."
But this is what his salesforce were actually doing. With a strategy based on cold-calling, the entire future of the company's Australia/NZ base was fishing without bait, so sales staff churn was through the roof.
Today, cold calling is lumped into the same unfashionable basket as global telemarketing and spam; basically, business and society is saturated by it that carries little or no stret cred anymore.
So here are our important cold calling tips. After a comforting discussion on the issue, we worked out the true returns from his cold calling platform are:
1. Extremely low conversion rates
2. too much paperwork to document dead ends
3. people hate it so much they would rather take up smoking
OK, so point 3 may be somewhat toungue in cheek, but sales professional really hate cold calling. It is seen as a major time impost for low return.
You can discover some helpful ideas on my short e-book on this very subject. It is very quick to read and it may show you just how many of us go fishing without bait and never even know it. No need to take up smoking.