Cold calling for my startup and how I learned to embrace the challenge
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
Yes that makes me less of a salesman. So be it.
Tangent: In India you can report unsolicited sales calls to a central (government) authority, where you can sign up to get on a "Do Not Disturb" list, and get any sales caller who ignores this fined, and eventually get his number disconnected etc.
The system isn't perfect, and there are some impressive hacks to bypass it, but the situation now is much better than before these regulations existed. Where one used to get multiple spammers a day, now weeks and months can go by before getting one (who I promptly report). My number must be on some shared "cranky idiot who hates cold callers" list, I almost never get these calls now.
A minister was interrupted in parliament while presenting the annual national budget (iirc) by someone who wanted to sell him a credit card(!), which led to this regulation.
And it is a godsend. Cold callers should all burn in hellfire (imo)
Take a list of the world's 400 billionaires and ask them who has NOT Cold-Called?
My guess is its less than 10. Or to put it another may, most successful people Cold-called, their "heros" or experts in their field or successful people in town etc.
So I disagree the way you put cold-calling.
If you want to start a business, I strongly suggest you to change you attitude towards Sales. Unfortunately, Engineers have this unjustified hate towards Sales, not every sales pitch or call is unethical or pushy.
In the B2B context, things seem a little different, especially for startups who have products that are not known. If you work in a particular field and someone calls you to tell you about their new product that is relevant to your company and your specific role, that seems much less terrible than the untargeted calling described above. And in some cases, you may actually be glad that you were called. I don't think it's fair to say that "all cold calling is horrible and unethical", since it can be done in very targeted ways. And small startups in particular (who are here on HN) often try to cold-call in as targeted a way as possible—because when you're spending CEO time on the phone, you're very sensitive to wasting anyone's time.
At the end of the day, it comes down to balancing the benefits to people who are glad you called and the detriment to people whose time you wasted. If you're not targeted, you're likely a net negative to society. If you're very targeted (as many small startups are), there's a much greater chance you're a net positive.
Just like you can be a dentist and hate getting tooth fillings.
Or you can be a surgeon, and hate having surgery.
I occasionally receive emails from lists specific to trendy-looking SaaS/PaaS products that I've never even heard of. Just the same the emails will start rolling in telling me that my wait was up and their launch is just beginning and "come grab a promo-price for one month" if I sign on for a year, etc.
When I first received anything like that, I thought maybe I'd just forgotten that I'd seen it and asked for updates— but no. After seeing more upon more, I realized that I was just getting spammed. Except none of it gets filtered out, because they don't carry the markings of what I'll lazily classify as 'traditional' spam.
I've also wondered if there was a way to connect email spammers to each other. Like send an email to two spammers who had both emailed me and try to engage them with each other. I haven't figured out an elegant/useful way to do this yet.
It would be fun to toy with them, but really I just wonder how they think others will look favourably upon their business when they try to make a sale that way. Maybe not everybody feels the same way, but it just seems cheap. Then again, my cell provider just initiated texting me advertisements randomly so I guess if it can be done, it will be done...
I want your business to fail if you cold-call.
My business succeeds BECAUSE of cold calls. So your drop in the ocean matters not.
What if they're 52 minutes long?
About 30% of the time, the person was happy to chat in the moment (they had chosen to answer a call from an unknown number, after all). And the rest of the time, you benefit from setting up a time that is more convenient for them. Some of the time you end up never having the later call—but it seems this happens where there wasn't a great fit to begin with, so it actually saves you time talking to an unlikely lead.
1. Ask if they have 30 seconds to chat.
2. If they say no, ask for another time that works better. People are polite, so many will not say no. Schedule this time immediately and have them confirm on the calendar right away.
3. If they say yes, immediately start asking them empathetic questions that demonstrate knowledge of their problems, followed by, "Does any of this resonate with you?"
419 scammers are "just trying to earn a living" too.
Also, despite the fact that I despise and block everything the internet ad industry throws at me, that industry arguably provides something in return for the trouble of putting up with their bullshit. Cold calling provides me with absolutely nothing beyond a rude interruption of my day at best.
I don't care what you're offering, because I subconsciously tag anything associated with cold calling as a scam and file it in the same mental folder as that "free cruise" I "won".
Unless you're purposely hiding yourself from the internet(I don't want to deal with you anyhow). Then why can't I just discover you on Google for my target?
Or are you selling me something that I had no idea I needed?
I will guarantee that for anyone who calls me unsolicited to sell something, I will do everything in my power never to buy your products.
To respond to your first statement, telemarketers don't take no, or not interested for an answer.
You contradict yourself, first you say I'm being a dick, but then you say you don't care. So which is it?
Wow, you hit the nail right on the head. Being a dick to someone trying to earn a living does say a lot about your character.
Cold calling someone is being a dick to someone trying to earn a living. Period.
But there are a lot of things we do professionally that we don't enjoy. Expense reports are a huge time sink and I hate doing them. But I hate not getting reimbursed even more.
If you are trying to hire salespeople who can cold call well then I suggest looking for people that are highly organized, process driven, friendly and good storytellers. During the interview try and pay attention to how many times they say "uh" "like" and "you know." Ask them their favorite experience from last summer and see if the way they tell the story is interesting. Try to get them to tell you if they have student loans, a mortgage, a family...anything that indicates a greater immediate financial need. Challenge something they said and see if they defend themselves (competitiveness). The best salesperson I know is crazy as a shithouse rat and rather unreliable...until I tell him I met a guy that's better at sales than he is. Then he gets to work and does things that will blow your mind (cold call to 5 figure deal in 2 weeks). The second best cold caller I know told me in the interview "I hate cold calls. But I love Chanel."
It takes a personality type but it isn't difficult work at all. Most people are just scared and/or don't spend enough time on the work.
Uh... Might not want to do that actually.
I Haven't done it for ages but damn making a sale is a great feeling :) Kinda makes me want to google start ups looking for sales people based on commission. Would be fun to experiment stuff I've learned since those days.
What succeeded for me was SEO, direct mail, and email campaigns. I still had to do sales pitches, but I was working off warm leads from people that actually wanted to hear from me.
I'm not saying cold calling doesn't work. I'm saying it's an inefficient use of time. Yes, some people will buy, but there are far more efficient ways of reaching potential clients.
Somebody liked the sound of your voice, however the sales numbers suggest something isn't lining up. Read your script out loud and record it with iPhone. You can pretty much sell anything cold calling enough people.
Could be the product you are selling, but sounds like there could more efficient ways to proceed if you ever start cold calling again.
Cold outreach with a lot of effort/expense put into it is also a different beast from the typical cold call.
One thing I've realized working on my own is that you can do anything you want. You don't have to do the thing you hate the most to make progress. It will feel draining, feel like more work, and be less productive than focusing on where you are strong.
Is that it?
How do you accomplish that without communicating with others?
You always have to do things you don't like when building a business. I'm just saying don't make something you don't like part of your scaling strategy.
Most of the cold calls I get are, in fact, scams— so to save myself agony and time-out-of-life, that's the category it goes into for me.
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Two shorts:
Number one:
I regularly get rotating numbers calling from scam credit collection agencies (second-tier, purchased bad loans allegedly). I regularly now get called for somebody who isn't me, and they're always threatening. Though my favourite was receiving a threatening call once about 'urgent business matters' that pertained to me owing a significant amount of money in outstanding debt to the company I currently work for, and hold accounts with. Ridiculous. That's the camp cold calls fall under for me.
Number two, and so much more infuriating:
a major telecom company held a sales campaign in the lobby of my apartment building. For a week! Every day when I arrived home I would be confronted by two or three sales people to try and convince me to change internet providers. And god they were persistent. Even worse, two of the four elevators were down so most of the people in the building were sitting ducks who couldn't very well escape. Couldn't even deal with the doorman to pick up a package without one sidling up to try and sell to me while I was in a conversation.
Just thinking about it grinds me. If I need something, I will look to buy it. If I recognize inefficiency in my day or workflow or whatever—I will pursue a solution. If I am unhappy with how much I'm paying for internet or some other service, I will try to find something better.
What I don't want is to be confronted and put on the spot when I'm not actively seeking to do business.
When I had account managers that had to do their own cold calling they greatly underperformed. When I had someone whose only job was to cold call and book demos which were then closed by account managers one person was getting more meetings than all my account managers combined.
Some people don’t like getting cold calls, I personally don’t mind and the number of people that don’t mind statistically out number the ones who do. We have tons of data to support this. I highly recommend evaluating this as a strategy in any B2B customer acquisition program.
I don't doubt it's a good strategy, but I doubt most people actually "don't mind". What kind of data do you have to support your claim?
If you replace "don't mind" with "tolerate", I would find it more believable.