About 15-16 years ago, I bumped into a college friend of mine at a Kickin’ Chicken restaurant in Miami. We were both by ourselves, making sales calls, and decided to pop into this place for lunch. Neither one of us lived in Miami – he was down from Atlanta, while I was living in Orlando. A bigger coincidence was that we were both calling on the same customer where I had a relationship, but my friend was running into obstacles. He was heading over there after lunch to try to make another of several cold calls. I offered to introduce him to the right person – which I did. I called from the restaurant and asked my contact if I could stop by. I was planning to anyway in the next day or two.
When we arrived, my contact greeted me in the lobby. I explained what I needed to do while I was there (basically meet with their IT department to take care of a couple things), and then I shared the story of bumping into my friend and thought it would be good for them to meet. I assumed my friend had a brain. He did graduate from the University of Florida and seemed to be able to function in society. Well, I was wrong. Even before I finished the introduction, he dove into a diatribe about his product and didn’t shut up for about five minutes. I eventually interrupted to spare my customer, and quite frankly, my friend. It was embarrassing. Thankfully, my customer understood my position and our relationship never missed a beat. However, my friend never got any more face time.
This story leads us to our third and final strategy…
Cold calling strategy #3: Refuse time with your contact on the cold call.
Yep, you read correctly. If you get the chance to actually meet your prospect on a cold call, do not take up their time. Use that minute or two to schedule an appointment at a later date. Whatever you have to sell will fall on deaf ears during the cold call. After about seven seconds in the example above, my customer’s eyes were glazed with disinterest – he had other things to do. Unless you’re giving away lottery tickets or selling cold fusion, they’re not going to be engaged. If they are, then you probably have the wrong contact.
One contradiction to this strategy: if they’re showing extreme interest because of the timing and ask you to come back to their office to discuss your solutions, then do so. However, this has to be due to timing. Something like “this is perfect timing” needs to come out of their mouth. If not, schedule an appointment for a later date.
What do you think? Would you do this, or would you take any moment you have to sell yourself?
