Getting salespeople to consistently make a high volume of cold calls is damn near impossible. For nearly twenty years, in my sales training, I have been teaching, coaching, urging and prodding them to do just that.
Try as I might, I have never been successful at accomplishing this even though I have made over 10,000 cold calls of my own.
The psychological pain associated with rejection and the internalization by sales people that they are failures is just too painful. Now along comes a study that further sheds light on rejection and points out that not only is this rejection psychologically painful but it is also physically painful.
In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, University of Michigan social psychologist Ethan Kross suggests that romantic breakups and rejection affects the same area of brain as physical pain. Says Kross, “We found that the intense experience of social rejection activates regions of the brain that are involved in the sensory experience of physical pain”. The study goes on to say that rejection and physical pain activate another set of brain regions involved in negative emotions of bad feeling.
If cold calling rejection doesn’t constitute social rejection I am not sure what does.
Not only does cold calling hurt, it is a dumb and archaic method of client acquisition. It may have worked well in the 1950’s when women stayed home and either answered the phone or the door bell, but in today’s world of caller ID, answer machines and voice mail cold calling just doesn’t work very well.
If you insist on cold calling you will be perceived as a Willy Lowman type peddler who is just one step above the homeless beggars who inhabit every intersection in town.
If you must cold call because you have no other way of getting appointments do it, but you should start immediately developing marketing initiatives that will attract clients rather than chasing them. Failure to make this transition guarantees that you will forever be on the cold call treadmill to nowhere.
Wise sales managers should take heed to this and would do well to take this into consideration when admonishing their sales reps to make more cold calls. Ignorant ‘old school’ sales trainers would do well to include in their sales training direct response marketing techniques that teach how to become client magnets .
To learn how to attract more clients and eliminate cold calling click here.
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