Guest Article The Blue Devils were down. Duke would either advance to the Final Four or get washed out of March Madness. With less than a minute to go, they hit a three-point shot and were up again. The crowd went crazy. Stephanie Cole and her husband Dave were at home on the edge of the sofa shouting at the TV. Neither were Duke fans, but both had Duke winning. The path to a winning bracket seemed much more in reach. Suddenly Stephanie, a colleague of mine, remembered the LinkedIn profile of an executive she had been trying to meet. “I knew we could help him, so I had decided to cold call him.” She had left voicemails and sent occasional emails for more than a year, but he had been unresponsive. Now as students rushed the floor after the final buzzer, she turned to Dave and said, “He’s a Blue Devil.” Make a Human Connection In an age when computers are ubiquitous, it is easy to want to automate the selling of expert services. Software can have its place, but nothing replaces human contact. If you see someone you feel you can help, sometimes it just makes sense to just pick up the phone. Let’s be clear here: Phoning someone you do not know can be scary. We would much rather publish a whitepaper on a subject and hope that customers beat a path to our door, but to rely on that as your only means of making new friends is crazy. Overcome the fear, find the phone number, and make the call — resolute in your belief that your experience can complement the experience of the person you are calling, and that together there is a least the possibility of creating value that each of you could not create alone. The Method Stephanie’s method to the lost art of the call:
In consultant and professional services, we are the product. It is why in our world, delivery sells. You can employ all the tactics you want to try and get someone to pick up the phone and call you, but the odds of them doing that will be smaller than if you strap on the headset and take the initiative yourself. Tom McMakin is the author of How Clients Buy: A Practical Guide to Business Development for Consulting and Professional Services due out from Wiley in March 2018. He is also the CEO of PIE, a business development consultancy for professional services firm. He can be reached at tmcmakin @ profitableideas.com. The post The Lost Art of the Cold Call appeared first on Succeed As Your Own Boss. from https://succeedasyourownboss.com/the-lost-art-of-the-cold-call/
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorHello I am Teri Crawford 26 years old living in Toronto, Canada. I have recently finished my MBA and planning to start my own business. Archives
November 2018
Categories |