How to Warm-Up Cold Calls & Chilly Emails
By Dr. Gary S. Goodman
I’ve been doing a telephone marketing campaign to promote a series of seminars that I’ll be presenting in the next several months at various universities.
To bolster registrations in my Best Practices in Negotiation, Managing Client Relations, and Building Your Professional Practice seminars, I’ve been phoning into various elite professional practitioners’ offices.
Many are difficult to reach because they’re with patients and clients, but I have found there is a viable alternative to leaving messages, and to actually making that initial, chilly call.
I visit their web sites first, gleaning information about the principals and identifying email addresses. Often, they’ll have hot links to their email, so all I have to do is paste in my brochure-ware and customize the “subject” line.
I invest only a few minutes at web sites to learn the essentials about my prospects, enabling me to customize the emails I send so they sound like personal invitations to my seminars.
Consequently, my cold calls are not really cold, because they follow-up my emails. If prospects recall seeing my course descriptions, I summarize their contents and mention I’d like them to attend the sessions.
If they didn’t receive the email, or they tossed it, it’s not a problem. I summarize the contents and mention I’d like them to attend, while promising to send another email right away.
Here’s what I’m finding:
(1) I only have to make about 20-25 contacts to determine if I’m appealing to the right market niches. If, for instance, dentists have zero interest in attending, I can zip over to architects or to attorneys in a heartbeat. Therefore this is truly a MARKETING campaign that I’m doing, instead of selling, alone.
(2) By emailing and calling within 24 hours, I shrink the decision timeline, considerably. In the past, when I’d do conventional snail mailings, I’d have to wait weeks until the pieces hit offices and businesses. Now, assisted by the Internet, feedback is nearly instantaneous and I can alter the look and feel of my emails quite quickly, if I feel they can be improved.
(3) By referring in my call to an email I sent, I build a certain amount of credibility which I can cash in with the call screener by saying I’m calling to follow-up the invitation I sent to the principal of the firm.
(4) Having been to the web site before, and by bringing it up on my screen as I call, I can refer to it, and customize my chat.
(5) I’m doing “investment cold-calling.” By investing time up front, in web research and customizing the emails, and then following-through by phone, I feel completely professional—that I’ve earned the right to have meaningful conversations with my prospects. Compare this to the “dumb” and “cheap” calls most of us get, and you can appreciate the difference.
So, here’s an effective way to warm-up both your cold calls and your emails at the same time. Give this approach a try and see what you think!
Dr. Gary S. Goodman is the best-selling author of 12 books and more than a thousand articles. A frequent expert commentator on radio and TV, he is quoted in prominent publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Business Week. President of Clientrelations.com and Customersatisfaction.com, his seminars and training programs are sponsored internationally and he is a top-rated faculty member at more than 40 universities, including UC Berkeley and UCLA. Gary brings over two decades of management and consulting experience to the table, with the best academic credentials in the speaking and training industry. A Ph.D. from the Annenberg School For Communication at USC, an MBA from the Peter F. Drucker School of Management, and a J.D. degree from Loyola, his clients include several Fortune 1000 companies and successful family owned and operated firms.
He can be seen on CNBC at: http://www.cnbc.com.cob-web.org:8888/id/15840232?video=417455932# and reached at: gary@customersatisfaction.com
Tags: appointment, call center, cold calls, CRM, email, keynote, maketing, prospecting, seminars, speaker, speech
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