This draft has been re-written by another forumite Bridget Kelly Copywriting services I thank her for her help in making my drivel something that can be read without the use of the Rosetta stone.

Obtaining new business 

Obtaining new business is THE most important part of any business; if you cannot get new customers then you will eventually go out of business. We lose on average 20% of customers per year for reasons beyond our control: bankruptcy, death, geographical relocation, or buy outs. All these things happen to customers no matter how good the service we provide is. 

How can we get new customers? 
There are many ways to do this— networking, direct mail, door to door calling, advertising— but NONE is as effective as the telephone. The telephone is the time machine that can get you across the country in seconds, can get you information immediately, and better still will give you your return on investment NOW. No waiting for them to ring you back, no waiting for mailers to be returned: NOW, without delay, the telephone will give you an instant assessment of how well your new customer acquisition venture is running. 

So you don’t like cold calling? — So don’t cold call!
The term cold calling strikes fear into the heart of many people, mostly for the wrong reasons. What is cold calling after all apart from contacting someone that you can help, but that you have never met before? 
The first thing to do BEFORE you cold call is ask yourself if the customer will benefit from your services. If the answer is yes, then you SHOULD call them. After all, if you saw someone drop some money, you would have no problem shouting "Hey Mate you dropped your money!" even though he is a total stranger, because you believed he would want to hear what you had to say.
The biggest mistake people make when cold calling is to call cold. This may sound odd but let me explain. 

Prospecting
PROSPECTING: a nice old gold rush word. Prospect, don’t just cold call. When I agreed to write this (me and my big spur of the moment mouth), I decided I would do it for real and start cold rather than just post one of my old training scripts. So this is what I did: I prospected for calls, so I'd have an edge when I called.

Yellow Pages. 
First I picked up the new yellow pages that were delivered about a month ago. I opened that yellow pages to the group of people I felt most akin to, then I checked the ads with web addresses in them. One in three had no site up yet. I picked 5 of them, copied their ads on the copier, and put them in my cold call folder together with the reason for me calling them. 
Next I looked through the yellow pages for businesses showing e-mail addresses to a generic account— hotmail, yahoo, etc.— and did the same for them, copying their ads, writing down the reason for calling, and putting them in my cold call folder.

Local Newspapers: 
I bought the local weekly and daily newspapers and looked through them for businesses who had "under new ownership" ads, and then businesses that were using e-mail but offered no website address. I copied them, made note of my reason to call each one, and put them in the folder too. 

Supermarkets :
I looked at the local "take a card" stand: again, looking for businesses with no web address, but with e-mail. I stapled the cards to a sheet of paper, one per sheet, and wrote down the reasons for calling them. 

I now had 50 warm cold calls to make. This may not seem like an edge to you, but believe me it's plenty to take the chill off a cold call. Because when you speak to these people, you will have done your homework, and that is all you need. 

So I think the main thing here is that prospecting is one of the most important parts of making cold calling easier. If you want to pick up the yellow pages and just start calling, by all means do it, but the response you get if you apply yourself to prospecting first will blow your mind. I haven't done this for years, but I found myself easily falling into the good habit of looking at everything through my prospecting eyes and seeing opportunities everywhere. Always, always carry a small bit of paper and a pen, or a pocket organizer, so you can seize every opportunity. 

Preparation
You should always prepare for any form of marketing. This is especially so with telephone calling: any tension you feel will be transferred down the line and directly to your prospect, so the key thing here is to be prepared, to know what you're doing, and most importantly to be in control. 

Now I had my 50 leads. I grouped them into "reasons for calling"— keep in mind, those are their reasons, not my own. I had a nice generic email pile, a website not live pile, and an own domain and email but website not live pile including new business and new owner business: 50 in total. 

The Pitch
Who what when why where and how: these are the questions journalists have to answer to convince busy people to read their stories, and the questions we must answer to get people to stay on the line and buy what we're selling. You quickly have to establish who they are aiming at, how they get their business, why people use them, where they operate, and so on. What makes their business tick and where does yours fit with it?

These people would not have chosen to be in the position they are in, for example with their web address having been let loose on the world without any content in it, so you can bet your last pound that they will be busy people. Treat their time as precious and don't waste it beating around the bush, or they'll blow you off.

I say "the pitch", but don't learn it like a parrot. The world knows when they're being script-pitched and instinctively hate it. So you must be different or you'll get the same result as the rest of the cold calling crowd. It is this that will set you apart: be different, care for your customer, and also for yourself. Tell them it is your business and that you guess they're busy because so are you, so you'll get straight to the point. Plan to make your opening statement as strong as possible in as beneficial a way to them as possible.

Example: I know your yellow pages advert has a web address in it, so I know you want a web site, but I also know that your site isn't ready. I want to help you maximise your advertising without looking like someone who can't get his act together, and I want it to be me who does this work. Now obviously you'll have to phrase that in a way that suits your own personality, but those are the basic facts you'll want to cover as quickly and directly as possible.

The people with generic e-mail addresses need to be pitched a little differently (hence putting them in a different pile). "Now I know you value the web, as you provide an e-mail address. I also guess that since you invite e-mail contact, you'd like to have more e-mails from customers. The best way to do this is to tell people why they should mail you. If they already mail you from just an advert, imagine the volume you would get if you had a website where people could have a good look at what you can do for them, all the time being told "e-mail us, come spend your money with us"— that is what a good website will do for you. It can spur people into action who might have been just looking." Again, you have to use your own style, but do not mess about. Tell them how they can benefit and why they should meet you.

The Plan
You must plan what you are going to do. You must always be in control of the conversation. You must always get out what you want to get out of it. And you must always sell what you want to sell. What I mean by that is: You must have clear objectives. 

The best way I have found is to follow this plan of action: 
1. Call 
2. Face to face meeting where you close the deal 
3. Do the work and get paid for it 
4. Get referrals for more work: Nice warm leads, warmer than just prospects, and the end of your cold calling days! 

You can only sell one thing at a time, so when you call, sell the appointment, not the product. The product is the bait, the appointment the hook. You tell the appointment what the product can do, but not the detail of it: that comes at the meeting.

When you call you sell the meeting and you ask for the appointment. If you're pushed for more details then you respond with "Can I explain all of that when we meet?" You have again stated your intention of meeting, which is key. "But briefly," you continue, and give them a specific benefit or an example: "Jones and Co. asked the same thing, and they're getting about 6 enquiries a day now from the website I made them, so when can we get together so I can do the same for you?" This may sound pushy but it's just what you need. If the person likes what they've heard, they'll want to make an appointment to see you. 

When you get the appointment, then relax: they will buy from you, you'd better believe that!

And one final thought: Do it YOURSELF. Don't get a girl to make appointments. You speak to The Man (note: the man may be a woman, but what I mean is The Person In Charge) at the other end. In my experience, you will get a better response if The Man at the other end knows he or she is talking to The Man at your end. There is a kind of small-business empathy that wants all small businesses to succeed.

You've now worked out your reasons to get the various prospects to buy from you. You have their reasons to buy sorted out, so the next step is to identify the right person to speak to, and this is where it really gets fun 

This is just the basic overview of cold calling but I did it this last five days, cold called today, spoke to eleven people and have made five appointments. God alone knows how I'm going to find the time to actually do any work I may get out of this, but I had to do it for real to review the process, as it's been a while since I've done this. HOME

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