Cold Call into No Call

Darn those pesky prospects, if it weren’t for them what a great job we would have.

To com­bat the prob­lem of too many sales leads, I have come up with a sure fire method of mak­ing sure no one returns your phone calls or replies to your emails.  I can absolutely guar­an­tee the results. 100% of your money back if you get one response.

First off, you’ll need the right mind set. For­get that your prospect is get­ting ham­mered by dozens of sales peo­ple on a daily basis; voice mail, email, snail mail and in per­son.  Be absolutely con­vinced that your call is THE most impor­tant event in your prospects’ day.

PHONE

Since nobody answers their phone any­more you’ll need a voice mail plan.  Plan? we don’t need no stink­ing plan.  Our Plan is to wing it.

Really, why prep? it’s just  voice mail you’ll only run into it in over 90% of your calls.  Make sure you hum and um and haw.  Start your mes­sage with aaah.  End it with a speed talker ver­sion of your phone num­ber, say it, only once. Hey, your prospect bet­ter be pay­ing atten­tion to catch your mes­sage.   In between your first har­rumph and your light speed con­tact info, don’t worry about a com­pelling mes­sage.  Just bab­ble on about being in town and swing­ing by.  For good­ness sake don’t let them think you can fix a headache of theirs or where you’ve been able to help a sim­i­lar institution.

My advanced strat­egy is to leave some vague mes­sage like “hey this is Bill call me back”.  That’s guar­an­teed to get you ignored.

When you do acci­den­tally get a live per­son, don’t for­get it’s all about you.

Yes You: your sched­ule, your time. What­ever hap­pens, make sure you don’t have any­thing specif­i­cally rel­e­vant to say, it has to be a bunch of gen­er­al­i­ties.  “Hi I’m Keith and I rep­re­sent the largest provider of wa wa wawa wa…….”

Don’t, for any rea­son, do any research into why they might need your solu­tion.  Come on, you’re a sales pro, you’ve made thou­sands of calls like this.  Go with the flow.   Be the ball.

EMAIL

Email can be a great way to reach out to poten­tial prospects so it’s impor­tant to take care so your emails will have no impact.  My plan starts with the sub­ject line.

Here are a few sure fire strate­gies to craft the sub­ject line just so.  We want to make sure your email gets sent right into the trash bin or caught in the spam filter.

1. Make sure your sub­ject line is vague.  ‘are you unhappy with your cur­rent solution?!? ‘
2. Sound like every­one else – ‘True automa­tion of your sys­tem Research Dynamics!’
3. Be famil­iar – ‘Bill check this out!’
4. Look like spam ‘ROI in 15 days!!!!’ (Don’t for­get you can never use enough excla­ma­tion points in your sub­ject line.)

On to the body of the email.  This too is very impor­tant because if by some rea­son your sub­ject line hasn’t done it, this is your last chance to turn off your prospect.     So let’s make the body of your email really long, at least a page. Make sure a cou­ple of words in the first few sen­tences are misspelled.

With the advent of mass email pro­grams you have a unique oppor­tu­nity to turn off masses of prospects with just one click.  Make sure you overuse your abil­ity to insert a first name.   Then make sure it’s a first name they actu­ally don’t go by.   The impor­tant thing is to make sure that the mass email blast is just vague enough to fit to every­body.  That way it’ll have no impact on anybody.

Have mar­ket­ing work up a great HTML mes­sage with lots of pic­tures of pretty, smil­ing pro­fes­sion­als.  Don’t make it look like it came from a real per­son with a real message.

Oh and don’t for­get to attach a bunch a sales lit in .pdf for­mat so it’ll get caught in the spam filter.

This is just a sam­ple of my pro­gram. There are many more ways to have no impact and get lost in the back­ground noise.  Now go out there and alien­ate your poten­tial cus­tomers, all you have to do is not try.

3 Responses to “ Cold Call into No Call ”

1. RescueMe II says:

   October 19, 2009 at 7:03 pm

   Ha ha ha ha ha!!!! Per­fect, I’ve been look­ing for a way to tuck­point those sales cracks I’d been work­ing all year. Its a good time to shut them down since we are in the last quarter.
2. Sales Chick says:

   October 19, 2009 at 7:23 pm

   Ha! I can one up you. I can guar­an­tee 100% that you’ll get no where with your prospects IF YOU NEVER EVEN CALL THEM! 

   Don’t be a wimp! Do your dis­cov­ery and pick up the phone! or get in your car! 10 weeks left — GAME ON!

   (How’s that for !!!!! ?)
   – SC
3. Duke says:

   October 21, 2009 at 6:33 pm

   Make the e-mail con­cise, brief and empha­size ben­e­fits to the per­son you’re speak­ing to in the e-mail.

   For instance, the CFO could give a rats ass if your solu­tion makes the work­flow in the mail room smoother, and the employ­ees less stressed.

   Hit the CFO with what mat­ters to her/him.……it’s all about the Benjamins.

   Or, don’t tell the qual­ity con­trol peo­ple that your solu­tion will save the com­pany big bucks, they only care about improv­ing cus­tomer satisfaction.

   Duke