The Truth About Cold Calling For Direct Sales Profesionals

In the previous part to this series on cold calling, I talked about the 2nd level of cold calling. Today I am going to reveal the 3rd and 4th levels of cold calling and let you know if I believe that are valid strategies for building an effective direct sales organization.

Level 3 - Cold Calling Leads

The third level of cold calling is the cold calling of leads. These are people who have filled out a form or responded to some type of ad or survey indicating that they have an interest in what you have to offer.

This is still cold calling because they have no idea who you are and you have no idea who they are. However, in this case, they have requested some information.

While this is not necessarily one of my favorite methods of prospecting, this is something that I do use quite frequently in my business. The reason why is because I can purchase these types of leads faster and less expensively than I can using techniques to do level 4 cold calling, which I will explain later.

Depending on the quality of leads that you purchase, you will still face a lot of rejection. This is in particular if they are not "real time" leads, which means you get their information as soon as they make a request.

Another issue is that some lead vendors offer incentives for people to fill out the information. You will also face a lot of rejection if the lead vendor you use does this. The reason why is because you will get a lot of people that will say "hey, I just wanted the free TV" or whatever incentive that was being offered at the time.

Anything that you can do to qualify these leads more before you call them will help you in the prospecting process. For instance, all my leads go into a contact management system where they get sent an email to my web site.

Using this system, I will call the people who actually look at the presentation on my web site first. 2nd, I will call the people who go to my web site. 3rd, I will call the people who opened my email, but didn't go to my site. Finally, I will call the people that didn't do anything.

Level 4 - Personally Generated Leads

The fourth and final level of cold calling is personally generated leads. These are leads who filled out some information after looking at some information that you offered in advance first.

In my opinion, this is the best method of cold calling and ideally, these are the types of leads that I would like to spend the majority of my time working, if at all possible.

There are a number of ways you can generate these leads. In fact, there's an excellent course on the subject. It's called Building On A Budget and it teaches you how to generate your own leads using the internet.

Frank's full version of his ebook "Cold Calling Is A Waste Of Time" also goes into some in depth information on how to generate these types of leads as well. You can view a preview of the ebook for free right on my web site.

So as you can see, all cold calling is not created equal. There are different levels of cold calling. Personally, doing something is better than doing nothing, so if the best thing you can think of is engage in level 1 cold calling, go ahead and do so.

However, the sooner you are able to upgrade to the higher levels of cold calling, the easier and the more effective you are going to find the process of building a direct sales organization to be.