Quit Cold Calling

If you can’t cold call, don’t! It’s that easy.

How, you now ask, can you get qualified prospects on whom to call and turn into your new customers if you don’t cold call? Let someone else do it.

The typical sales type will do anything to avoid dialing the phone to try to convince someone they don’t know to meet and listen to their pitch. It is uncomfortable bordering on painful.

Watch your sales pro during “phone time”. He will rearrange papers on his desk, take extended restroom breaks, work feverishly on an email, chart or other paperwork, dial and hang-up quickly claiming to get a busy signal, doodle, stare into space, take calls from customers he must service, get extra coffee, meet with other staffers who need his attention right now and on and on it goes. A sales rep will do almost anything to avoid the dreaded cold call.

The downside, of course, is very few calls get made, no new rocks are overturned and the sales pipeline remains empty. Sales projections are missed, money is lost and unhappiness reigns supreme.

Turn this highly important task over to a phone sales professional and watch your fortunes rise. A sales appointment setter or telemarketer will dial the phone 30 to 50 times an hour and talk with a fair number of qualified prospects, scheduling appointments and gathering important competitor information. This prospector goes about the job cheerfully, never losing sight of the goal of setting meetings with qualified potential customers. He is a craftsman—an artisan who never gives up.

Using these phone pros builds your business by canvassing targeted SIC codes, demographics or geographic locations. More meetings are scheduled, more presentations made and many more sales closed.

Quit fighting the obvious. If you can’t cold call, DON’T.

Outsourcing some sales efforts can boost the bottom line

Hotel & Motel Management, by Howard Feiertag
Lots of outsourcing is going on these days in all areas of hotel operations, so why not take a look at what could be helpful in this area with regard to sales?

We all can offer suggestions on how salespeople can be more productive with their time. After all, the most important role of a salesperson is to make more sales, and that relates to bringing in more business, not making more sales calls.

But at many properties, we see job descriptions referring to the number of sales calls that need to be made. If it's not reflected in a job description, we know about managers telling salespeople to go out and make more calls. However, it is not the number of calls we make that creates profit for a business, but the dollar amount of business actually being collected.

In order to bring in more profitable business, we first need to know who to call. This is where we get to the term "prospecting," which means finding out who is in a position to provide business to a property. The most successful salespeople are those who concentrate only on calling qualified prospects. Sales personnel would be more productive if they spent their time making contact and building relationships with those who have been qualified to book business with them.

All too often, salespeople spend a good amount of time making "cold calls." This term refers to calls being made on just about anyone to determine if that contact could be considered a prospect. The cold calls are made to "qualify" if that contact would have any business for a property. These calls are made by phone or in person.

We need to consider if the amount of time spent by a salesperson making cold calls to find qualified prospects is as productive as that person spending the time making calls on only those already qualified. Most sales personnel already know the answer to that question. So, the next question is, if they do not do the cold calling to find qualified prospects, how will that get done so that the salesperson has only prospects to call?

This is where outsourcing comes into play. Companies that will do cold calling for a property--often at a much lower cost than having a salesperson do it--are becoming more prevalent.
In addition to prospecting (lead generation), some companies provide a variety of sales activity functions, such as database cleansing, sales missions, trade-show follow-up services, direct mail follow-up programs, customer satisfaction surveys, customer opinion polls, internal employee surveys and mystery shopping.

Howard Feiertag is on the faculty of the Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, Va. He can be reached at howardf@vt.edu.