As people who make money online, we sometimes need to use more personal methods of contact than email/social networking/etc. For some, strictly-online methods are all they need. However, I’ve recently moved into an area of marketing I never thought I’d attempt: cold-calling.

I know, I know… cold calling isn’t exactly a “personal” method of contact, but it is more personal than a mass email or a forum post – to some people. I’m 32 and for my generation, a few older generations and certainly most of the younger folks, online contact often feels just as “real” as meeting someone for coffee. However, this is not the case for everyone and this is where having actual telephone contact can come in handy.

In this article, I just want to go over some of the basics I’ve learned recently that have helped me get some results from cold-calling folks that might otherwise be missed because of their lack of trust for/interest in/knowledge of online technology.

• Believe in a Positive Outcome

  Nope, I refuse to call it “smile and dial.” However, the way you approach each call and greet each lead will have a huge impact on how they react to you. If you feel (or sound) nervous, unsure or bored, you might as well not make the call. Also, if you dial expecting to hear a “no,” get a nasty attitude or some negative feedback, you’re setting yourself up for it (Law of Attraction, anyone?). Consider this: you are a human being calling another human being to offer them a valuable service. Your thoughts and feelings are powerful and will directly reflect how they react to you. So put on a smile, relax and just interact like a normal person. Dial that number knowing that you will get the result you want.

• Be Prepared

  I hate to use the word “script” here because the last thing you should do is cold-call folks and read to them. Seriously, even if you’re a professional audiobook reader, the person on the other end will still know you are reading to them. I have a few different scripts written out that I am constantly revising (based on the attitude of the person who picks up the phone, the time of day and even the age of the lead), but I do not read them word-for-word. Scripts are more like working notes that allow you to follow a solid pattern taking you from (1) a professional greeting to (2) the reason for your call to (3) the action you are requesting from the lead.
  
  Aside from my scripts, my office is papered with various notecards on which I’ve written key points, hot-button responses and open-ended questions that might help me through the more difficult calls. The idea is to find the most important issue for each particular lead as quickly as possible so you can help them resolve it. Remember, though, first and foremost you are a person speaking with a person; don’t get all smiley-selly-snakey or you’re done.

• Know your Product or Service

  This goes hand-in-hand with my next point, but there is no way to exaggerate the importance of knowing your product or service down to the last detail. If you are in an appointment-setter type role, you can bounce a few of these questions by offering to set up an appointment for the next professional level to answer the question. And, yes, sometimes this can work in your favor. However, if you get stuttery and can’t speak knowledgably about whatever you’re pitching, then you can’t expect your leads to trust you. They need to trust that you believe in this service and if you don’t know about it, it will be really hard for them to trust that you believe in it. So why should they?

• Counter Initial Negative Responses

  Don’t badger people or argue with them if they give you a flat-out, snarky, negative response. However, if you’re pitching a service and they say they don’t need it, ask them who did it and if the provider included INSERT HERE ALL THE REASONS WHY YOUR SERVICE IS BEST. If they already have a provider to which they feel loyal, offer to beat the price (if you’re able to do so) or throw in some extras.
  
  As I said, don’t badger, but when someone says, “Oh no, we don’t have that problem,” don’t just say, “Okay, thanks,” and hang up. You’re wasting leads when you lack assertion. This is a major reason why it is particularly important to know what you are pitching. Example: you’re calling leads regarding carpet cleaning. The lead says they always have their carpets cleaned by Carpet Superstars (Yes, I made that up). This is your chance to ask some questions: “Do you have pets?” “Do they take special care of pet stains?” “Is their product environmentally safe?” There are a lot of questions you can ask that can keep the lead on the phone and you never know when you might hit their hot-button issue.

• Use Open-Ended Questions

  Don’t ask people how they are or if they have time to talk. You are cold-calling. Even if the lead is warm or even hot, this call was unscheduled from their perspective. This means that even if they were sitting at their kitchen table staring at the wall, they were not expecting you to call. Hence, they are busy.
  
  After your initial greeting-purpose-action introduction, you need to get them talking. I read a great piece of advice somewhere (can’t remember where so if you wrote it let me know and I’ll credit you): “People will not hang up on themselves.” Ask them an open-ended question relating to your product or service. If you can get answers from them, you can begin to learn their specific needs and offer solutions.

• Names are Powerful

  It has been proven again and again that there is something very powerful about using a person’s first name when addressing them. If you have the first name of a lead you are cold-calling: use it. The use of a first name makes the call feel more personal. It makes people feel important, respected and holds their attention. Don’t over-do it, but make it clear that you are speaking to a specific person and that he or she has your full attention. This also helps things sound less scripted if you’re just starting out.
  
  The second part of this tip is pronunciation. If you massacre someone’s first or last name when you ask to speak with them, chances are they (or the person answering the phone) are immediately going to lose interest in you. Luckily, there are some great resources online for finding the correct way to pronounce a first or last name: Pronounce Names, Hear Names and Ingolo. If you can’t find a name you are looking for, try phoning a friend or using Ask.com or Yahoo Answers. If all else fails and you mangle a name, apologize profusely, ask the correct pronunciation and make note of it so you’ll never do it again – if there is an again.

• Know a Bit About your Lead

  If your list of leads is just names and numbers, you might want to do a bit of demographic research to get an idea of who you’re calling. There’s no need to go into full-on Internet stalker mode, but with a site like Spokeo Reverse Phone Number Look-up you can type in any ten-digit U.S. number and learn a bit about the person on the other end.
  
  I find the age information most useful. For example, when I’m calling after 8PM, I want to make sure the lead isn’t in his 70s. Chances are he’s either in bed or on his way there and this is not a prime time for him to sign up for anthing. Other demographics can also help you estimate the best times to call, the person’s ability to pay for your services based on income and what sort of family make-up they have. Spokeo’s basic search is free (which I find adequate for my purposes), but you can get a bunch more information for as little as $2.95 a month.

• Try Skype + Telify

  Yesterday I published an article about my efficient and inexpensive technological method for cold calling. You can read it here: Increase Cold Calling Efficiency, Decrease Cost with Skype + Telify.

• Remember that you have Something Valuable to Offer

  I’m ending with this tip because, to me, it is the most important. I mentioned before that your attitude while cold calling will have a major impact on the attitudes of those you call. One way to retain a positive attitude is to have faith in what you are selling. If you are pitching something in which you don’t believe, consider trying something new. Seriously. I know we all need to make a living somehow, but it is important – in so many ways – to truly believe in what you’re trying to sell.
  
  When I first started cold-calling, my best friend asked me how I felt about being considered a telemarketer. She’s a very honest, straightforward woman so I wasn’t at all offended by the question, but it did made me think. The conclusion I came to was that, yes, there are people who consider all cold-callers to be annoying telemarketers. However, I believe that the services I’m offering are worthwhile, legitimate and useful services for those who are interested in them. I don’t badger people who aren’t interested and I am polite as possible. I think that if you are going to take on any kind of sales position, you truly must believe that what you are selling is worth buying; otherwise you are wasting everyone’s time – especially yours and/or the company you are representing.

There are some people who firmly believe that cold-calling is a waste of time. People definitely have strong opinions about the viability of the telephone as a lead contacting tool. It’s even been asked, “Is Cold Calling Dead?” I don’t believe it is. If you are prepared, truly care about your product or service and treat your prospects like the human beings they are; there is no reason why you cannot use cold calling as a tool in your marketing arsenal.

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Over the next few weeks I plan to write quite a bit on this blog about cold-calling. I know a lot of people are totally against it and I can respect that. However, I’ve found it to be a good way to reach a certain segment of customers in a certain niche and so I’m pushing forward with it. In this article, I’ll discuss the trial-and-error process I went through to find the most efficient and least expensive way to make hundreds of phone calls in a small(ish) chunk of time.

Quick disclaimer: I did not purchase leads and the leads I’m calling are all at least luke-warm; meaning they have at some point agreed to be called about this specific service. This doesn’t mean they’re all gung ho to hear about it when I call, but I’m not just opening the phone book or using some crackpot’s “super-list” of phone numbers. That said…

I started out my cold-calls using my personal cellphone because I don’t have a dedicated business line. I’ve always done most of my prospecting and selling on the Internet and my cell phone was fine for a small amount of in and outbound business calls. Since my cell has unlimited U.S. minutes I figured it was the obvious choice.

It wasn’t until a friend pointed out to me that I was broadcasting my number to hundreds of people a day – some who might not be so happy to hear from me – that I realized that using the cellphone could present several problems. I considered adding a dedicated business line to my cell account, but decided to give Skype a try first.

I’d used Skype a fair amount for Skype-to-Skype calling (both audio and video), but hadn’t tried calls to landline or cell telephone numbers. As it turns out, there really isn’t much difference and I’ve been really happy with it.

First of all, you can’t beat the price: for $2.99/month (less if you play quarterly or yearly) you can make unlimited calls to phone numbers in the U.S. and Canada. I have a super-nice headset for interviews and other audio work, but it’s the double-ear monster kind and I knew I wouldn’t want to wear it all day long. So I picked up a single-ear headset (Cyber Acoustics USB – AC-840) for $30 and was pleasantly surprised by call quality. No echo, no popping, solid sound.

The problem I started running into was one of efficiency. Skype has some great keyboard shortcuts, but once you bring up the “Call Phones” screen you can only make a single call before you have to close it and then click “call phones” again. This meant closing call windows and opening new ones, then dialing – extremely clunky and quickly annoying. I figured I was cutting my calls by at least 1/3 with this process so I went hunting for a solution. There is apparently a Skype option that automatically turns all phone numbers into links you could click to engage a new call, but for some reason this wasn’t working with my database.

After a quick search (How much do I love Firefox add-ins?), I found a beautiful little Firefox add-in called Telify to solve that problem. It worked like a charm, turning my numbers into links and automatically resolving country code issues as it goes. A few clicks and my call is in process. Excellent!

The last issue I am having will also be easily resolved. Since I’m calling from Skype, my number comes up “unknown” on the caller ids of everyone I call.” This not generally a good way to get folks to pick up. Honestly, I send “unknown” and “restricted” calls straight to voicemail, so I can’t expect my leads to pick up if I don’t have a real number. Luckily, I can purchase my own incoming Skype telephone number for less than $8/quarter. Then my calls will show an actual number rather than “unknown” and I should see an improvement in my pickup rate.

So there you have it. My powerhouse plan for using Skype + Telify* to reduce my cold-calling cost and increase efficiency. How about you guys? Do you cold call? What’s your method? Share!

*Telify was created by the obviously awesome Michael Koch and can be downloaded for free via the Firefox add-on site or Michael’s own site. Or you can just:

download Telify here

Michael also has another cool add-on for Firefox called FlexBar that gives you added control of all those toolbars that take up important browser real estate.

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I just published a review of the new blog/social networking/review/forum GDGT. It is definitely a fun place to hang out and you can find out more about it here: GDGT: Social Networking for Gadget Geeks.

Check it out and let me know what you think. Also, if you like the new blog at Examiner.com, please subscribe to the Tacoma Gadget and Technology Blog. Enjoy.

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According to the new service, Jounce, online advertising will never be the same. Jounce recently opened up in beta to a small number of users and I was sent an invite. Jounce is a search engine for products to promote as an affiliate marketer.

The idea behind Jounce is that, as an affiliate marketer, it takes a long time to search through all the networks to find the best products and services to promote. With Jounce, you search across all affiliate networks for products and all information. You don’t need to be a member of all the affiliate networks in order to search for products, but, as always, you’ll need to join the affiliate netowrk in order to promote the product as an affiliate. We’ll get to how easy Jounce makes that in a minute.

To find a product, you simply type in keywords for products or services and Jounce returns a whole slew of options which may relate to your site. You can flag an offer while you’re searching and then check it later by accessing your account page. This truly is superfast and extremely user-friendly.

Here’s an example search. I typed “cat health” in to the Jounce search bar and received nearly 2,000 results. I have many choices on how I want the results organized, ranging from highest commission and product price to monthly EPC and relevance. Here’s what a single search result looks like:



As you can see, it looks much like the results you’re shown on individual affiliate marketing sites: name, link to product page, price, commission, etc. But you are also shown the network from which this product originated.

Here comes the best part of Jounce. When you click on the little arror after the network name, you can go join the network or, if you are already a member, you can sync your affiliate network account with Jounce. This option makes it uneccessary to ever visit individual affiliate network sites. Ever. Imagine what an amazing timesaver this could be. Currently there are only four networks (Pepperjam, Commission Junction, ClixGalore aand ClickBank) available for syncing, but Jounce plans to add hundreds of networks as it unfolds.

Aside from the obvious brilliance of this idea for all of us affiliate marketers, I think it will also give some of the little networks and individual sellers a better chance, perhaps sort of level the playing field. It will be very interesting to see where Jounce goes from here. When I received a beta invite I also received five beta invites I can send out. So if you are interested in checking out Jounce, just let me know and I’ll send one your way.

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I don’t usually recommend a ton of free reports here because most of them are just not that great and only add to the overwhelming problem of information overload. However, earlier today I was sent a link to a new free report: 201 Tips to Rock Your Blog. Created by Leo Babauta and Mary Jaksch, this concise and easy-to-follow report is full of fresh as well as tried-and-true ideas to give your blog a kick in the butt or start it out with a bang.

Leo and Mary share a slew of short, hard-hitting tips that apply to bloggers at all levels. I’ve been blogging for over five years now and this report gave me some great new ideas as well as reminding me of very important fundamentals of a successful blog.

The report is organized into sections based on various aspects of blogs and blogging: headlines, design, images, monetization, etc. It’s an easy read, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it isn’t dense with important information. I highly recommend you check it out.

Also, if you refer at least three people to download the free report (when you sign up for the download you are given a referral link), you will gain access to a new video also created by Mary and Leo called “How to Write a Blog Post that Goes Viral.” This offer is a win-win, so make sure you head over to 201 Tips to Rock Your Blog and start reading.

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