February 23, 2023 by Ken Goldstein - 0 comments

Cold Call Catastrophes and Catalysts

As the economy comes under increasing pressure, I find myself wading through an email inbox increasingly filled with clutter. I am being too polite. It is filled with garbage. Sadly, much of that garbage comes from sales folk who think they are reaching out to me to generate much-needed business for their companies.

Cold-calling is part of a salesperson’s job, I know that, and it is hard. If you don’t learn to do it well, you won’t be in sales long, or you will be doing it for the rest of your life on increasingly less lucrative accounts with thinner commissions than you are currently receiving. If you are not hearing back from me and the many others you are bombarding with modestly tailored spam, I am sure I don’t have to remind you that you are not succeeding.

While overcoming objections is a pillar of sales, you aren’t doing that if I delete your pitch on sight. Given the lack of good training you might be getting, allow me to suggest a few things you might be doing wrong. At the risk of inviting further assault, I will then suggest some things you might want to consider doing instead. If you are a manager overseeing a platoon of cold-callers, this might be an excellent time to audit your strategies, tactics, directions, and results to help those under your wing succeed rather than struggle.

“Can I send you a gift card for your time?”

No, you can’t. I don’t trade my time for $10 per half-hour. I also don’t want a free Yeti mug. I am not taking a meeting as a thank-you for something I can buy on my own. Anyone who takes this paltry bait is either violating their company’s conflicts policy or stringing you along without decision-making authority. Don’t offer to have coffee, lunch, designer cookies, or anything else sent to my office as an introduction. We don’t know each other. This is not going to make us friends. It’s insulting and you must stop now. This is not the same as me agreeing to have lunch or dinner with you in person because you have caught my interest. It’s cheap, it’s icky, and it compromises both our integrity.

“Can we jump on the phone for a few minutes?”

No, we can’t. I don’t jump on calls. I choose them wisely. Remember the obvious: I don’t know you and you don’t know me. You’re selling to me. It’s not my job to pick a time from your calendar to hear a sales pitch you initiated. You are being presumptuous and overreaching if you think I am going to drop what I am doing to jump at your opportunity. Don’t make yourself look silly when you are introducing yourself.

“Are you the right person to consider a new service?”

Seriously, you can’t be bothered to do your homework and know the answer to this before you send your inquiry? Why do you think I pick the VOIP system here? Or the cleaning service? Or the door alarm? If you’re wrong soliciting me, do you think I’m going to tell you whom you should pitch when I don’t know you? If we’re considering a new voicemail platform, someone is already working on that and you’re too late.

“Did I drop below the top of your email list?”

Yes, each of the last three times you emailed me and I didn’t respond. Moving your fourth inquiry back to the top of my email inbox at best is going to remind me of the last three I ignored in my backlog or deleted. What’s that old saying about the definition of insanity?

Okay, enough timesink, I’m sure there are dozens (hundreds) more examples of these non-icebreakers. Your time is valuable, same as mine, and neither of us can afford to be wasting it. Your bosses may tell you they want to know how many cold calls you made yesterday (almost no one calls anymore so most of this is email), but what they want are prospects — warm leads they believe you can convert to business. Here are a few avenues that might get you an email in return, the start of a conversation, which is the best you can hope to achieve on a first solicitation.

Get a proper introduction.

Want to meet me? Find someone who knows both of us and get that person to facilitate an introduction. I just heard your head explore: “That’s so hard,” you bellowed. “It could take weeks, and then why would anyone volunteer to bother you about an intrusive sales call?” Yes, exactly. It’s going to be a rare occurrence, but if you know someone I know and they think meeting you could potentially help me, they will reach out on your behalf. This is the drumbeat of effective networking. When it’s mutually beneficial, all boats float. A warm introduction beats a cold introduction every day of the week. It is worth all your time to secure one.

Send me something I don’t know.

I may not want your canned demo, but if you take the time to prepare a custom report that clearly demonstrates how your product or service solves a problem I have, I might flip past slide one. It all depends on how hard you’ve worked to make your case, how much useful data you can amass that catches my attention, and how relevant your argument proves to be from the first sentence to the last. “I can’t possibly do that for every cold call,” you groan. I agree, you don’t have to do it for every unrequested approach, just the one you want me to acknowledge.

Establish a relationship based on shared interests.

There’s a lot you can learn about people you want to meet by doing research — the organizations where they belong, the charities they support, the articles they’ve written or talks they’ve given, If you find a way to establish an authentic bond or point of connection, there is a chance you might open a dialogue that leads to a business opportunity. This is a much longer road and it will fail more than it will succeed, but it is much easier to pitch someone when they’ve already decided you are credible, rather than evaluating your personal credibility and your pitch in the same instant. Would you be surprised to hear that people like to do business with people they know or have already done business with in the past? Getting that history is hard, but once you have it, a lot more doors open.

What’s the real secret?

The real secret to building a successful sales pipeline hasn’t much changed in a hundred or more years: It all comes down to advance work. As much as 90% of your sales success is in preparation. Once you get in front of someone, which is the shortest time on time on the calendar, your presentation skills will stand or fall on your offstage readiness. Shortcuts seldom work. It’s your time out of sight that makes your time in sight resonate. Your time is an investment in your outcome, and the more you invest, the more likely you are to establish the basis of an opportunity.

Or you can offer to send me a gift card for a luscious fruit basket I won’t redeem and add that send to the tally you report to your boss. Your choice.

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Photo: Pixabay

September 3, 2014 by Ken Goldstein - 10 Comments

How to Lose a Customer for Life for Ten Bucks

Steve Martin in his heyday had a funny routine called Let’s Get Small. Today I am going to ask you to do the opposite. I am going to ask you not to be small.

A while back I wrote an article called the The $20 Brand Bond, noting how Amazon locked in my loyalty by facilitating a modest refund in record time without asking me a single question. Now I am going to tell you the story from the other end, how a local brick-and-mortar company lost me forever for half that much.

This was the very definition of a no-brainer. My wife and I recently went to dinner at a neighborhood restaurant, which since it opened offered a no-corkage policy if you bought a bottle of wine at a shop a few doors down. We had done this several times and enjoyed the restaurant as well as spent a little more on wine, since there was no mark-up after retail. All was well with the village—until we walked in one Friday with a store-bought bottle stickered with the retail shop’s brand, only to be told while the waiter was uncorking it that the no-corkage fee no longer applied weekends but was now good weeknights only. I asked why the fellow at the wine shop hadn’t told me that since we had just been there and mentioned we needed the sticker for the restaurant to waive the corkage. The waiter said he had no idea why, but it was “out of his authority” and he would send over the owner.

This restaurant is about 1500 square feet, maybe 20 tables. The owner arrived a half-hour later. I told him the situation bothered me, that we had followed the routine only to be told after our bottle was open that corkage would apply because it was Friday. He responded, “Well, they should have told you at the wine shop. I’ll have to follow up with the owner there. He should tell his people that we changed this policy. I have to charge you $10 tonight.”

“You’re the owner,” I said. “You have to charge me $10? You have no leeway to make this one-time exception since we didn’t know you changed the rules?”

“We changed the policy so I am going to charge you,” said the owner, and he walked away.

We will never go back to that restaurant. I have told this story to perhaps 50 people around town. I am not naming the restaurant here out of loyalty to our community to prevent harm to our local businesses. Yet here you observe the destruction brought on a business by making the single most important mistake a business can make: not loving customers.

What’s interesting about this particular scenario is that we almost always order extra food when we don’t pay the restaurant for a bottle of wine, and we take home increased leftovers. We also tend to tip heavily and supplement the night’s bill so the restaurant doesn’t get beat on its own promotion. We understand the cost of customer acquisition and operating in a competitive environment. We understand you can change your policies anytime you like and rules are rules, no doubt to be fair and ensure continuity in the enterprise. We also understand that we have choices, we like great value more than we like a reduced bill, and we like to be treated kindly when we are guests in your house. You don’t have to do any of those things. Feel free to advertise, run Groupons, buy ads on Google, whatever you think gets us in the door. What gets us in the door fastest is getting us back in the door after we just had a swell experience. It doesn’t get any cheaper or easier than that.

When it comes to your customers, never think small. Your customers are your lifeblood. Without them your business is nothing. It takes years to acquire a customer base, and marketing is often your biggest intangible risk investment in a new business. You can lose a customer in an instant, and the potential damage to your reputation is unquantifiable. Yelp and OpenTable are only the beginning of your problem when you do a customer wrong. While bad reviews there are almost impossible to shed, they pale in comparison to the power of WOM: Word of Mouth. Casual conversation now travels at internet speed. Word of mouth escalates and compounds exponentially, but we are more predisposed to hear the bad over the good. It might take a dozen people telling you a place is good to try it. It might take only one to get you to avoid it all costs.

Is this just about small local businesses? I think not. Listen to the people around you talk about their cable companies, their phone carriers, their insurance companies. What’s their #1 complaint? Well, cost of course, getting gouged for mediocre products. And then? Customer service. They can’t get anyone on the line to help them. When they do get someone on the line they have little discretion to help them. These customers are held in place by a lack of choice—a situation that won’t last forever. When these neglected customers do have a choice—and they will—they will be gone, gone, gone!

Last week I attended a talk called The Rise of the Chief Customer Officer. I agreed with everything the speaker had to say about making customer service strategic and giving the Chief Customer Officer a seat at the table, except for one thing: I don’t think a CEO or an owner can afford to delegate this title; I think the CEO or owner has to be the Chief Customer Officer. If you want to show your employees what matters to you most, lead by example. Customers matter most. They pay for you to have a business. Contrary to an old cliché, they aren’t always right, but they do always matter. If you don’t woo them at every turn, they will vote with their feet. Or their mouths. Or their smartphone.

Thinking big means thinking long term. You don’t want one-off transactions; they are much too expensive. You want ongoing relationships, where customers return to you because you treat them like gold. Invest in relationships and the transactions will follow. Leave a few bucks on the table today for lifetime value that is unlimited.

Our local restaurateur got his ten bucks for the bottle of wine per his policy. Good for him. The next ten times we don’t walk into his cafe at $100 per seating costs him gross sales of $1000. The ten people who don’t come in because of word of mouth cost another $1000. Multiply by ten years of lost loyalty, that’s $20,000 of topline vaporized. You won’t need an MBA to calculate the negative ROI on that cold hard ten-spot in his pocket.

Still want that extra margin on a bottle of wine on tonight’s tab?

February 20, 2011 by Ken Goldstein - 0 comments

More on Social Commerce

Simple Definition of Social Commerce
by Paul Marsden
Social Commerce Today, November 17, 2009

Social Commerce is Much More than a Buzzword

However you want to define it, shopping is social. The network’s the thing. Inspire a dialogue, remove all barriers to exchange, and the community will do most of the heavy lifting. If it’s not interactive, it’s a soap box (pun intended), a very tough way to sell.

February 19, 2011 by Ken Goldstein - 0 comments

Social Commerce is Real

Prepare for Social Commerce
by Dianna Dilworth
DM News, December 29, 2006

The Mass is No More

Nothing is more powerful in moving someone from intension to transaction than the opinions and recommendations of your own community. What our friends and family say and think means an order of magnitude more than any paid placement. You just can’t buy this kind of endorsement, only inspire it.