Cold calls

I personally hate cold calls, if I want something that you might be selling that is of interest to me, I'll get in contact with you, if you contact me you would have just wasted your time and money. Recently I have been bombarded with automated cold calls from insurance companies for around 6 weeks now, they know my public liability is due for renewal in November. When answering the telephone all you get is a recorded message asking you to dial another number to get the quote. All this does is get the customers back up, so they certainly would not get a sale from me...

I'm getting the automated phone calls about top-up pensions - DUH - they're a total nuisance.

I know that people say cold calling works and that there's a success rate of 2/10 or something like that. I believe genuine companies who cold call are going to find it harder to convert phone calls because of all of the publicity about scam calls. I can't imagine a phone conversation which would make me say "Yes" - so I'm afraid I can't be of any help.

Margaret

I think cold calls are a curse of modern business, but accept they have their place, and will confess to using them when we first started.

The ones that wind people up are automated, as Barney says, plus aggressive hungry sales people. We know you are on a target commission driven salary, but if it comes over as aggressive, then it just smells of desperation.

In my mind, no sale should be attempted from a cold call, and certainly no one in their right mind should agree to anything from a cold call. So treat it as a lead generation, warm people up, be polite, try humour, have a thick skin But just target businesses.

Don't phone people at home! Especially early evening. If you've been working all day, do you really want to talk out being miss sold PPI insurance as you sit down with your family for a meal

I'd be marginally less annoyed by cold calls if the person ringing me started off "I'm X from co Y; please give me a couple of minutes to find out whether product Z would be of interest to you"...

What I passionately hate are both the silent calls (just checking there's someone around to answer the phone - your time and temper are of no importance to us); and the calls where the caller waffles on anonymously for ages.

I never buy as a result of a cold call either.

I get that a lot. Mostly from people trying to sell me cellphone contracts. I haven't had a contract in years, and don't intend taking that plunge again anytime soon. There are also a few calls going around the place doing market surveys. Drives me up the wall it does. When they say they are from company x and would I like to take part in the survey, the only answer they get is a dial tone. Seriously. What makes it even more interesting is that neither my cell nor my home phone are listed, so it makes me wonder how they get my numbers in the first place.

I know what you mean, dam surveys! In the UK they try this trick to get round the TPS laws (toothless agency, but still worth signing up if you are UK based).

This issue seems to be worldwide. The big phone operators flog your details The ones that don't are infiltrated by cheap outsourced resource who sell your details on

They can be misleading as well, you get a 3rd party company who give the impression they are your current phone operator, and try and entice you to upgrade, change package etc.

So I'm getting the feeling people aren't fans of cold calling

Does anyone do it and have success with it? Maybe you have a good patter/pitch you want to share. Any positive cold calling stories?

Definitely not a fan of cold calling. I'm on TPS for my home number & mobile, and I actually get very few cold calls.

When we started in business, we thought for about 5 seconds about cold calling, then we decided we shouldn't do something to others that we personally hate.

When you add 'cold e-mailing' (not technically spam, as technically you can't spam a business e-mail, but close enough) as another 'hate', that does rather limit direct marketing methods.

So we haven't got many customers, because we don't pester a lot of people, but we at least are living to our own standards.

Which sort of turns the question around, 'if you don't call call / cold e-mail' then how do you get new business?'

edit: thinking about it I personally hate being 'sold to' by any method

Usually around here, when people call and start asking personal questions, nine times out of ten, its actually a scam. People have linked these calls to break ins.

Cold calling and Cold emailing definitely have a bad rep. But you can use newsletters in the same way, and I guess if you keep it as good a quality as your site where people register for these newsletters, it could be beneficial.

Call me nuts, but I would actually link newsletters to Guerrilla marketing techniques. That way, people never know what they're going to get next, and it might help gain conversions etc. I just enjoy keeping people on their toes.

Agree with Barney. Cold calls are just horrible. Try to call the right people. I mean identify your customers first and then try to get in touch with them. Your effort will definitely show results then.