Sales Tip: Stop Screwing Up Your Sales Numbers

DALLAS - Oct. 24, 2013 - PRLog -- For some reason (maybe it was fate!) multiple books I’ve read recently have mentioned that Gene Simmons’ book is one of the best business books out there.

Skeptical, I bought it on my Kindle, and sure enough, it was a fantastic book.

What I found most interesting is that Gene Simmons ran KISS like a business right from the start. His own opinion of their music is that it isn’t very good, and that all four original band members were amateurs at best who, to this day, still cannot read sheet music, but none of that matters as long as people are buying records and concert tickets.

in other words, Gene Simmons gets one very important aspect of business – any business – that far too many people don’t understand:

Your top priority is to keep people buying!

Unfortunately, most salespeople – strangely enough – don’t quite get this. That’s why most struggle, and only a small percentage become wildly successful at sales.

Consider this: Most decision makers today have concocted elaborate schemes to prevent cold callers from ever reaching them. The most popular, and the one I use, is to have a separate voicemail that sales calls are sent to.

And guess what? It’s never checked!

That’s right. If you’re wondering why your messages aren’t returned, it’s because your prospects never get them in the first place.

Is this rude? No, I don’t think so. As someone on the “decision maker” side of the table rather than the “salesperson” side, our definition of rude is receiving a cold call in the middle of a busy day when we’re already behind on work.

Also consider the university study that concluded that 80% of decision makers will never, ever buy from a cold caller – ever.

And more startling, the problem isn’t that 80% won’t buy from cold callers. The real problem is that 20% will.

Why is this important? Because as long as those 20% are still buying from cold calls, salespeople will continue to delude themselves into thinking that “cold calling works!”

Seriously – the average success rate from cold calling is 1%, and among the very best of the best, it’s 3%.

Three percent! But is this any surprise when only 1 in 5 decision makers will even respond to a cold call in the first place?

If that 20% of the market would just stop responding to cold calls, people would wake up to the fact that it’s a zero-results game, and they’d finally give it up and do something more productive to generate leads.

But, I’m not complaining. As long as the majority of salespeople continue to cold call and keep on fighting each other over that 20% of the market, the rest of us are free to go out and close sales with the other 80%.

I titled this email “Stop Screwing Up” because that’s what cold calling is – a giant screw-up. And as long as salespeople get a sale here and there from cold calling, they’ll keep screwing up by cold calling and will be afraid to start doing something different and better to prospect for sales.

Stop Screwing Up!

There’s really no sense in continuing to cold call when even a university study concluded that 4 out of 5 people will never respond. That’s pretty bad odds. And in terms of actual sales success, it’s even worse than that.

But, there’s good news: There’s a way out of cold calling. Lots of ways out. And I’ve assembled them all into a step-by-step, easy to use system. It's called the Never Cold Call Again system, and you can download a free 37-page PDF preview at http://www.nevercoldcallagain.net