Cold Call Selling (Cont.)

I consider the cold call to be the basic building block of the sales process. You can use it to gain feedback about your company, product, pitch and customers in one fell swoop by taking massive action in your territory.

There was a saying when I lived in the South, "Let's take this dog out and see if it can hunt". You can use this same principle whenever you find yourself in a new territory or having to adopt and sell a new product. Get out there and see as many potential customers over a very short period of time. Or, as my friend, April Braswell, Dating Maven and Relationship coach would say, get out there and see some people.

When I first moved to Alabama, yes, Alabama, I didn't know anything about the market or know anyone. My first action was to find a qualified buyer and then simply call on them. In my case the market was shipbuilding, so qualified targets were easy to find. I just looked on the Internet for shipyards, got in the car and started calling on customers. We did this for two months solid.

I didn't sell anything during this time period. We did gain valuable market intelligence however that allowed us to focus our approach, retool our presentation and target our efforts more effectively over the next 10 months. The result, sales were increased from under $100,000 to over $1.4 million over the entire one year time period.