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Hiring a Cold Caller

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Jan 23, 2009 1:40 pm

Easy.

Hire a college intern. Most are willing to work at a financial company for mininum wage to get it on their resume.

I did it for 2 years. I saw 15 interns come and go. I have friends who have interned everywhere.

I made $7 bucks an hour but I learned a great deal. I actually set up solid appointments and would make 200+ calls a day. Granted, I was the best intern of the bunch, and if they are not monitored they’ll read magazines and fake dial, but if you can sucker them in like I was, they’ll drink your cool-aid and do you well.

Other interns, including some pretty cute girls, got paid nothing. They’d cold call all day, file, do BS work and get paid 0.

College students are hungry. Trust me.

Jan 23, 2009 1:53 pm
SkibaSeven2:

Easy.

Hire a college intern. Most are willing to work at a financial company for mininum wage to get it on their resume.

I did it for 2 years. I saw 15 interns come and go. I have friends who have interned everywhere.

I made $7 bucks an hour but I learned a great deal. I actually set up solid appointments and would make 200+ calls a day. Granted, I was the best intern of the bunch, and if they are not monitored they’ll read magazines and fake dial, but if you can sucker them in like I was, they’ll drink your cool-aid and do you well.

Other interns, including some pretty cute girls, got paid nothing. They’d cold call all day, file, do BS work and get paid 0.

College students are hungry. Trust me.

    You totally correct that it would be easier to have a college kid do it. But for whatever reason, even with 3 colleges/univ near by, all of the interns we had just wanted to paper work. I had 3 scripts done and approved from them to call but none of them wanted to do it. BOM was just happy that a kid with some ok family connections had a good experience.   So I figure that if I get a temp agency to come in 2 days a week for 4hrs a day on my own dime it would just be that many more I could extend my reach to.
Jan 23, 2009 2:01 pm
anonymous:

[quote=Morphius] Ah yes, the magic bullet approach to prospecting.  If they are going to be both effective and compliance approved, they will need to be licensed themselves.  If they are licensed, they are not likely to work for $10 an hour.  And if they are willing to work for McDonalds server rates, they probably aren’t good enough to generate any worthwhile leads. 

If this strategy actually was effective, don’t you think it would be used a bit more often?

  I'm mainly responding because this is the first time that I can remember thinking differently about something since he usually writes what I'm thinking.       [/quote]


It's funny that you mention that. I've been lumping  the two of you in the same category for a very long time.
Jan 23, 2009 3:03 pm

Hey

  To your cold calling note. Don't get suckered into it. It stinks. Bad idea.  Real bad idea.   ~ Having someone else call to fill a seminar means you will have less seats fill. Never seminar unless it is to a preexisting group that will do the marketing of you for themselves. IE - join a networking group and offer to host an event. Have THEM market to their group and prospective  members. Much easier and far less cost/worry to you. They will even track the attendees and pay for food if you play it right.   ~Having someone unregistered make appointments for you without truly being able to qualify prospects because they are unregistered is also a bad idea. You will wind up with plenty of 8k appointments to talk about dollar cost averaging that way.   ~ Plus, the best benefit of cold calling yourself is that you become a much better negotiator and you hit thousands of objections that you can work to overcome with someone you don't know. Then, when you hit the objection live - you are completely capable of addressing it because you have practiced it a million times when the stakes aren't as high. Think of cold calling as a drill and you will never regret it.   .......
Jan 23, 2009 3:39 pm

Takingnames… has some great posts on here… from my guess he coldcalls constantly and does well doing it…

  Too many people get on this forum and say "this doesn't work" or "Yeah somebody i know tried that and it was a waste"...   Problem is people don't stick with anything long enough to make it work. I have a friend who cold called for a month and never got anything out of it.. said "It doesn't work.. everybody who has money is on the DNC"... I have done it and landed million dollar accounts.. it takes time, months, but it works..   Or you could hang out at the chamber with broke people and get nothing..
Jan 23, 2009 3:43 pm

[quote=Takingnames]Hey

  To your cold calling note. Don't get suckered into it. It stinks. Bad idea.  Real bad idea.   ~ Having someone else call to fill a seminar means you will have less seats fill. Never seminar unless it is to a preexisting group that will do the marketing of you for themselves. IE - join a networking group and offer to host an event. Have THEM market to their group and prospective  members. Much easier and far less cost/worry to you. They will even track the attendees and pay for food if you play it right.   Good idea - having an affinity group do all the ground work. Misinformed - on using hired help to fill seats.     ~Having someone unregistered make appointments for you without truly being able to qualify prospects because they are unregistered is also a bad idea. You will wind up with plenty of 8k appointments to talk about dollar cost averaging that way.   The process is that the RR calls all attendees the day sfter the seminar to move them from attendee to prospect. That said, my SA sets the appointments.   ~ Plus, the best benefit of cold calling yourself is that you become a much better negotiator and you hit thousands of objections that you can work to overcome with someone you don't know. Then, when you hit the objection live - you are completely capable of addressing it because you have practiced it a million times when the stakes aren't as high. Think of cold calling as a drill and you will never regret it.   Agree that practice makes perfect and that you should never hire a caller to do something you haven't done yourself. I know what the numbers are, calls/prospects etc because i've done it myself. And calling does get you sharp and keep you there.   Butttttttt, there is this- In another thread, $83,333, the poster talks about what it takes to hit the really big numbers. The answer is simple- it takes a lot of sales calls. Simply put, the batter who gets more at bats is going to get more hits. At bats, in our business, is defined as being in a closing situation where you get to close the business - make the sale. To do this it is important to delegate as many of the non-sales functions as possible. All service gets delegated. Parts of the prospecting process can be delegated as well. Among those is the process of filling seminar seats. Relaistically to fill 30 to 40 seats takes 80 to 100 hours of calling. If you're running one seminar a month and doing it all yourself that's one to two weeks a month of time spent just to fill the seminar. OK, maybe you could spend some time doing part of that lifting, but those 80 to 100 hours are much better spent calling people and asking them to buy something or meeting with folks and asking them to buy something.   If you want to get big- focus- organize- and delegate non sales functions. If you can't afford to hire help then organization becomes more important. Set a schedule to prospect/sell and don't accept incoming calls during those periods. Push service/return calls to a set time every day. This allows you to maintain control of your day versus getting bogged down and thrown off task by a client who wants to know why their dividend check was 8 cents more than last quarter. Once you establish positive cash flow max out one of your credit cards and hire some help. .......[/quote]
Jan 24, 2009 5:55 am
No argument there, Bond guy. It does take a lot of sales calls.   Agree on the effort involved with ground up seminars. That just makes no sense. When you use affinity groups, you are adding far fewer people to the mix by calling to fill the seminar. IE - you have a group of 40 attending anyway because you are using an existing networking group or club or something, so you call to add 5-7 new prospects to the mix and up the number slightly to improve your odds, but you aren't doing all the heavy lifting.