Ask HN: Do you cold call?

^ This here is the best advice for non-sales folks doing sales call. This man did a lot of reading on sales.

You basically have change your mindset about it. You are not selling things to them (and no money is even exchange on the first call either), you are trying to help them.

-- No one likes to be sold to. Stop selling. Also don't think of it as cold-call.

Think of yourself as a consultant.

Think of yourself as a student.

A student in business class, writing a report and researching a company. Find out their current news about their business, and recent trends affecting their industry. Now, can your product fill to relieve some of the workflow they have according to your research.

If so, the client will open up to you. At the end of the day, that client, that manager just wants to get their work done better. If your product does that, and you found out that recent issue, your product can help with. You got a good consulting gig starting to happen.

Once you have your report, write a cold email instead.

I have amnesia / sleeping difficulty (being awake for ~20 hours, then sleep for 10), which means my waking cycles roll around. UK-based sales people, on the other hand, tend to do their cold calls at 10am sharp.

Long story short: when they call me, I'm generally in REM sleep, and have been for a mere 2 hours. After their interruption, I will not be able to sleep back, but will spend the next 10 hours in zombie mode.

I have found a fantastic new way to use this zombie time: looking up legal, and law services, small courts, corporate databases about their company, facebook of their personal, and any and all leveraged counter-offense methods, that will make these companies, and individuals within not exist ever, ever again.

Please for the love of all that is holy, respect TPS's do-not-call lists.

[1] See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6163051 for more

Shocking that a bunch of engineers don't like being cold-called ;-) But it's silly to write it off as a viable sales strategy. At my startup we've had a ton of success with cold-calling, and I've talked to software CMOs and VP Sales all over Boston that use it as a core part of their strategy.

If you're doing B2B sales in a relatively new category there's basically no other way to reach your early market; they're not googling for your category, and probably not even for a technical solution to it, especially if you're selling to a non-IT function (marketing, sales, finance, etc.).

In those contexts, cold-calling, done well, can help educate the market, create demand, and set the stage for later inbound efforts. Often we'll have a cold call where the prospect's response isn't "WTF you wasted my time" but "I had no idea this kind of thing existed; where were you 5 years ago?"

It's not easy; you have to select your targets carefully, and have a good pitch, not be too push, and get a lot of other things right to make it work, but it DOES work.

Let's assume you have a cold list and you want to turn it into someone that's willing to talk to your sales person. So your going to get about 6 a shift let's call a shift 6 hrs. So, your at ~$10 a lead. Let's say you close 1 out of 10. On a free trial or something with minimal commitment. Now your at $100/trial. Now to convert them to an actual regularly paying customer your at another 1 out of 10, or $1000. Plus you have to pay the person that converts them to the free trial and get's their credit card#.