No More Cold Calling: How to Create Hot Prospects

No More Cold Calling: How to Create Hot Prospects

Do people give you a blank stare when you promote your business to them?
Back when I was still pretty new to online marketing—long before I ever got the idea for MOBE—I was an affiliate for another online marketing company. I’d found this company online, read about their offer and became very excited. I ended up investing more than $25,000 in that company because I got it—I understood how a person could make a lot of money with it.
But getting other people to understand that and join me was not so easy.

Generating Leads the Hard Way

Since I was still pretty new and inexperienced, I did what the trainers in that company suggested. This is not a bad idea—if your trainers have good suggestions or a plan that works, follow their advice. But back then, their suggestion was to talk to anyone and everyone about the company and the opportunity: strangers, people behind you in line at the supermarket, any warm body within speaking distance.
That kind of approach—constantly promoting to anyone in earshot—is great if you’re naturally extroverted. I’m not, so I found it pretty rough going. But I wanted very badly to succeed; so for a year, I forced myself to do it that way. It was not easy, not pleasant, and definitely not productive.
Every day, for a few hours, I would call business owners right from the Yellow Pages, completely cold, and try to get them interested in what I was selling. A rodeo rider is lucky if he can stay on the bull for eight seconds. I was lucky if I could keep business owners on the phone for ten.
An extrovert may have an easier time talking to strangers, but it’s still the hardest way to generate a good lead. It’s not efficient at all.

A Breakthrough Discovery

I was desperate to make a sale and was grasping for anything that could help me achieve that.
There had to be a way to identify people who were interested in opportunities like the one I was presenting. There had to be a way to bring them up to the point where they understood, got excited about the potential, and could be more easily closed.
I found my solution in direct response copywriting—particularly in books written by Dan Kennedy and others who were successful marketers even before the internet. Direct response is a technique (some would say it’s an art) for capturing and developing a person’s interest to the degree that they will buy.
Direct response works best when targeted at an audience that already has some degree of interest in the topic (product, service, humanitarian cause, etc.) This was a key realization: I could market to people who already understood. I wouldn’t have to explain it to them from the ground up.
Another thing I discovered in studying Kennedy and others is the concept of positioning—the idea of presenting yourself as an expert or authority in a certain area. People place value on experts. They seek out authorities and feel fortunate to be able to learn from people who are successful in a particular field.
Positioning yourself as an expert gets people to come to you, which means they are much better quality prospects and easier to close.
I began to think in terms of marketing and positioning and how I could put it to use in my own business.

Putting It into Practice

One of my earliest marketing campaigns (which used an approach the more “experienced me” would never use today) was a report I wrote which compared the company I was with to one of its competitors. I wrote about the pros and cons of each company, and of course, my company came out miles ahead.
I then targeted people who were looking at this other company. I offered them the free report, which contained a subtle call to action that basically said, “Hey, that thing is okay, but this is the real deal—the real moneymaking opportunity. Come join me.”
It received some response—a heck of a lot more than cold calling.
There are a few reasons it received a response:

• Direct response marketing allows a person to absorb information where and when they choose. There isn’t the pressure to understand and decide … all those things that come with a face-to-face or telephone sales call.
• Unlike a cold call, I didn’t have to educate them before I could generate their interest. They would’ve already done their own research. They were looking at this other company, so the interest in home business and being your own boss was already there.
• My report explained how and why my company was a better deal.
• It contained a strong and definite “call to action”—the action I wanted them to take, which was to sign up with me.

In any direct response campaign, the hottest prospects respond. They are the ones who want it the most, who get it most, and with whom you will be able to interact most successfully with on a one-on-one basis.
You can make sales by cold-calling, but it might take years and it’s a 99.9% rejection level. Instead, identify an audience that already has some understanding of your type of product or service and pitch to them. It’s a much easier sale to make.
If you’re not already a recognized expert in your line of business, start to get comfortable with the idea that you could be. This is important in many kinds of marketing, but particularly if you’re going to market a business opportunity to others.
Great ideas for how to position yourself as an expert can be found in the article, “How to Ethically Present Yourself as a Success before Making Your First Sale.”
Learn direct response copy writing. It’s an indispensable skill for an entrepreneur or small businessperson. Even if you don’t end up doing all the promotional writing for your company, the knowledge will enable you to evaluate the work of the writers you hire.
written by Matt Lloyd


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Article provided by mobe.com Filed Under: Ask Matt Lloyd, Marketing 101, Start Your Business Tagged With: Matt Lloyd