Re: What are you doing now that cold calling is going to be harder to do w/ the Do Not Call list?

"MarketingTNT" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> Looking for some clever ideas to still bring in business now that we
> can't make as many calls as we used to.  I work for an insurance agent
> of a very large insurance company.  We're a new office, scratch, so
> the best way we have been bringing in business is to make cold calls
> to businesses and to people at home.  We make very few to people at
> home, but still, this DNC list is going to hurt.  Anyone else in the
> same situation?  What are going to do?  Thanks for any suggestions!

Contacting people in person, I think, is the best way to go. But how do you
actually get out there and meet lots of people? That's a tough one!

I liked doing cold  calls myself. I had a formula down. I knew that if I
made 100 calls a week, I'd get a new customer every month. For my business,
computer consulting at that time, cold calling was great. Sure, I got a lot
of rejections, but so what? I always knew that 400th call (on average) was
going to land a deal, and the faster I got through those rejections, the
faster I could get to work and make some money. (Or maybe it was 250 calls a
week and one customer per thousand calls. I really don't remember.)

I suppose, in the insurance biz, all of these little business networking
meetings and so forth will pay off for you after time. It'll be just like
cold calling: you'll have to make a ton of calls before anybody shows any
interest, and of those interested, only a few of them will actually buy.

Are you outgoing? Are you the kind of person who can walk around in a crowd
and pickup conversations with people? Hey, if I was at a concert or a
festival of some sort and you came on with a hard sell, I'd walk away. But
if we talked for a few minutes in a food line or something and you mentioned
that you sell this-and-that kinds of insurance and passed me a business
card, if I happened to be looking for that kind of insurance, I'd call.

The thing with cold calls is that you have to make enough calls -- hundreds
and hundreds -- so that your odds of finding enough people who are looking
for what you are selling pans out for you.

Just as you sat down at your desk every Monday morning and said to yourself,
"I'm going to make three hundred cold calls this week," you have to do the
same thing at a different level now. You have to say, "Damnit, I'm gonna go
out this week and meet a hundred new people."

That's just a thought, anyway, and its totally untested by me. I would
think, though, that going from cold calls to actually meeting people, if you
have an outgoing personality, might not be so hard. And in any event, if it
doesn't work, so what? You'll have fun trying, and you'll simply chalk up
one more failure dead, gone and out of the way on your road to success.

Mike