Have you ever gone speed dating?
If you have or you haven’t here’s how it works:
You have one to two minute conversations with a number of suitors in quick succession and if you get a phone number, it’s awesome and if you don’t, despair not, there are tons of suitors to follow.
Everyone’s in the same mindset so no one takes a rejection personally and everyone is thinking there’s probably a better one after this one.
Imagine now, if you were to send a friend on a speed date and he was able to let’s say get 10 phone numbers.
He comes back, shares those phone numbers with you and says: “Well I know you’re a stud bro you’ll probably be able to set a date with at least 4 of these women. Woohoo”
If this doesn’t sound weird to you man you have a problem.
If it does, pray tell me why do you expect your sales reps to do the same in response to email marketing leads you’ve purchased from a third party!
And there are countless sales managers walking around the floor today shouting at their sales reps for not being good enough because they can’t even close ‘warm leads’.
Sure..!
This mentality is the reason most businesses fail.
The fact that you take the prospect not as an individual but just a ‘number’, a robot almost on auto pilot, that is the reason most businesses today shut down before they even start.
If you cannot reasonably expect and let’s say you and your friend are both equally good looking and even have the same set of skills and salary, values etc… even then.. would it be reasonable to expect that you could date 4/10 of the women he got the phone numbers from on a speed date?
Let me tell you something, if Brad Pitt can pull those numbers off I’d still be surprised.
Maybe yeah, let’s say a girl you matched with on tinder and had a decent conversation with, is waiting for you in a café and instead of you Brad Pitt shows up. She’ll be crazy psyched it’s Brad-Pitt and would obviously want to continue on a date with him but it may not necessarily be because she sees in him a potential partner.
It would be most probably because he’s friggin Brad Pitt!
Do you understand the difference?
If you don’t I feel sorry for you and you better stop objectifying women asap. I’m deeply disappointed in you in fact. You sir, need some counseling.
If you did then you get the point.
A ‘Yes’ is not necessarily a yes for the ‘service’ or product on offer.
A ‘Yes’ could simply be a yes because you reached out to the person in the right way at the right time and it made him look at his current needs differently.
His needs may not be the same if someone else came along offering the same thing at a different time of day in a different way when he’s in a different mood and using different words..
It’s a lot easier to build trust in cold calling, even though I do concede it is slightly brutal as not many people take cold calling that well. The rejections etc et all.
Trust me though, done right, the rejection ratio in cold calling is way way less than what you will have to go through crappy ‘warm leads’ you got fed by email marketing!
Think of it like this.
You’re a door to door salesman let’s say.
I speak from experience as I’ve done this too. Yes sir.
Only thing different was that it was educational institutions not homes but hit 10 institutes in a day and you’ll quickly realize rejection is rejection.
So let’s say you’re a door to door salesman.
You are selling a new tablet without an upfront down payment, purely on credit card installments.
You walk up to one house you get rejected, you walk to another you get rejected and let’s say you keep getting rejected for three days straight until you finally hit a new neighborhood and end up making a sale.
Let’s say you make three sales in the next three days and one week into the job you end up making a sale on 4 of those 7 days.
What did you learn?
Trust me, if you ended up making a sale on 4 days out of 7, you probably can look at house’s door and get a decent idea if the guy is going to buy.
If not in 7 days, trust me, in a month at least you’ll develop a pretty great idea about who buys and what your ideal buyer persona is.
When you’re calling so called ‘warm’ leads bought from third party email marketers, this isn’t the case.
Why? Most of the time you can’t see what was said to get the response that you got that made the lead ‘warm’ in the eyes of the marketer and your sales manager.
Quite often, you can tell just by looking at the website/ business details that this is the opposite of the ideal buyer persona but you must still pursue him because the reply reads “Yes please, I’d like more information”
Email marketing leads are meant to dumb a sales force down.
You know why?
Because the management either knows nothing about sales, can’t afford good sales people or is too insecure of building the business on the foundation of an excellent sales team comprised of excellent sales reps.
I’m not kidding!
I worked with a client who didn’t want to hire exceptional sales reps even though he could afford them just because he didn’t want to build the business on the back of ‘skill’ that could not be replicated.
I said that’s a good point John but can you tell me what happens in the future when you’re stuck with a business that does nothing exceptional but caters to the standard and the average?
When your entire team is psychologically conditioned around getting by on meeting quota and doing just enough to avoid being cut?
He didn’t like it.
I said it anyway because my job as a consultant was to tell him the truth.
Maybe in a new business that is up and coming in a new field such as let’s say electronic vehicles, this could be a viable business strategy.
In a highly competitive business operating in a highly volatile economic scenario such as these times, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Sooner or later, if you are operating in a saturated or competitive business landscape, if you’re not doing what you do much much better than the competition, the client has no incentive to stay on with you as soon as he can afford more.
It’s that simple.
