Overcoming frustration while cold-calling for leads.

You are all excited about starting a day where you are going to start filling up your pipeline (as you may have won / lost deals and it's time to replenish).  These would be new opportunities / relationships opening up doors for you to understand what new interesting and exciting things are going on in this world.   So you start, during your allocated time to call up your target accounts - motivated and blocking out all non-productive thoughts.  You do this for a few days, weeks, months - call, no answer, call no answer, you get the pattern!  So how does one stay so motivated while overcoming this block?


1. Prep work (research) - Do lots of this and the best time is to do it during the evenings or weekends (I know a salesperson never stops working!).  What you want to try and find:

• Description - get a brief summary of what the company does
• Call List - get 3-5 contacts (based on their position titles)
• Phone numbers - you can always call these numbers at night and right down the prompts using 'dial-by-name' directory to get you to speak to person as fast as possible. 

2.  Mindset - this is a challenge as you are staring at a near empty pipeline and it's hard to come down off your past laurels of success - and rejection is the last thing you want to see!  Try to shift the mindset and think of yourself as a detective (like CSI, James Bond, or even Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She wrote!).  As a detective, you are trying to uncover challenges your target account is going through, through careful questioning, you can identify their pain-points and pitch accordingly.


3.  Numbers - a lot of sales organizations tell you "it's a numbers game", but how do you implement it?  To motivate you before every call, motivate yourself.  It might sound funny, but it can get you excited to speak with  a prospect if you say the following:

• One dial/call closer to an opportunity! (it is the law of numbers, if someone picks up after 8 dials, say T-X number of dials left!)
• This is the prospects lucky day to get a call on a valuable product/service they didn't know about!
• This call is worth 'X' number of $$$ for me - it's quick math, but take your average deal size and divide by how many calls it took to get it (guess this number) and put a value on the call.  Write it down if you have to and imagine it coming into your bank account.

I hope this has been helpful to you as it is for me.  It's about making it more fun and productive to get your pipeline filled.  Please share more ideas!