What’s your biggest fear when it comes to picking up the telephone?
Posted in: News & Views, Author: admin (March 16, 2010)
Here at Virtual Sales Limited, we hear the same comments all the time:
I hate the phone!
I can’t do my own telemarketing – it terrifies me!
I don’t know how you sell on the phone all day for other people – it would scare me to death!
And it’s true – the majority of people really dislike picking up the telephone and calling people, whether it be cold calling, calling to a warm list, or even sometimes calling old clients!
While we’re happy that this dread exists (or we wouldn’t have any business!) we thought it would be interesting to find out WHAT people hate about it and WHY they dislike it so much.
So please use the comments section below to let us know why you dislike picking up the telephone – we’ll be posting the results in another blog soon!
Comments
My fear is getting the ‘gatekeeper’ – the over-protective receptionist who doesn’t really understand their business or mine. That’s why LinkedIn and Twitter are so good – you find out who are the key players in a business and you get to interact with them directly on their own terms
I wouldn’t call it a fear as such, but I’m not one for the telephone. I don’t ‘do’ cold calling, and luckily don’t have to, but I also stay away from the phone as much as possible anyway – I find I get loads more done and service my clients better if I just get on with my work!
I agree with Ali – sites like LinkedIn and Twitter are great places to find out who is working in key decision making roles at a company.
Also just doing a “google” search on a company or a contact can give you some great ammunition before you make that first call.
Luckily we have a great team of people that just love picking up the phone and cold calling people!
The biggest fear is always that I’ll fail to pack enough relevant punch into the opening statement. Calls need not be scripted (prospects never follow a script after all) but if you fail to make a short, effective opening the call can be poor. To get this right both the person doing the calling and any other people responsible for the success of phone based initiatives should be in complete agreement, AND be prepared to solicit feedback from the people they call as well as each other if things are going less well than planned.
Much like Nikki above, we don’t really cold call – we get a lot of work from referrals and online networking, fortunately.
At present we don’t really have anything that I’d see as viable for telemarketing, but if we did, having worked on a predictive dialler in the past, I’d be most afraid of compliance issues!
It’s a great shame that there is such a fear over sales calls. I guess it is the fear of rejection,of the unknown and even of bad news. I really don’t enjoy using the phone for marketing. I much prefer face to face – with follow up on email/twitter.