I don’t know anyone who…
I don’t know anyone who cold calls and is in the top 20% of my market center. There is really only one in another market center so I’m going out on a limb here any saying that cold calling works but not to get you at the top of your market unless you keep doing it consistently.
I guess that’s sort of obvious but what isn’t obvious is the problem with cold calling. It’s not a sustainable way to run a business. We hate to be told ‘no’ and that is what most of the cold calls end up being. We hate rejection and cold calls are 99 rejections to get to a maybe. It might be 150 to 200 rejections with the anti-spam stuff that exists now.
We want people to like us so we don’t do it consistently and the folks who encourage you to do it probably don’t do it consistently either. They might do it for a week, or a month and even 6 months but unless they are a special breed, they don’t do it.
So what do you do instead?
Seth Godin wrote Permission Marketing in 1999 (over 20 years ago) and I was fortunate to read it in 2003 when I started in real estate. It shows us there is a critical piece missing from our databases and that is permission. It is the expectation that I am going to call, send a note or piece of marketing material and I know it is welcome.
“You’re not paying attention. Nobody is.” That is a quote from the book. He goes into the massive amount of money that is being spent on getting your attention and that was 23 years ago. It’s gone up.
I am encouraging you to get the book and consider a different way to do business. You will be surprised how well it works and how much better life is when you don’t have all that rejection to deal with.
Jerry