Thinking About Doing Some Cold Calling? Try This Instead…

I’ve talked about this subject before not too long ago but since I’ve had several clients, readers and potential clients in the last month pushing to start a cold calling campaign, I thought I would give a quick write about an alternative.

So when you think cold calling you are envisioning getting a list of let’s say a few hundred to a thousand prospects that may fit your criteria of a good client. Now if you really wanted to push ahead with this idea there are many things you need to put in place.




Normally that includes a better job of whittling down that list to really good candidates if at all possible to help your success rate out. Unless you can handle work in a large geographic area, chances are you really don’t have hundreds or thousands of true potential clients. Especially when a large number may not be worth your time and effort.

Then you have a short and sweet script that has a call to action and what I call a “Plan B” if the main call to action is not in the cards. Do you send out something in the mail first before calling? Who will be making these calls?

Next you have more relationship building for those that took the call to action as well as to those that took Plan B. Then you have your sales process to contend with.

Wow, that’s a lot of work. It’s a long process since this is done completely cold. Not exactly a way to quickly turn over some business especially since this idea usually comes into most people’s heads when they are pretty close to panic mode. It’s almost a guaranteed stress festival that will spit out slow and minimal results.

By the way, the quickest of sales is always to find other products/services that would be a great addition to help out current clients. But that an entirely different subject.

If you really want to cold call someone, why not give a ring to a business telling them you want to give them money and not take it from them? Huh, you say?

What I’m referring to is often called a joint venture (JV). Not the type where you literally partner up in a new business, but where you agree to help each other out.

This could be a quid pro quo where they do something for you and you do the same for them or more likely a “you do this and I’ll pay you for the results” type of thing.

So who would you partner up with? The best people are other professionals that provide services to your typical clients and better yet their contact point being the same person you would want to talk to. You may have to do a little thinking on this, but typically that would include accountants, attorneys, software companies (such as line of business apps), telecommunications, etc.

Big vendors may need a different approach than small vendors, but the point is to utilize the list they already made and turn them into YOUR prospects. Thus adding them into your marketing funnel a whole bunch of steps ahead of any type of cold prospecting.

You will need to get a bit creative with the deal you need to make with this JV partner. You’ll also already need know what you want them to do for you, how you want them to do it, how you are going to pay/reciprocate and what they are driving these client to (such as a webinar or lunch and learn etc).

Sound confusing? Let me sum it up for you. No matter how you look at it you are looking to get new prospects in your marketing funnel. Cold calling starts by contacting A LOT of unknown businesses so you begin at point zero out of let’s say 10 steps to get them to your sales funnel. And you are contacting them to sell them something.

A JV has you contacting a handful of unknown or possibly known businesses to let them know you want to give them money or trade somehow for endorsing you. Not for a sale but for information/educational purposes that will lead to a sale. This way they don’t think they are inconveniencing their clients or prospect lists but understand they will get something later on down the road, unless a quid pro quo situation.

Any prospect you get from that effort has them starting out more likely at step 5 of 10 in the marketing funnel with a bit of a relationship already in place.

So which scenario do you think a “cold call” is easier to catch someone’s attention with? I’d say the one giving money away instead of the option screaming “I want to sell you something”. I’d also rather only have to make a handful of calls in order to arrange for leads generated in the middle of a process/funnel than from ground zero.

Think about it next time you are looking to add a new type of marketing campaign to your mix. Especially if in panic mode and you think cold calling is the answer.

You know where to find me if you have any questions or comments.


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant’s Coach

Common Google Adwords and General Marketing Mistakes

I read Google Adwords (and Facebook) impresario Perry Marshall’s emails every time they come to me. In touting a colleague’s new book (Howie Jacobson’s Adwords for Dummies) this week, he went over a bunch of beginner mistakes in the book which hit home not only for Google Ads, but for other written marketing as well.

I decided to pick a few out and put my 2 cents in as well as put in some comments relating to non-Adwords marketing mediums. Here they are:






Neglecting to Split-Test Your Ads: Very important in online advertising as well as written advertising like direct mail. In Adwords the "create new ad" link is used to create a 2nd and 3rd and 4th ad and try different text.

By running them simultaneously, you can see how small changes like one word, a word order change, a capital letter change or even a change in the URL you display can make big differences. Although not as easy, split testing email and direct mail marketing is a must. Even if just the subject/headline to see which does better.

Letting Google Decide Which Ad is Better: In Campaign Settings, turn of the "Optimize Ad Serving" setting and check daily or at least every other day to see which ad is doing better. When you keep this setting on, Google decides itself which ad is better automatically and it isn’t always as accurate as you think. Let it run itself to see what happens. Which leads into…

Declaring a Winner Too Quickly: Letting a split test run for two days to yield a few impressions and a few clicks is not a good idea. Let them go until you have 20 clicks on one ad but better with 20+ clicks on both ads. With a tight B2B scenario like you are in, at least 10 clicks on each if it seems to be taking too long. But that could also indicate not so good keywords or a really bad ad to begin with if it takes a long time.

When dealing with email or direct mail, you should be looking for results in a week or so and sending out enough to get a good test sampling. A very tight list of prospects falling under a tight set of criteria will allow you to see true results with a small mailing of 100 split 50-50.

Declaring Split-Test Winners Too Slowly: The faster you figure out what works, the faster you can go full steam ahead on implementing it. Although you are really creating a new control to once again split test against and should keep testing. Keeping an eye on your results on a regular basis like mentioned before is important.

For Adwords you can also go to http://www.splittester.com and enter the # of clicks and the CTR (Click Through Rate) of any two ads and it will indicate if the one that seems better really is.

Split Testing for Improved CTR Only: At first, CTR is the only thing you can measure. You want it high so you get the most traffic. But the real metric you are going for once they respond to any marketing is conversion rate and cost per new customer. All response and no conversion does nothing so remember that a Google Ad or an email or a direct mail piece needs to have a complete funnel to take people from interested to the sales process.

Creating Ad Groups with Unrelated Keywords: When making a Google Ad, don’t look to put every keyword you can think of in the ad. Tight ad groups based on a narrow set of related keywords matched closely to the ads and the landing page are what you are looking to do. Thinking like this for email or direct mail will also keep you focused on that all important one subject targeted to one target segment of your list.

Ignoring Negative Keywords (Online Ads Only): Often ignored but important is negative keywords which keep away the truly unwanted. Your list of keywords for your ad may attract clicks from those looking for similar information that you don’t want and impressions for searches you don’t want such as people looking for a networking group versus networking services.

Unwanted impressions and clicks mess up your CTR as well as give you a much lower conversion rate because they should not have responded to your ad in the first place. Not unlike having a bad description in your natural search to find your website causing you to see a lot of traffic and no results (of course no results could be a bad marketing funnel but that’s another subject).

Ignoring the 80/20 Rule: The 80/20 Rule says that the vast majority of outputs (impressions, clicks, leads, sales) are caused by a very small minority of inputs (ad groups, ads and keywords.) Spend your time on the vital few instead of the insignificant many. Same goes for email and direct mail.


Remember that with any marketing campaign, and especially in a very cramped Google Ad, you need to focus on one item to market and drive people to a page on your website talking immediately about just that one item. These initial contacts, no matter what format they are in, are leads into your marketing funnel which feeds your sales funnel.

Best of luck and keep on testing!


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant’s Coach

How Do You Answer “What Does Your Company Do?”

I touched upon the subject of a clear “elevator pitch”, which is a quick version of answering the question, “what does your company do?”. After hearing some recent pitches and coming across some good examples to explain it better, I thought I would elaborate on it a bit in this post.

Many business owners and sales people make the same mistakes in answering this “what does your company do” question. Most lead with some sort of solution statement even though it’s pretty obvious this should not be the first thing said.




Why? Because it’s human nature to try to utilize the positive up front when in this case, identify a typical client and their typical problems is the way to go even though it seems to lead on a negative tone.

Before going further let me list out the order of what we want to have in a good elevator pitch:

- Target
- Problem
- Outcome
- Story

So let’s start from the beginning at the target. It’s a good bet that leading with the types of clients you actually work with is the way to go. That should immediately be followed by the typical problems that you solve.

These can often be summarized in one sentence. As an example, which sounds better?:
“We make technology work for small businesses.” OR “We work with attorney and accounting companies that are afraid of losing sensitive client information and need access to that information at all times.”

I would say choice #2 wins on this one.

Once you have identified the who and the what, now we can mention the typical outcome of working with these targets on the problems you identified. For example to go with the above:

“We provide them with backup and disaster recovery systems as well as network and computer equipment service plans designed specifically for their industry.”

These first three parts make up your main marketing message and can be used in any written or verbal communication with slight modifications to fit the specific audience you are speaking to. Meaning if you know you are talking to a partner in a law firm, then everything gets slanted towards a law firm.

Now we are set to bring it all together with a quick story. And I do mean quick.
The story should stick to the same premise as the first three parts. It should go over the target, the problem and then the outcome or solution. For example:

“Recently we were referred to a partner in a law firm that told us access to the server which held his client documentation was slow and he was afraid that the drives might be failing. We were able to get in there the next day and audit his entire network. It turned out that his drives were almost full and his backup system was not set up properly. Within a week we supplied him with an upgraded server, set him up with a backup solution and they are now on one of our signature service plans to keep it all running without worrying about downtime or the integrity of their data.”

You can even shorten that up a bit and it still works.

Put it all together and parts one, two and three take an entire 15 to 20 seconds max to spit out and maybe another 15 to 20 seconds for the story that fits who you are talking to using the same target, problem, outcome principle.

Think about it and see what you can come up with to solidify your main marketing message and be able to better answer the question “What does you business do”.


To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant’s Coach