In the dynamic realm of guerrilla marketing, where unconventional strategies reign supreme, cold calling emerges as a powerful tool for marketeers seeking direct and immediate engagement with potential clients. I have found cold calling, like most marketing tactics, to be challenging, but if implemented correctly it can be powerful.
Cold calling is not for the faint of heart. Every call you make you are putting yourself out there to people who really have no interest talking to you. We are bombarded with spam calls these days and you need to be more than just another spammer. Here is how you can separate yourself and start driving leads into your business.
Step 1: Generate Your Cold Calling List
You need people to call! An easy way to build out your calling list is to use a service like Propstream (Not affiliated with I have just used their product). You can sign up for $99/mo and with it you get access to downloaded a list of 10,000 saved properties a month. You can apply filters to specific geographical locations to try and build out your ideal customer avatar based on the type of home they might have. For my business, I wanted someone who had a garage, strong equity position on their house, and had been there for over 10 years. We do concrete coating in garages so we wanted to target people who owned their house for a while and might be interested in putting money back into their property.
After you have your saved list, you will need to generate phone numbers tagged to that list of potential customers. Propstream makes it easy and you can pay 0.12 cents per person to do what is called “skip tracing.” This will pull numbers across multiple databased tagged to that person and/or address.
Step 2: Build a Funnel
I messed up here the first time I started cold calling. I reached out to customers, but if they didn’t want a quote I had no way to move them into a “drip campaign.” You can not do that. Go into this guerrilla marketing tactic with the mindset that you won’t sell people on the first call.
My experience has been people don’t want a quote right away but they are open to receiving an email from your company. Note, my service I was providing is a little more complicated to explain to customers. We were in the concrete coating business. Customers would get confused thinking we did concrete work or that we could coat your existing stamped concrete. I was in a very niche sector within the concrete industry. I have heard the roofing industry has had great success getting customers asking for in person quotes on the phone. They had success usually by offering a free roof inspection on that first call. Everyone has a roof so people knew what they were getting on the initial call without having to explain what the service is they provide. BE CLEAR ON YOUR OFFERING.
Either way, you still need a funnel to capture any leads that don’t want your initial offering. A funnel is a way to capture these leads and indoctrinate them into your brand. You should build out multiple touch points with more emails, texts, and even a follow up call. Think about how you want your funnel to work, but do not think a single could outreach will close the sale. Build multiple touch points.
Step 3: Call Script
You need a script. Do not try to make these calls on the fly without any idea what you are going to say. Have a clear idea as to what you are going to say and what you are hoping to get out of the call. Cold calling takes a lot of your time. Make it worth it by having clear goals and being professional on the phone.
We took our script one step further by writing down objections we would expect customers to have. Our script even had little cheat sheet on product information so our cold caller had all the information they would need right there in front of them.
If you plan on leaving messages too make sure you have a script for the voicemail. There is nothing more unprofessional than someone leaving a long mindless voicemail.
Step 4: Call
You have your cold calling list, your funnel built out, and a script in front of you now it’s time to start calling. Set a clear schedule and go through a number of calls you want to get through each day. Then hold yourself accountable and start dialing.
It will not be easy. You may get yelled at, spit on (theoretically), and hung up on but you have to keep at it. Cold calling works and you’re a guerrilla marketeer, go get it!
Cold calling is a great guerrilla marketing tactic for the business owner on a budget. You might spend around $1,200 for 10,000 numbers (leads) to call. You are getting in front of a lot of people in your market and getting your name out there. It is a great way to build that top line marketing funnel. I will say be patient and don’t expect instant results. While cold calling can drive revenue into your business it isn’t the easiest method and can wear you down. You have to go into this strategy with the mindset to stick with it for a minimum of 6 months. What I did in my business was to outsource our cold calling. I knew I wouldn’t want to sit down and make all these calls so I hired a team to do it for me. Find out what is right for your business and get after it.
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