Cold Calling
I come from a call center leadership background, so this is a big thing to admit.
Cold calling is a tough grind that is really hard to win.
Especially in the world of business brokerage – where the cold calls you want to make are to business owners.
I was “promoted” into a call center, telesales leadership role in 2006. I have led teams from one to 120, in-office, remote, in the United States, nearshore, offshore, really far offshore. There were B2C campaigns, B2B sales programs, inbound, outbound.
Here are my two main reasons why the game of cold calling business owners is so challenging.
First…
Business owners aren’t salespeople.
Yes – I know – everyone is in sales. And owners/founders have been selling since day one. They had to sell to new customers, keep reselling to existing customers, sell new hires on the opportunity that lay ahead without proof. They sold their spouse and family on the business idea. They might have sold a bank or two for financing.
We can agree that everyone is in sales.
And yet – the business owner you are calling on is no longer in ‘sales’ mode. They are running a company you hope to list, which by definition means it is probably doing $1 million or more in revenue a year. They are no longer sitting by the phone hoping for an inbound call from a yellow pages ad, or the ValPak coupon that went out, or their Google PPC campaign.
They have people for that. They have a team to take those calls.
They are dealing with way more important business-related tasks, fires, and needs.
So, if a call comes in from an unknown number, they probably won’t answer it.
My experience says that if they do answer it, then it could be a strong indicator that they are still deeply involved in the business (which equals the kind of owner dependency that will make it hard to get a good sale price on the open market).
When we think about the psychology of a business owner who has grown a business from nothing to seven figures of revenue over a multi-decade period,
they aren’t answering cold calls.
Now, before we get to the second reason, let’s take a quick stop and deal with what you might be thinking:
I know if I call enough owners someone will pick up.
Yes – that is always true. It is always possible to generate results from any activity if you do it enough times.
If you need to take down a brick wall, you could definitely grab your normal-sized hammer out of your toolbox in the garage and hit the wall enough times to knock it down.
But the question is –
- How many times would you have to hit it?
- How long would that take (especially once your arm muscles fail and you must take breaks)?
- Is there a better way?
Yes – of course there is a better, more efficient way.
So, the question is not “how many calls will it take to get an owner on the line?”
The question is:
“is the juice worth the squeeze?”
Because if it takes a lot of calls to get someone on the line, what do you think the chances are that that owner wants to talk about selling at some point in the next three years?
Imagine if you call 100 people, and one answers.
And imagine that it takes 10 conversations to result in one potential future listing.
That is 1,000 calls.
If the math works out.
Most brokers I know aren’t going to make a thousand cold calls.
Let me give you some real-world numbers.
Recently I started an internal campaign to do just this. To generate meetings for our clients through cold calling.
Once we got past the challenges with poor-quality lists, the team was able to actually get to dialing where it seemed like calls went to the right person.
Tech wise, I set the team up with a power dialer with localized caller ID numbers to help with answer rate.
You definitely aren’t going to win this game or even get measurable results by hand dialing numbers.
Here is the outcome:
- 2,857 calls
- 60.9% of the time there was no answer
- 15.3% the contact was not available
- Bad phone numbers 9.4% of the time
- Unqualified business (not a good fit – too low revenue) – 3% (but yet – at least they answered!)
- 44 ‘not interested’
- 22 asked to be put on do not call list
- 14 no longer in business
- 10 were ‘too busy’ with business to chat about selling
- 2 meetings were scheduled
2 successes out of 2,857 calls. That’s 0.07% conversion.
Another note – the team I used for this has extensive experience from past campaigns from another company that called business owners to book meetings for brokers. And they are in the US.
No, these results aren’t from a lack of experience or using an offshore call center.
These were also industry-specific lists with an industry-specific offer/broker.
I share all that because it’s not that I just want to be negative against cold calling.
But the stats show that it didn’t work the way we were running it.
And I firmly believe in my perspective, based on human psychology and experience, that business owners aren’t going to answer their phone.
Now – you know who will almost ALWAYS answer their phone?
Salespeople!
Why?
Because it could be a new prospective client or a lead they have been speaking with or a referral.
The inbound call to a salesperson = opportunity.
The inbound call to a business owner is mostly like a sales pitch they don’t have time for right now.
And if we truly think about it, an unplanned inbound phone call is always a distraction.
It means you must stop what you were doing to answer and speak with someone.
I first heard this perspective a few years ago.
It was hard to accept, being a call center guy.
But it’s true.
You could be watching television, and when that phone rings you must decide if taking your focus away from your tv is okay.
You must make an attention decision in that moment of what to focus on.
This is true for all of us.
And now think about the last 10 business owners you helped through the process of selling their business.
How many of them had time and attention to spare on answering every inbound phone call?
Second…
People – business owners, all of us – now have more tools to avoid calls than the tools people have in making the calls.
We have more defensive tactics.
Cell phones with built in spam caller detection and blocking.
Systems to make callers identify themselves before you even speak with them.
Caller ID in itself was a great invention.
I remember a time when you didn’t know who was calling and everyone was excited about answering it.
Then the telemarketers started calling.
You knew if it rang during dinner, it was a telemarketer hoping you were home at dinner time.
But you had to answer because it could be someone you know in an emergency.
Combine the busy business owner with income call defensive tactics and you have a difficult program to win at.
Again, I know, it’s a number game.
You can win if you put in enough reps.
With win = get conversations with business owners.
But will win = best use of time, energy, and resources?
Calls to your target demographic –
I would say not.
(Especially when we throw in the mix the hidden factor – how many others are calling business owners with the same goal, so they have learned to not answer anyone’s calls because they have answered and been pitched enough times to really dislike those calls?)
People who make outbound cold calls try to ignore all the ways that someone can NOT answer the call.
And the fact they just fundamentally don’t have to.
Mix in a busy business owner, it creates a really big challenge for calling campaigns.
Again, not saying you cannot win with cold calling.
Gurus out there are always talking about their success from cold calling people.
But I think it’s very important to compare apples to apples – of who is being called and what is being offered.
Calling a consumer to sell them solar, calling a business to sell them a new CRM, and trying to talk to a business owner about selling their business are all completely different types of campaigns.
As I looked through the stats and reflected on recent conversations with business brokers about calling campaigns, I felt this was an important article to write.
Marketing is all about evolving – adapting to what is working, doing none of what’s not working, playing the short and long game (hunting and farming), and being open to what your target ICP truly wants for communication channels.
Until next time,
Jason
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