Hiring on cold callers for your business

wlctrent

For all you business owners out there, have you ever considered hiring on a few qualified cold callers to generate leads for your business? If so, what kind of compensation would you offer? Has this proven effective for you?

How do you stick with the legal guidelines of being "the employer". I know it gets kind of sticky when it comes to hiring on Independent Contractors versus employees, because 80 % of the time, they end up being classified as an employee anyway and your stuck paying in taxes.

Bald Dog

Personally I would never use the phone for first contact. Phones get screened and when the gatekeeper tells her boss that "Boss, a cold call is waiting for you on line 3", most bosses won't interrupt what they are doing, so the gatekeeper will get rid of the caller.

I would use direct mail. And not for soliciting business, but offering a free report or something valuable. We can't start a new relationship by asking for the money.

Compensation. Since I want this person to be included in the rest of the team, I would pay her the same way. I believe in teamwork, so I would pay the same base salary for everyone, and pay out a percentage of the gross sales as bonus. Equally for everyone of course. In my experience, this is the only environment in which everyone will work at his/her peak potential to make the team win.

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AZBroker

This has been brought up a few times at our real estate brokerage. Paying taxes wasn't the issue but "licensed vs. unlicensed activity" was. Personally, I would support a base wage + bonus for contract as compensation.

JacquesWerth

We have trained thousands of people to do their own "Telephone Prospecting" not "Cold Calling." Many of them have hired people to do the prospecting for them.

Those who were successful doing it themselves generally got good results from the people that they hired. Those that did not become skilled at Telephone Prospecting, seldom got satisfactory results from the people that they hired.

Bald Dog

Jacques,

You have a good point here. It doesn'[t have to be cold calling, but people must have good telephone manners and telephone skills. Even when they are following up on an enquiry, they must have the skills to define whether or not there is a basis for working together. Well, exactly as you explain it in your book.

AZBroker

Would there be a reason to expect anything different? If the people who did poorly trained others in their methods it stands to reason that the trainees would do poorly too.

Bald Dog

I think here Jacques means the specific high probability prospecting approach. Many salespeople jump in the car and drive to appointments even when there is only a tiny percent chance of having a sale. They spend a lot of time on tyre-kickers.

What Jacques's HPB selling has taught me is how to be a polite and courteous "hardarse" and request commitment from prospects. I don't even meet prospects unless they come to the meeting with a commitment cheque of $1-5,000. Bringing a filled in and signed cheque indicates that if we have a mutually beneficial basis for working together, they are ready, willing and able to proceed. And by the end of the meeting I expect a yes/no decision. These people don’t need to “think about it.” They know that if they do, I take the cheque for wasting my time.

Some say this approach is arrogant. Maybe. I tell them everything upfront and I also put it in writing. There are no small prints and hidden agendas. They know what they are getting into when they decide to meet me. How can they expect to get respect from their own clients if they don’t respect others?

I don’t think it’s about poorly trained people. It’s about being trained on the softer, more lenient approaches of having meeting after meeting with no progress.

AZBroker

The no-nonsense approach you described not only makes sense but I think is a common approach among top performers. Arrogant? A person can present an arrogant attitude but an approach can't.

susana

I'm curious what you do if you have a secretary call you and request a meeting? She's calling on behalf of her boss. Very hard to prequalify if you can't speak directly with the prospect. The reason I raise this issue is because it happened to me. The Admin wouldn't give any info, other than "He (boss) wants to have a meeting.' He wouldn't get on the phone with me. I resisted a meeting for that reason. They called the VP of Sales and complained that I wouldn't schedule a meeting.

Susan

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Bald Dog

Susan,

I insist on talking to the decision maker and the "guardian of the purse". I do this for ethical reasons. As an engineer I learnt in amplifier design that the more stages there are in a system, the higher the overall distortion will be. Every stage brings in new distortion. The same is with humans. Every new messenger distorts the message. A secretary doesn't have the same skills and perspective as the CEO, thus she can't make strategic level decisions.

It's the same as being operated on by a nurse who relays her findings and questions for the next step to a surgeon. I'd prefer the surgeon.

Also, CEOs who show no interest in who they are meeting, who they are investing their times in, are not really smart CEOs. Although when we consider that the average corporate CEO spends only 28 minutes a day (Gartner Group survey, I believe) to do bottom line enhancing activities,
I'm not even surprised.

Of course, it's easy for me. No one can call my vice president for there is none.

Also, I think, using Susan's example, the lear jets are pretty expensive. Secretaries are not in the position of discussing those high-calibre deals.

And you did the right thing.