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Is cold-calling a waste of time?
Last month I wrote about Frank Rumbauskas and his program “Cold Calling is a waste of time” This week a saw some data from an article written by Ernest Nicastro that puts Frank’s hypothesis into context.
In his article in Marketing Profs, Ernest references some research conducted at Harvard University that found that executives need to see your message approximately nine (9) times before they will be receptive to talking to you. Ernest also states that for every message you send out only one in three will be seen by these executives. (And these numbers are only getting worse as the noise in the marketplace grows.)
This makes for some quite compelling math. Ernest’s findings say that you will need to approach a target executive approximately twenty-seven (27) times before they will warm up to talking to you. So if your only method of contacting suspects is cold calling you will need to make twenty-seven (27) cold calls per suspect in your database before even getting a conversation.
Are there sales people who call each suspect in their target list 27 times just to get through? There are…but not many. Most senior sales executives I have met average two to three cold calls a day (if they are in cold calling form) and have at least a hundred targets in their database. At that rate they will only meet a small fraction of their targets before they go on to their next sales job…