5 Reasons Why You Should Be Cold Calling

Even though I write books and do training for people who want to attract leads the smart way, I still get so many emails from people screaming "cold calling works," so I thought I'd make them happy for a change and tell you the top 5 reasons why you should keep it up:

1. You are a masochist.
Masochist (noun): The tendency to derive pleasure from one's own pain or humiliation.

2. You are addicted to the struggle.
Psychologists have identified the fact that many people stay poor or in otherwise bad circumstances because they are addicted to their own struggle.

3. You want to stay poor.
You have some type of moral or ethical objection to wealth and prosperity.

4. You work for an idiot.
Your boss is a dummy who wants you to keep cold prospecting with no regard to the fact that the less you sell, the less he makes.

5. You are already rich.
Since you don't need to make any sales or even keep your job, you cold call all day to pass the time.

So there you have it - the 5 best reasons I can come up with to cold call.

On a more serious note, the only real reason anyone makes cold calls is because they don't know what else to do. Or, even worse, they're working for a boss or a corporation that requires cold calling. This one baffles me because the more you sell, the more money your sales manager makes, since they work on an override commission basis. So why on earth do they want you cold calling?

I'll tell you why, and this comes from personal experience: I used to work for a large Fortune 100 company. Like many huge corporations, it was run like the government in the fact that it's almost impossible to get fired. It was, in essence, a jobs program in the private sector.

Guess what happened when a salesperson was failing miserably? Since firing was out of the question, they were promoted to - you guessed it - sales management!

In most cases, these people weren't really bad at sales, but were simply never taught how to prospect intelligently, so they made cold calls. And it didn't work.

So, after getting promoted, for failing of all things, they went on teaching cold calling to their sales teams because they simply didn't know anything else.

If you want to succeed in sales, and don't fall into any of the 5 categories listed above, do yourself a favor and drop the cold calling routine, and begin using modern prospecting techniques that work!