Posted by In less than a year this entrepreneur has turned her idea into a multimillion-pound business all through cold calling.
And this case study shows that while cold calling is nobody’s favorite way to get business, there are times when it is still truly the best way to do it.
This gal started a small niche financial services company and was struggling to onboard clients. She was creating her sales funnels, using SEO and targeted advertising. But after burning through £2500.00 (~$2950.00) she still had not onboarded a single customer.
That’s when she turned to cold calling.
Yes, cold calling; perhaps the scariest phrase in the history of sales.
As I relay this story, please think about the one word that sums up everything she did and at the end we’ll see if you came up with the same word that is churning through my head as I write this.
Here’s what she did to build her multimillion-pound B2B business in just one year:
1: She found public financial information to set up the parameters of what her ideal client looks like in terms of how many people would be working for them, their turnover and the sort of industries they’re operating in.
In the UK this is extremely easy to do. In other countries you may have to dig for it or even pay for it, but odds are it’s accessible to you.
2: She found a scraper to pick up every single company in the UK that matched those criteria.
Every. Single. One.
3: She employed someone to find the generic contact details of the first 10,000 companies on the list. Generic simply means the phone number and email address for the front desk instead of the extension for a particular vice president.
4: She set a goal that for every 100 calls she made, she would get 10 people into a meeting and 1 person converted into a paying customer.
5: She started cold calling. I don’t know about you, but those 4 words send icy fingers down my spine. She. Started. Cold. Calling. She had no cold call training other than what she found on YouTube videos.
The first week, she blew 80% of the calls and made a lot of mistakes. But the other 20% were starting to perform because she was learning from the mistakes she made. She got 6 appointments booked, only 1 showed up and they didn’t buy.
If this was you, would you have given up at this point?
She learned that instead of saying, “We do this and this and this,” which was boring prospects to death, she instead began asking, “Hey, I’m from [company name] and I was just wanting to find out how you’re coping with [a certain financial problem] process?”
That lead into a conversation of their needs and how she could help them. She solved one or two small problems quickly over the phone for them and then suggested they book an appointment to get into the heart of the matter.
She says that you don’t want to make your outreach your sales pitch.
6: She continued on, learning from her mistakes. At the end of the first month, she got her first paying customer. 2000 calls, one month and only one paying customer.
She says what was more valuable than that paying customer were the skills she’d learned and the confidence she built.
7: She continued with her calling and her stats continued to improve. By the fifth month she was starting to reach her goal of onboarding 25 to 30 customers a month.
At this point she started employing people to do the work for her. She now has sales agents working the spreadsheet and making 100 calls a day each, as well as 3 sales people to handle the appointments.
Now for every 100 calls they make, 12 people come to an appointment and 2 companies sign up.
In less than one year she has turned her idea into a multimillion-pound business that is onboarding nearly 100 clients a month.
Her big takeaway is to not believe the B.S. when people tell you that you have to build your business a certain way. If you strategize correctly, you can build an extremely successful business without spending a fortune to get customers, if you’re willing to cold call.
Maybe the best thing about cold calling is the instant feedback you get. You get to refine your message as you go, testing your value proposition and call to action until you sharpen and polish it into a selling machine.
You also get to test buyer trends and find the benefit and story that are connecting with people right now.
Oh yes, and the word that best sums up all of her efforts?
Perseverance.
If you can persevere through the difficulties and do the things you’re not crazy about doing, then there’s absolutely nothing to stop you from succeeding.