Cold calling. Just hearing the term causes chest-tightening anxiety for many people.

It may trigger the memory and distaste caused by a telemarketer who, three seconds after you answered the phone, mispronounced your name and robotically read a poorly written script, trying to pitch you something you’d never be a prospect for.

Few people can argue that cold calling is pleasant.

The mere notion of cold calling arouses fear, which is why most people are reluctant to do it. Add that to the fact that many cold callers lack the knowledge and ability to do it well. They think their only option is to rely on the cheesy, sleazy, salesy-sounding techniques that make people instinctively reject them.

There’s also this crazy notion that to sell over the phone, you should love rejection. Tell me how that would be possible in the real world?

Making cold calls is distasteful—and it’s dumb. In fact, after finishing this book, I want you to never use those words again when referring to professional telephone prospecting.

The great news is that soon you will be able to confidently call people you don’t know, who are not expecting your call, engage them in a conversation, and interest them in speaking with you—and ultimately buying from you. Imagine never having to place a cold call again.

But how will you know what never to do again, and what to absolutely do instead? Let’s begin by defining a cold call: It takes place when a salesperson calls someone he does not know, and—with little or no information about the prospect—robotically dials number after number, giving the same pitch to everyone who answers.

Of course, these calls are destined for failure. To illustrate the absurdity of the concept, let’s look at this scenario: An entertainment writer is assigned an interview with Beyoncé.

He begins his conversation with the world-renowned personality by saying: “So Ms. Beyoncé … or is it, um, just Beyoncé … ah, anyway, I’m going to do the same type of interview I’ve done with hundreds of other people. Now, what is it exactly that you do?”

Ridiculous, right? Such a scenario would never take place.

Now imagine this: A sales rep phones a company, gets someone she believes to be a decision maker on the phone, and says, “Hi, I’m Erin Nelson with Able Supply. We sell maintenance supplies. I’d like to tell you about our products and talk about becoming a vendor for you. Now, what is it that your company does?”

Though equally absurd, conversations like these occur every day—I know because I get them regularly. Unprepared salespeople blindly make phone calls, using tired, old-school sales techniques, hoping that because they picked up the phone and made a call that they will find someone who will agree to do what they want.

But hoping is clearly not enough.

Why Telephone Prospecting Is Both Essential, Profitable, and Still Works

Now that we have thoroughly trashed the concept of cold calling, let’s get something else perfectly clear: Telephone prospecting is essential for business sustainability and growth.

That’s right. Prospecting by phone is a necessary part of new business acquisition and growth.

Ideally, it’s not the only way, but it’s a vital component of the model. Businesses that merely react—waiting for the phone to ring, hoping a prospect will reach out because of a brilliant tweet, for web orders to stream in, while relying on business from existing customers—are not nearly as successful as those who employ proactive telephone prospecting as part of the mix.

Think about it: Every business has customers who quit buying for lots of reasons—bankruptcy, downsizing, switching vendors, death, lack of attention from the vendor, and more. Therefore, you need to replace that business just to stay even. If you hope to grow, you need to add even more clients. And telephone prospecting can do that for you—quickly.

Of course, it needs to be done in the right way—the Smart Calling way—as we’ll discuss soon.

Of course, there are detractors out there, people who believe that prospecting is dead. They use the term cold calling in their denouncements, but they usually are referring to phone prospecting in general. Some of these anti-cold-calling gurus have made names for themselves and profited by preying on the fear of cold calling.

Many of them are pushing their own programs on “social selling,” “email marketing,” “content marketing,” or whatever shiny fad makes people who are afraid of the phone feel good about themselves by doing something else instead.

These resources typically suggest either getting people to refer you to decision makers, creating social media and inbound marketing strategies and campaigns, writing lots of online content, or doing old-fashioned direct marketing to generate leads so that people contact you.

All of those activities accomplish certain objectives, and they are preferable to cold calling, given a choice. If you have the time, ability, and money to engage in those types of marketing programs to generate leads, I suggest you take advantage of them. They all work, and smart companies realize that there are many avenues that lead to new business. I use them all myself. In fact, I have personally generated millions of dollars in sales from direct-response advertising, a process wherein people I’ve never spoken to simply placed orders with us over the phone, through the mail, and online.

Here’s where I differ with some of the new-to-the-scene gurus: many of them suggest that their method is the only thing you should be doing, and you should not be using the phone.

I suggest you use a mix of them to complement your calling.

In reality, all these forms of marketing are just that: marketing. And when a sales rep—whose primary job is to sell—spends precious selling time drafting email campaigns, putting out door hangers, posting on social media sites, and completing other administrative busywork, then he is avoiding his most important function: talking to people. I’ve seen many sales reps who thought they were being productive by sending out email. In fact, they were just busy. In many instances, they were afraid to make the calls, so they deluded themselves into believing that they were engaging in sales behavior, which, in actuality, was avoidance behavior.

I love the environment we operate within today. As I’ll discuss later, social intelligence makes it so easy to place a Smart Call. Even easier than 10 years ago when this book first came out. And many forms of social media make it easier to make ourselves favorably visible to our prospects, to connect, and even frame a positive premise in the prospect’s mind before speaking with her. We’ll touch on those later. But despite what the “social selling” crowd wants you to believe, these techniques are not selling. When someone gets too caught up in ancillary activity and makes it their main focus, it is time that is not being devoted to your most high-value activity: talking to another human, in real time, speaking with your voice.

Mike Weinberg, author of the great books New Sales. Simplified., Sales Management. Simplified., and #SalesTruth says it perfectly: “Sales is a verb.” He adds, “Top performers in sales don’t wait for anything or anyone … Top performers act … Waiting is the key for new business failure.”

I couldn’t agree more. When you have identified a prospect you feel would be a great customer—someone you just know would benefit wildly from a business relationship—you may very well grow old and poor waiting forever for that person to respond to a marketing campaign.

In fact, one rep, Brian Switzer, shared how that actually happened to him after buying into one of the cold-calling-is-dead programs.

Signing up clients without prospecting to 10–20 strangers? Hell yeah. I was in.

I traded in my calling methods of business development and put that other fella’s plan into action. And when I say put it into action, I mean followed it to a T; no skipped steps, no doing it my way.

And then, crickets. Upfront I told myself to give it a full year to pay off. After one calendar year, it has been by far the worst year of my career. A total disaster. Sales were running at about an 80 percent decline, and it has been a huge blow to my financial situation.

When I hear someone definitively state that using the phone in prospecting no longer works, they instantly lose credibility with me. I wonder what else they are wrong about. They might as well say, “Electricity is dead. It no longer works.”

The fact—proven by those of us who have made fortunes doing it and those showing success right now—is that prospecting by phone works. And when done the right way—the Smart Calling way—it is wildly profitable.

According to studies by the respected training and consulting firm, the Rain Group:

• 57% of C-level buyers prefer that salespeople call them.
• About half of all directors and managers prefer the call, too.
• 69% of buyers accepted a call from new salespeople in the past 12 months.
• 82% of buyers accept meetings when salespeople reach out to them.

Telephone prospecting is the quickest, cheapest, and most interactive way to make a contact and a sale. Many of you reading this could pick up the phone right now, call someone you don’t know and who never has heard of you, and have an electronic payment transaction minutes later.

Let’s look at some of the other benefits of telephone prospecting:

• You can enter a buying process that already is in progress. You may have been on the other end of this. Think of a situation where you were several calls, weeks, or months into a sales discussion with a prospect. Perhaps you were already well into the proposal phase. Then, suddenly, you are informed another competitor has entered the picture. What? You’ve done the tilling, planting, and nurturing, and they come later attempting to harvest the crop! Well, that’s fair in business. But you want to be that guy, and prospecting does this for you.
• Phone calling creates immediate opportunities for you that you never would have had previously. Hopefully, this does not come as a shock: Only a minuscule percentage of the world’s population is looking for what you sell right now or is looking to buy from someone different. Writing a blog post or liking someone’s LinkedIn article likely won’t move them to contact you the minute you write it or do it. But a phone call can. It can start a sales process immediately—even when they were not previously considering doing anything differently.
• Calling creates future opportunities. To somewhat contradict the previous point, you can surely create immediate opportunities, but let’s be real: Most of the people you call will not enter into an active sales cycle with you at that immediate moment. Some will simply and flat out not be prospects. However, there may be a future fit with others, even if the timing is not right today. Therefore, with regular prospecting, you methodically fill your pipeline with qualified prospects whom you subsequently enter into your automated stay-in-touch marketing campaign, so that when the time is right, you are top-of-mind.
• It sharpens your sales skills. Anyone can react to an order or respond to a warm lead who contacts you. But the more you practice regularly—doing the right things—the better you become. Many salespeople left the profession over the past five years because it simply isn’t as easy as it used to be. Good prospectors, however, are always in demand.
• It’s motivating! When you take action on anything and move toward a goal—especially if it is just a bit scary—it is impossible to feel down or depressed. Your mind becomes preoccupied with the task at hand, and you inherently find ways to accomplish it.

Cold Calling Myths, Smart Calling Truths

Before we go any further, I must dispel some prospecting myths that have been perpetuated over the years. Some of these beliefs are still held by sales managers and reps, and in all cases they are just plain wrong. They contribute to all of the negative opinions that surround telephone prospecting and general sales prospecting.

Still Think Prospecting Doesn’t Work? That’s News to Sales Pros Doing It

Smart Calling Inner Circle Coaching member Sean Jones owns a successful merchant services credit card processing company, Revolution Payments.

At one point in his life, through a series of choices and circumstances, he essentially was homeless. He decided to turn his life around, moved to different city, got into reading personal development books, and got a cold calling job in the merchant services business. That led to him starting his own business and selling for himself, which he has now done for over 20 years.

It has made him a millionaire.

“I can attribute almost all of the success I’ve had in business to cold calling,” Sean said.

And, he is not resting on his success, but instead, continues to build on what got him to where he is: “Even though we have salespeople, I still prospect 50–100 new contacts per week.”

(I did a video interview with Sean. Find it in your Smart Calling Companion Course in Chapter 1, SmartCallingBook.com.)

Okay, you might be thinking, all of this makes sense. Maybe you already knew you needed to pick up the phone to accomplish whatever objective you have to meet. The problems, though—the real reasons you bought this book—might still be gnawing at you: the how part of it.

• How can you make it more palatable to call someone you do not know?
• How can you show success doing it?
• How can you overcome the fear of the no?
• How can you avoid using outdated, salesy techniques and sounding like the cheesy cold caller that everyone dreads?
• How can you avoid turning into a Jell-O-legged stutterer who sounds like a total doofus when confronted with the inevitable resistance?

The Answer: Smart Calling

The subtitle of this book is Eliminate the Fear, Failure, and Rejection from Cold Calling. I’m not being very humble when I say that I’m proud to have come up with such a great title. However, it’s not about me. It’s about you and about how, together, we’re going to do just what the title promises.

Let’s define in three steps exactly what Smart Calling is:

1. Acquiring intelligence about people—and their situations—companies, and industries prior to speaking with a decision maker.
2. Using that information within a proven prospecting and sales process, engaging in a consultative conversation that puts both you and the prospect at ease.
3. Consequently helping prospects take actions (meeting with you and buying from you) that they feel good about and from which they gain value.

As a result:

• You get through to more buyers, more often, since gatekeepers not only provide you with information but also become part of the process and your sales team.
• Buyers are more receptive initially, in the first 10 to 20 seconds of the call—the time during which most calls fail.
• Buyers don’t view you as a typical salesperson or vendor but rather as someone who has their best interests in mind and can provide real value and return on investment.
• You become more comfortable with your calls and confident in what you say—even in difficult situations.
• You will never be rejected again. (You might be skeptical about this one, but you’ll see exactly how and why this is the case later in the book.)

Smart Calling versus Cold Calling

Let’s look at two sales calls from the same company.

One is a dumb call, very typical of what many salespeople do every day. The other is a Smart Caller who uses the process, strategy, and tactics we cover in this book.