We’re overdue for pointing our readers in the direction of life in the middle, a blog by Paul Colman. Paul is an amusing and perceptive commentator on marketing, martial arts and other things. He’s a client of ours. And he’s apparently quite hard. But despite these things, we’d be recommending his blog as worth reading. Because it is.
He added an interesting post recently on cold calling.
However you look at it, cold calling is shit, really. I’ve been on both ends of it. It’s miserable having to call people you don’t know and try to sell them stuff. And it’s depressing getting a call from someone you don’t know who says, ‘And how are you today?’ when we both know that he doesn’t care how I am and he’s about to follow a script designed to part me inexorably from my time and my company’s money. So the two of us understand that he’s going to have to speak for as long as possible without drawing breath because basic politeness will probably stop me from either interrupting or simply hanging up, however tempting these options might be. And then I love those assumptive ‘questions’ in the script – ‘Is one of your company’s objectives to maximise revenue from blue chip new clients?’
‘No, our objectives are to carve figurines out of cheese and buy as many as possible of those scary little ornaments made of real, dead but somehow embalmed or glazed frogs playing little musical instruments.’
When you give an answer like this there’s usually a bit of a pause on the other end of the phone… And then you realise you’re not being clever or funny, you’re just making their already unpleasant job even worse.
Paul’s cold-calling guidelines look pretty good to me and I’d commend them to anyone who might be thinking of cold-calling wieden + kennedy. Unfortunately, in my exerience, most of the people who cold-call me haven’t gone to the trouble to look at our blog or website. So they probably won’t get this tip.
