Cold Calling-it works and its hard
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I wanted to share a recent story. I cold call on the traditional muni bond script. I call attorney’s and business owners. When i get their voicemail I leave a message for them to call back–yes they do call back, i track it and find that 10% of all voicemails i leave are returned. Recently i called an attorney and left a message on voice mail, he called back the same day, we had a 45 min conversation re munis. Long story short, he was in a managed account for munis with too high a fee structure for the maturities he was in.
I met him a week later- he has over 500K in the mgd bond account, and he was all set to transfer--i thought it too good to be true, it was. He fired the bond mgrs and moved the assets to another broker dealer where he already had accounts. After further conversations with him he remained open to me showing him bonds/new issues when I find them, as the bonds mature at the old place he will buy from me. I ramped up my cold calling activities late in 2009- it took roughly 3500 dials to get to this guy. I am disappointed he didn't transfer, my call to him helped him save real money, but it takes time to develop a relationship. He is now a top prospect in my pipeline, fully qualified, who I've met that I will make a client. For all of you out there looking for magic potions, clever phone scripts, and silver bullets I have it for you right here for free--work hard and be ferociously persistent, you will find people to do business with you.Wow, what a prick. You need to make it clear to these people that if you do the work for them and you have what they need, then they purchase the product from you.
Actually ASK THEM the question: Joe, I’m going to spend the time going through your accounts and if it’s one thing about me you’ll find out it’s that I"m thorough, now if I see any opportunities or alternatives to what you’re currently doing, and you do want to make a change, and I have what fits the bill, I’d ask you to place the business with me. Is that fair?
and WAIT for them to answer you. If they don’t answer yes, then DO NOT PROCEED because they are not worthwhile to work with.
Usually I would agree with your sentiments. However, in this case I haven't invested much time in this person yet. If, after a reasonable amount of attempts I find that he is not sincere I would move on. The real point of my post was to motivate those out there who have doubts about cold calling. Leaving that voice mail led to an appointment with a high net worth individual. My gut feel is that he will be a client one day. As much as I'd like to meet a prospect and convert him on the first meeting I don't think that is reality. All we can ask for in sales is to have as many appointments as we can, and you will close a portion of them.Wow, what a prick. You need to make it clear to these people that if you do the work for them and you have what they need, then they purchase the product from you.
Actually ASK THEM the question: Joe, I’m going to spend the time going through your accounts and if it’s one thing about me you’ll find out it’s that I"m thorough, now if I see any opportunities or alternatives to what you’re currently doing, and you do want to make a change, and I have what fits the bill, I’d ask you to place the business with me. Is that fair?
and WAIT for them to answer you. If they don’t answer yes, then DO NOT PROCEED because they are not worthwhile to work with.
[quote=ccmachine]I wanted to share a recent story. I cold call on the traditional muni bond script. I call attorney’s and business owners. When i get their voicemail I leave a message for them to call back–yes they do call back, i track it and find that 10% of all voicemails i leave are returned. Recently i called an attorney and left a message on voice mail, he called back the same day, we had a 45 min conversation re munis. Long story short, he was in a managed account for munis with too high a fee structure for the maturities he was in.
I met him a week later- he has over 500K in the mgd bond account, and he was all set to transfer--i thought it too good to be true, it was. He fired the bond mgrs and moved the assets to another broker dealer where he already had accounts. After further conversations with him he remained open to me showing him bonds/new issues when I find them, as the bonds mature at the old place he will buy from me. I ramped up my cold calling activities late in 2009- it took roughly 3500 dials to get to this guy. I am disappointed he didn't transfer, my call to him helped him save real money, but it takes time to develop a relationship. He is now a top prospect in my pipeline, fully qualified, who I've met that I will make a client. For all of you out there looking for magic potions, clever phone scripts, and silver bullets I have it for you right here for free--work hard and be ferociously persistent, you will find people to do business with you. [/quote] Even though you didn't get the account you still made the calls to get the appointment. On the new households you do bring on as clients from cold calling what is the avg. account size? Thanks,Took you 3500 dials to get one guy who is in the pipe? Correct me if I read that wrong.
No. I have many other prospects that I got during those 3500 dials. Fortunately or not I consider him one of my best prospects, we'll see how it pans out.Took you 3500 dials to get one guy who is in the pipe? Correct me if I read that wrong.
Can we safely assume that you have not found much success since your "success story" is a person who is not a client?
"However, in this case I haven't invested much time in this person yet. If, after a reasonable amount of attempts I find that he is not sincere I would move on." A few 2 minute phone calls qualifies as not spending much time. You have already spent 45 minutes on the phone with him and met him in person. You've invested lots of time with him and following this time that you spent with him, he made a proactive decision to do business with a different B/D. Cold calling works, but this is not an example of it.[quote=BioFreeze]
[quote=ccmachine][quote=Otane]Took you 3500 dials to get one guy who is in the pipe? Correct me if I read that wrong. [/quote]
No. I have many other prospects that I got during those 3500 dials. Fortunately or not I consider him one of my best prospects, we’ll see how it pans out.[/quote]Sounds like cold calling doesn’t work. [/quote]
Your compliance dept ties your hands in regard to advertising, or mine does at least. Cold calling is one of the few avenues left, and it is probably the least used. I think if you don’t call you are dead…unless you connected or join a team.
No. I have many other prospects that I got during those 3500 dials. Fortunately or not I consider him one of my best prospects, we'll see how it pans out.[/quote][quote=ccmachine][quote=Otane]Took you 3500 dials to get one guy who is in the pipe? Correct me if I read that wrong.
Sounds like cold calling doesn't work.
[/quote]
I built my business off cold calling a long time ago. 1000 phone calls a day.
NY is almost impossible now to make it cold calling. If I had to start out today cold calling I doubt I’d even make it and I was real good back then.
I’d only cold call on muni’s. Keep it simple in something they are going to understand. I never left a voicemail. Maybe it works and I missed the boat back then on that idea.
Good luck
[quote=BioFreeze]
[quote=NY Guy]I built my business off cold calling a long time ago. 1000 phone calls a day.
NY is almost impossible now to make it cold calling. If I had to start out today cold calling I doubt I’d even make it and I was real good back then.
I’d only cold call on muni’s. Keep it simple in something they are going to understand. I never left a voicemail. Maybe it works and I missed the boat back then on that idea.
Good luck
[/quote]
I call bullsh*t on 1,000/day.
[/quote] You can call BS all you want. You’d be and you are wrong.
Myself and a bunch of others were confined to a room seperate from the main broker offices ( not much unlike the movie wall st ) with only partitions seperating us and all we did was dial all day for prospects and accounts. In by 7:30 calling Dr’s by 8:30am, business owners in the morning homes in the afternoon and night till 8pm and homes on saturdays 10am-2pm
We had call sheets we had to fill out and check off for each one of our dials,each one of our connects, each one of our leads and we had to hand it into our sales manager each day. In the beginning for every 10 dials you ended up with 1 connect ( person you were actually looking for.) for every 10 connects you’d get 1 lead roughly and for ecery 10 leads you’d get 1 account later on roughly if you were good. After a year or so when you got good at qualifying a lead you’d get less leads because you’d know who was a piker or wasnt worth the effort and you’d open more accounts on less leads
We had a big board up on our wall which tracked weekly new accounts,new assets for the week and gross commision ( although gross wasnt considered important back then because we had very few clients )
We a master list with overall rankings of all of us and if you were at the bottom of the list after a certain amount of time you got canned.
You dont know me. I dont BS
One day I started out at 8 AM with a list that was not scrubbed using Gryphon. The second I heard the first word from gryphon I would hang up. I dialed my fat asss off until 8 PM without a break. I dialed just under 600. I cant imagine its possible without some kind of automation to do more. If you do 1000 you are scoring world record dialing days, that’s huge!. A regular 12 hour day dialing and smiling for me would be around 350 dials.
What the hell is the diff how many dials he made. He made his point that he did a lot of cold calling on a daily consistent basis, there is no reason to not believe that, most successful people in this busioness did that.
Geez, the focus on minutia is unbelievable. Even the original poster who you guys are slamming...the guy is trying to be helpful. I know him personally and he has been very successful over the years cold calling , a lot of the guys on this board who are in the biz 2-3 years can learn from him. Some of you guys really focus on the wrong things if you want these boards to be useful. Thats how threads get off track and useless. JMHO[quote=Sportsfreakbob]What the hell is the diff how many dials he made. He made his point that he did a lot of cold calling on a daily consistent basis, there is no reason to not believe that, most successful people in this busioness did that.
Geez, the focus on minutia is unbelievable. Even the original poster who you guys are slamming...the guy is trying to be helpful. I know him personally and he has been very successful over the years cold calling , a lot of the guys on this board who are in the biz 2-3 years can learn from him. Some of you guys really focus on the wrong things if you want these boards to be useful. Thats how threads get off track and useless. JMHO[/quote] You call what I wrote slamming him? You may want to reread it when you're finished menstruating.Gaddock,
First of all i wasnt just referring to you, what set me off was the other guy who i consistently ignore because i know what he is, (the one that called him a liar). You on the other hand have proven yourself to be intelligent through all your posts. So I'll take you at your word. Maybe i took it wrong, it wasnt direct slamming, but seemed to me to imply something less than positive. But you have to admit the original poster on this thread has been slammed. And what I said about that is fact. Oh, one more thing, i dont menstruate, I'm past menopause.[quote=Sportsfreakbob]
Oh, one more thing, i dont menstruate, I'm past menopause.[/quote] This place gets so serious and cut throat sometimes I can see how one can get sucked in.One day I started out at 8 AM with a list that was not scrubbed using Gryphon. The second I heard the first word from gryphon I would hang up. I dialed my fat asss off until 8 PM without a break. I dialed just under 600. I cant imagine its possible without some kind of automation to do more. If you do 1000 you are scoring world record dialing days, that’s huge!. A regular 12 hour day dialing and smiling for me would be around 350 dials.
We didnt have automation. Heck I had to share a computer back then with the person next to me. It's doable. You can make more than 1 call a minute because back then when I started I'm not even sure if there was (call waiting) on phones so if you got busy signal you just went on to the next call.
I was trained originally by someone who had previously worked at lehman and basically you hung up after the 3rd ring and went to the next call. Also if the wife answered the phone and she said the husband wasnt home and you couldnt get the work # you just hung up. ( no caller ID back then )
You cant do any of that nowadays but that's the way it was back then. ( kind of like the wild west of cold calling ). None of us had really any clients so they there wasnt anything to take up your time. Just dial get leads and pitch bonds to prospects which doesnt take up time. And most of my pitching for new issues of bonds was on saturdays when retail order periods were on mondays but we got the scales on fridays
we also used 2 phones @ the same time, one in each ear, whichever side picked up first hung up the other. We had to make 200 contacts a day.
Just out of school I got a job with a firm called Stuart James. I moved to Atlanta. The first day I show up the doors are locked and a notice stating it was closed down by the IRS for tax evasion. By that afternoon the new firm, Chatfield Dean rose from the ashes. There were a couple guys there that did the two phone thing. I was out of there as soon as I found out what was really going down. It wasn’t good.
wow I remember the name chatfield dean. Damn those were the old days
In NY and Long Island there were a bunch of chopshops. A couple used to use the name Goldman in them. A.S Goldman or something like that. The you had your stratton and also continental securities which was a big one.
A friend of mine has a cousin dumb as a stump who worked at continental and then left to start his own chop shop with a few other guys and now has multi millions.
Unreal