Why the AK, LZ phone books are the worst prospect list you could ever use…
“Haha!” you say… “I’ve already got the White Pages ready so I don’t need your list building tips Rob!”.
Great for you (EPIC FAIL coming right up!). And best of luck ok, because you’re absolutely going to need it.
If you are one of those people who totally believe that there is no better phone list to use than the phone directory, I hope that you have boundless energy to waste and very low expectations of what you are going to achieve in any reasonable period of time . I’ve seen far too many sales people fall flat on their face or burn out because they can’t handle the long dreary days of making call after call to people they don’t know and who don’t want to speak with them.
Well trained gatekeepers (ie Receptionists, PA’s and Assistants) can easily tell you that you don’t know a thing about their business or the person you ACTUALLY need to speak to right from the first 4 seconds you’re on the phone to them. Even if you go for an advertorial type publication like the Yellow Pages, you still won’t really know much about the company you’re calling or who the boss is unless you’re calling micro-businesses like tradespeople etc.
Why would you waste your valuable time doing this then if it’s not only ineffective but incredibly painful too? Even if your boss is only paying you a small hourly rate and doesn’t care about how long it takes you, YOU can’t afford to waste your life like that. I’ve been there. In my early years of selling i’d had a few employers who thought that my annual salary was as cheap as chips so they didn’t care how effective I was day to day because they thought they were getting the business’ name out there by calling me all day. There’s two very big problems with this.
- If your boss is like this, they’re wasting money no matter how little (or a lot) they’re paying you.
- Your life and time on this earth is precious and should never be just given away because that’s what you’ll be doing day in, day out unless you take charge of your sales & how you go about it.
- Building an effective list is so vitally important before making sales or appointment setting calls. The biggest reasons why you shouldn’t use a phone directory as a sales call list in my view are as follows:
- With the exception of micro-businesses where the only person representing the business is named in the listing, you won’t know who to ask for. This can be overcome by doing some preparation calls first but that’s something I’ll cover in one of my other articles. PS: If you are calling micro-businesses like tradesmen, advisors, accountants, doctors etc from the phone book, remember that they expect to be talking to a client when someone calls, not a salesperson, so be very careful with your tact and approach or be prepared to be hung up on. Which leads me to my next point.
- People being called from the phone directory (especially if they are a gatekeeper) are usually sick and tired of being called by random sales people and many take great joy in playing games with callers or abusing them over the phone. Worse yet, you might only make it half-way through your first sentence before being ‘shut down’.
- The phone directory is not very well laid out from a targeting perspective. Phone directories are designed so that people who know the alphabet for their language (usually English but many other languages are done in the same way) can search for a name of a person or company very quickly. It’s not designed so that people ‘dialling for dollars’ can make the most of their time. The best of a bad bunch is to use the Yellow Pages which are based around industry or service categories, but even then, they are bunched in all together of differing sizes and specialties and locations. All up, this is a random and haphazard way of making phone calls.
- Phone directories can often be out of date leaving you dialing numbers that are disconnected or changed.
- It’s very hard to track who you’ve called, what you asked them, who you spoke to (or need to speak to) and whether they fit your target market.
You don’t need to know rocket surgery to understand that you could waste a lot of your valuable time trying to randomly call people in this way. Your time is absolutely best-spent, by preparing a table sheet or spreadsheet (if you don’t have a CRM system to use) to write down all of the details you need for each call. This usually means a list with at least the Company Name, Phone Number, Address, Website, Receptionist Name, Decision Maker’s name, Email address column, Call back date column, Facsimile Number etc. This isn’t an exhaustive list and for some sales people it won’t be wholly suitable but customize it to meet your needs. The other thing of course is that you won’t always have all of these details available before you call. The reason for putting in all of these columns is so that you know what you’ll need to get while you’re on the phone with them and have a space to record these details as you go.
I hope that this article gives a clear picture of why there’s much better ways to build lists and make cold calls than using the phone directory!