@artsy23 There are ones that I avoid. For example, any type of medical/dental office. The decision maker, the doctor, is the decider. Sometimes the office manager might be, but usually the doctor. They are seeing patients and have no time, so I can never get through to them, not in enough quantity to make it work. I've talked to people who sell to doctors, and they go right to the office, but they sell stuff like equipment that costs $100,000 type of thing so it makes sense.
I don't like restaurants at all for a number of reasons. First, the owners are rarely there overall. Then, most open at 10 or 11 am, so you can't call from 8 to 10 or 11 am. Then you can't talk to them from 11-2 because of the lunch crowd keeps them busy, then by 5:30 pm, they are being crushed by dinner crowds. So basically, you have from 2pm to 5pm to reach them. They are easier to reach than doctors but still not easy.
I don't sell to large enterprise companies. That might be good but it takes a long time to reach the right person, and then corporations that are enterprise level take forever to make a decision - you have to have a conference call with 20 people to sell them 2 pencils for 10 cents kind of thing.
So I just target small/medium sized businesses. You can always get through to the decision-maker, or head of the department. So if you have a company of 10 people you will get straight through to the owner, so therefore decision-maker. If there's 100 people in the company, you might have a tech department with 5 or 8 people in it, or warehouse/operations with 7 or 12 people in it. So you can easily get right through to the IT manager or Operations manager. And you can also get through to the president as well sometimes.
You really just have to test the industry out, I don't know how difficult it is to reach people in different industries, but if you try it out for a month and get valid reasons why the particular niche is bad, then drop it. Don't "hang in there" with cold calling. But then again, I will do 100-200 calls in a day and get a super good actual statistical data points to make a judgement. I won't call up for a week and only do 10 calls per day and decide if it is good or bad.
The statistical sample is not good enough. I don't run it through some kind of app that determines if I have a valid sample or the standard deviations, I just know if I call up 1000 people and can't get through to anyone, or maybe 20 people, fuck that industry, at least for cold calling. That type of industry, like doctors, requires in-person office visits, going to conventions, joining medical associations, sponsoring medical events and that kind of shit. Not cold calling.
If you have a service or product you can ship anywhere, not just local, then you can call anywhere in the USA or wherever country you're located in.
And I will do 200 dials in a day, to make it worth it. doing 200 over 2 weeks isn't going to work. They statistical odds don't work out that way. Because you can make 200 dials for three days and get 2 people interested, but then the next seven days you might get 15 people who say that they are interested each day. But if you make 200 calls over 2 weeks and only get 2 people interested, you will most likely erroneously think cold calling doesn't work, or the industry that you are calling is no good, because no interest at all from anyone over 2 weeks
seems like it sucks, but it may or may not because that's not enough calls for a valid statistical sampling. You have to make 150-200 per day for a week to an industry to really know.
If your call sucks as in the actual call, that will make you think cold calling doesn't work, which isn't true. Check out Jeremy Miner videos on how.
