Ask HN: How to learn to sell?
Hi.<p>I have made over 100,000 cold calls to small businesses over the years.<p>It works.<p>The issue is the discipline, and time.<p>I can call 200-250 calls per day maximum, which breaks down to 25 calls per hour, 12.5 per half hour, 6.25 per 15 minutes, or 2.0833 calls per 5 minutes...2 per 5 minutes. This is numbers dialed, and NOT conversations. Clearly this is do-able. While I can do that many, I find that about 150 calls is ideal, because you want longer conversations, which means interest on the prospect&#x27;s part.<p>I get anywhere from 8 to 12 small business owners who are interested per day. Sometimes less, but that&#x27;s statistics for you.<p>The goal is to have longer conversations, of course, sometimes they go on for 1.5 hour conversations, and sometimes I can make 20 calls in 15 minutes because they are all &quot;No thanks (click)* or voice mail. NEVER leave voice mail - nobody ever calls back, I&#x27;ve tried thousands of times and never got a call back. Sometimes I have a bunch of long conversations on a day and will only call 80 dials, which is fine, because I&#x27;m having long involved conversations, which is the entire point. If I talk with 2 people per day, each with a 4 hour conversation, wow, nice. But that&#x27;s not reality, or close to it.<p>The best way for me to look at it is over time, you see what your average sale is (can start with plain sale but eventually want to look at CLV - customer lifetime value) to calculate. You take the number of sales per month, divide it by the number of phone calls. So for example (just an example), for each $2000 of revenue that you earn, you make 100 phone calls. This means every single phone call you make $20, right? Every call averages out to that - every single call. So the more calls you make per minute, the more money you actually make. Every single phone call, whether a hangup, someone saying no, a voice mail...every single call, you make $20. So when you hang up the phone, say to yourself, &quot;I just made $20 with that 2 second phone call.&quot; This motivates me, at least.<p>I know that BlueTie suggest going door-to-door for B2B which is what you are doing, and I&#x27;ve done that. I have 3 problems with it.<p>Here are the issues: 1) With what I do, I have had business owners tell me that they have multiple people come in per week, doing the exact same thing, trying to sell them something that is similar. At first, I thought that they were lying just to get rid of me, but I went to so many businesses who said the same thing, that I had to conclude that they were telling the truth. 2) Compared to phone calls, it takes a LONG time to walk from one building to the next. Instead of calling on 25 per hour, it is a lot less because of all the walking and waiting for the owner sometimes - they&#x27;re with a client, in the back room, not there, etc. 3) I live in a major city, one of the biggest in the USA. The commercial corridors are far away from each other. I work in one and have hit it up, and other ones close by, but you soon have to start traveling farther and farther for more commercial streets.<p>When I cold call, I don&#x27;t have travel time - either from walking between businesses, or traveling to farther and farther away commercial corridors that I have not hit up yet.<p>So the upshot is that maybe I can do 20-40 location visits, but I can make 250 phone calls. Way more opportunity with calling. No matter what way you slice it, it is still a numbers game. You will not get any sales in walk-ins or phone calls if you don&#x27;t make any walking or calling. The more you do either one, the more potential opportunities.<p>Also, it is all about who you click with. I&#x27;ve had both phone calls and walk ins where the owner has said, &quot;Huh, usually with most people, I just say no thank you as a rule. Not sure why I want to hear from you but tell me what you do.&quot; This happens on both phone calls and walk-ins. It&#x27;s because for some multiple number of reasons. They are subconsciously ready to buy which has nothing to do with you. They &quot;click&quot; with you, which has everything to do with you and his or her personalities clicking. And so on. There are multiple reasons, not just one.<p>Another thing that I have learned about B2B walk-ins is it completely matters about what that commercial area is like. If it contains a bunch of chain stores - McDonalds, Dick&#x27;s Sporting Goods, Staples - a lot of large companies - that&#x27;s a waste of time, as the owner is not there and everything is done at the HQ, for the most part. So these types of commercial locations are to be avoided. So you want to do commercial corridors&#x2F;zoning where there are a lot of small businesses where you know that there is a good chance the owner will be there.<p>This next one sounds sexist, but it&#x27;s what I have found to be true. I&#x27;ve done the work, walked the walk. I have tried to do walk-ins at fancy-pants parts of town - very high-end. I have learned that this is a waste of time, because a good percentage of them are businesses started as a &quot;hobby&quot; by wives of wealthy men. The woman has to do something while the man earns the big bucks, so the guy buys his wife a store. And, she never comes in and has employees to do everything. She and her husband live in a fancy high-income part of town, so they are wealthy, and there&#x27;s no real <i>need</i> for the woman to be at the location in order to not hire one more employee. They can easily hire another employee to do the owner&#x27;s work. BUT, this is in super high-income areas where I work. I thought it would be good, but owners are never there, so waste of time.<p>What you want for walk-in sales is to find the zoning where there are a lot of businesses side by side, and they are not big box stores or franchises, nor super high income. What you look for is places that are kind of on the lower end, but not poverty zoned places of course. When you are in the lower end streets, the owner is always there. Like, for example where your auto repair shops are usually all located on a main street and there are a lot of businesses that are similar, where the owner is there.<p>That is my experience with walkins for B2B.<p>I&#x27;ve done walking to B2C and have done flyers, that is so worth it, because you can tape flyers on every door (not allowed to use mailboxes) or put on every car window. I&#x27;ve had huge luck with that. Make sure it is in areas where there are a lot of street parking and apartment buildings - going door to door in a residential part of town where everyone parks in their own garage and there&#x27;s no cars on the street is not good, plus you have to take a lot of time to walk up the driveway to the front door where you tape a flyer to the door - takes a lot more time, and it&#x27;s not really something you can do fast, plus people might call up cops because they think you are casing the neighborhood.<p>.<p>With phone calls, again I can call up to 250 dials per day, reach a live person, and do it anywhere in the area, next town, across the state, across the nation with a phone call.<p>There are tons of places to get leads, free or paid, that&#x27;s the least of one&#x27;s worries. I got probably 50,000 free leads in 3 or 4 days by doing some website scraping. You can do google searches for spreadsheets with companies. So, for example, you can do a google search for file extensions for excel spreadsheets for dentists by entering &quot;&#x27;dentist&#x27; filetype:xls&quot; and you will get a lot of results for dentists. I clicked on a dental referral list in North Carolina (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medicaid.ncdhhs.gov&#x2F;documents&#x2F;files&#x2F;dentist-list-medicaid-2016-02&#x2F;open" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medicaid.ncdhhs.gov&#x2F;documents&#x2F;files&#x2F;dentist-list-med...</a>) and downloaded a list of about 2050 dentists in North Carolina that accept Medicaid patients. It&#x27;s not for medicaid patients only, they accept any kind of patient, so you have 2050 dentists in excel spreadsheet that you can immediately import into your CRM and start dialing for dollars.<p>Here are a bunch from Little Rock when I do (&quot;business list&quot; phone filetype:xls) and then click on the link (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.littlerock.gov&#x2F;media&#x2F;2422&#x2F;business-list.xls" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.littlerock.gov&#x2F;media&#x2F;2422&#x2F;business-list.xls</a>) and you will get 12,818 businesses with name, address, phone, and emails.<p>You might not want Little Rock Arkansas businesses, but if you have a product that any small business can use, anywhere, then it doesn&#x27;t matter.<p>Sometimes when you look up one thing on Google search, but you get another, but that&#x27;s ok if you can sell to any business anywhere.<p>.<p>Also, you better get a great CRM if you start calling. I recommend Zoho. It is super inexpensive at $45 per month for ZohoOne, and you get about 40 different <i>really</i> good other apps. Screaming deal.<p>There are way more ways than this, though. These were just examples to show you. You can go to list brokers and buy names and addresses, for example, but you can do a much finer granular search this way - industry SIC code, companies with between 8 to 15 employees, located in zip code or metro area, or state, or whatever. It&#x27;s not too expensive - information is cheap.<p>.<p>Like everyone else says - Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount is the man.<p>I say that the best way is to read that book, but start calling. It always is awkward at first, but after a week of calling it gets to be robotic and easy. A great offer is the best way to get attention. Not a generic offer.<p>Oh, and like others say - a small gift does woners, or sending a birthday card or sympathy card IN THE REGULAR  MAIL, and NOT email is fantastic. I send $10 Starbucks cards if someone is real close &quot;Thank you for the opportunity for xyz&quot; kind of thing - all personlized and referring to something we talked about. I&#x27;ve sent Congratulations cards to someone who told me his wife just gave birth, Sympathy and Get Well cards, Anniversary cards. People are SHOCKED with notes. Many times, I&#x27;ll send a card and they will say &quot;You are the ONLY one who said anything, none of my friends or family said anything, and you are just some sales guy.&quot; and I get the business, of course, because I&#x27;m NOT just some &quot;sales guy&quot; is what they think - I care. And I do.  I know one guy who sent those huge bags of M&amp;Ms and offer either peanut or plain. That worked super well for him.