Work At Home Experts

Work At Home Strategies for new businesses often involve the dreaded process of “cold calling.” Just the very presence of the word “cold” in “cold calling” can be intimidating.

For the home-based entrepreneur, cold calling can mean phoning unintroduced prospects, or even venturing out of your home office and dropping flyers at the front desk of a business you would like to work with.

Cold calling doesn’t have to be so, well, cold. Entrepreneur Magazine’s Mark Henricks has some advice for the cold-calling home based business owner:

Only about 4 percent of cold sales calls are likely to turn into sales, says Dennis Kyle, CEO of Avon Lake, Ohio, sales training and consulting firm Positive Results. To beat these odds, generate better leads by carefully researching the market and warming up cold calls with a blended marketing campaign of e-mail, regular mail and other channels.

That should mean 12 percent to 20 percent of sales calls produce a hot prospect likely to buy, Kyle says. But sales will still take stick-to-itiveness. “A lot of it comes down to pure persistence,” adds Kyle.  “That’s never going to [change].”

For Anderson Toney, a New York City image and etiquette consultant, cold calls generated more customers after she took communication courses that taught her how to listen and allow prospects to express their needs. “Prior to taking those courses, I would just plow through cold calls because I hated them,” says Toney, 40, who employs one other person at the Anderson Center for Image & Etiquette. “After taking those courses, my closing percentage went up 300 percent.”

(Entrepreneur Magazine); Image: http://www.wpclipart.com/telephone/telephone_cartoon.png