I find myself thinking a lot lately about marketing since technically it is in a broad sense the industry I work in. All of my client work is marketing. —Anyway, I just received a cold call about accounting services. The caller talked about what they offer and did not ask me about my company until I volunteered something like, “I’m pretty small, so I don’t really need that right now.” Only then did the caller say they worked to help with startups, etc. That’s when my skepticism meter started to register.
Cold Calling 101 teaches us that we must ask questions of potential clients in order to understand their needs and address those needs. But this method is nullified by an introduction that turns into a monologue about the marketer’s services. Save that for advertising. You had me on the phone, right there!
I am not in the market for outside accounting services now, but I will be in the mid-term. I have some people in mind already, but I’m not sure how a cold call in the middle of the week might affect my decision making. Maybe if she had kept it short and was ready for me to say no, she could have told me about their website (with an easy-to-remember domain name) that I could have written down and reference later on when I would be ready to do some research about local accountants.
That wouldn’t be a half-bad approach for landing some cold-call clients my way, either.
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