Just got told to go f*** myself after cold calling a business owner...
November 13, 2024
by a searcher from INSEAD in San Francisco, CA, USA
...and I didn't die! Nothing meaningful happened at all, actually. I just moved on with my life.
Some background: I'm in the middle of a cold outreach campaign and at the point where I'm finally "dialing for dollars". Had to psych myself up a bit since I hate cold calling / rejection. Out of the 10 calls I made today:
- 5 people didn't pick up
- 2 people said they weren't interested, but in a friendly way
- 2 people literally hung up on me after being rude
...and one person sat on the phone with me for 40 minutes talking all about his business and life, no NDA required. He's also trying to sell, within my geography, and I've got a meeting scheduled with him for lunch next week.
Cold calling sucks. Rejection sucks. But not trying sucks even worse than failure.
Anyone else out there dialing for dollars? What's been your best (or worst) cold call experience?
from The University of Chicago in Chicago, IL, USA
2 things come to mind:
1. call him back and call him out. Don’t hesitate to drop f-bombs yourself. Sometimes you fight fire with ice but some times it’s better to fight fire with fire. It’s counterintuitive but it works and you have nothing to lose yourself at this point
2. don’t be hesitate to train your interns to do cold calls with you. We had a team of 5 interns or so and we called them the cold calls killers. I had so much phone doing cold calls with my team and we did a good job gamifying
I closed my first trad search fund deal via cold calls. I was doing up to 700 emails per a week and attended about 10 trade shows but it was what cold calls that got the job.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the stats. Be more action-biased
from City University of New York, Bernard M. Baruch College in San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA