Many companies do not know how to do cold calling correctly and many people do not like to do cold calling because they feel there are bothering the customer. As a franchisor we often opened new franchise businesses with a marketing program, which included listing all the potential companies our business franchise might do business with them the area.

Once this list was established we try to find contact names and contact each company directly. Generally we try to do cold calling on some types of clientele and others we preferred more direct marketing and actually stopping in the business itself.

It is important to establish goals in cold calling. Each company should determine what those goals are. For instance if you are selling a product or service which is rather complicated and it needs further explanation for the customer you are cold calling and therefore your objectives would be to try to turn 40 percent of the cold calls into sales appointment meetings.

In our case our goal was to get the franchisee 10,000 to 20,000 worth of monthly gross income in services. And we attached our cold calling efforts to our overall marketing program goals. We later found out it was easier to have goals prior to the main goal during cold calling so that our marketing team would make sure they got to a significant number of decision-makers.

If we did not reach our goal we would send our people out to contact them directly by stopping in their office. This was not easy and therefore the team wanted to make sure that they got through to the decision maker during the cold call. No matter how you decide to set up your goals for cold calling you are advised to at least have some goals to help foster efficiency and keep the sales team on track. Please consider this in 2006.