Yesterday subscriber and fellow freedom crusader messaged me with some great questions. (thank you Angela!)
I thought it might be helpful to answer them in a blog post.
Here we go.
Do you do cold calling from a list of leads?
I don’t do cold calling. Cold calling is when you call people who have no idea who you are.
I prefer to call people who know who I am.
I consider this calling warm leads.
It works like this.
You give your prospects something that can help them like a video, audio, podcast, PDF, etc.
They go through your information, learn things that can help them and in the process, hopefully get to know, like and trust you.
This way, when you call them, more than likely they are happy to receive your phone call and have a conversation with you.
Much different experience than calling cold leads.
Do you have any guidelines about the time of day to call (or not to call) your leads?
I think nowadays where everyone is connected to the cell phone, you can reach most people most of the time.
I connected with a great guy named Tyler yesterday morning at around 9:00 AM.
That being said, Saturdays and Sundays are days many people are not working so it stands to reason those are great days for connecting with prospects.
When I was building my first big team, I would call every week day at 4 PM MST and that seemed to work out pretty well.
That would connect with me east coasters at 6 PM and Central Standard time folks at 5 PM, just as they were getting off from work.
If you really want to up your chances of reaching people, you can call at a time when all time zones have past the 5:00 PM mark, but because I have family and want to have evenings with them, I would call a bit earlier and that seemed to work just fine.
Or what days /times to avoid calling?
Personally I never make calls on Sunday, only because those are church, family & rest days for me – but I know many who have great success calling prospects on Sundays.
I think the main thing is to be conscious of time zones and don’t call too late in the evening, say after 10:00 PM at night.
In Idaho where I live, I’m 2 hours behind EST, so If calling in the evening time, I would always stop before 8:00 PM.
If calling in the morning times, remember that Hawaii is 4 or so hours behind, so make sure you don’t call them in the middle of the night (or early morning for you).
Do you buy leads?
I don’t buy leads. I’ve always found it much more effective to generate them on my own.
I have purchased leads several times in the past and have never been very impressed with their quality.
Here’s how lots of home business leads you’ll buy work.
Someone is on a website and a pop up opens asking them if they’d like to enter in a drawing for a free ipad or something.
They enter their info, and bam, that’s your lead.
Not great right?
Contrast that to a lead that you know…
- Likes home business
- Is serious about building an income from home
- Knows you
- Likes you
- Trusts you
- Wants to learn from you
Quite a difference in quality right?
Generating your own leads does take a bit more skill and work, but in my experience it’s totally worth it.
Like Seth Godin says, “The long cut is the short cut.”
Hope these help and thanks for submitting those great questions Angela.
Oh and if you haven’t done so yet, I highly recommend going through my internet recruiting bootcamp.
It’s free and gives you a great overview of the process I’ve used since 2009 that has worked and continues to work extremely well.