Welcome to this week's NeverColdCall.com Mailbag by #1 Bestselling Author Frank Rumbauskas

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***Success Story***

Hi Frank,

Thank you I just started working for a steel frame
company for residential builders so I have to target
one group - I started droping off flyers but it took
me 3 hrs to hand out 3 flyers since the builders are
not close to each other - I went to a personal letter
from the directory of builders in my area and so far
I only sent out 60 letters and I have 2 appointments
and they asked me to stop by so I can prepare a
proposal - I was in control and I was not "begging" to
quote them.

Also I contacted the local Business Journal and they
jumped all over this - we will be featured in the next
edition - it has me as a contact and should bring in
many leads.

Next a web site will be set up since I am not
restricted to my area. I can go nationally on
my product.

Thank you again.

Ken Faulkner
Rapid Steel Framing Consultant

My comments:

Isn't life easier when people are coming to YOU to buy, the media is promoting YOU for free and getting dramatically more leads than advertising ever could, and you've barely scratched the surface of the ideas laid out in the book and CDs?

Congratulations on putting the ideas and techniques into ACTION! So many people, I'm afraid, read not just my book but many others as well and never bother to implement any of them.

Some tips going forward:

It's good to see that you're really following my advice in the "Take Back Your Power" chapter. Be sure to continue this in your appointments, paying particular attention to what I teach regarding personal style, adornment, and carriage of the body. Since your body language and voice tone account for 93% and your words account for only 7%, it's fairly safe to round that 93% up to 100 and round the 7% down to zero and accept the fact that your body language & carriage and your voice tone are everything!

I'm glad to see that you also implemented the chapter on how to get yourself written up in the Business Journal and other publications. This works amazingly well, so well that you may actually be overwhelmed. My advice is to find out what the specific publication date will be for your article, and to keep your schedule a bit more free than you normally would for a few days following publication. The barrage of phone calls is most drastic on days 1-3. However, you'll find people calling you months after the article runs! Also, go back and re-read that chapter again as you continue to work with your Business Journal reporter and other media personnel. Don't forget to ask your Business Journal person for referrals to reporters at other publications, many of whom will call you on their own after seeing this first article run.

By the way, for anyone out there who read that chapter and didn't actually do it out of doubt that it would work, or possibly out of intimidation in contacting reporters, don't let any of that stop you! It doesn't do any good to try one or two things in the book. It's really best to put the ENTIRE program into action - remember the "system of systems" I talk about? The salespeople I've been in contact with who are putting every last bit of it into action really are living the "sell more and work less" lifestyle. The wonderful thing about media attention and publicity is the amazing power of legitimacy it carries. While advertising and sales activity naturally raise objections and customer concerns, media publicity creates an image of you as an authorityfigure and the walls come tumbling down.

Good move on going forward with the website. Be sure to use the guidelines I lay out. Also, look for an upcoming e-book I'm working on that will more specifically address the use of the web as a lead-generator for salespeople in much more depth. I'm planning to send it out free to existing customers of my program.

Ken, you're well on your way to huge sales success. I really appreciate when students of this program have faith in what I teach and put it into useful action. Thank you for your trust, and congratulations on your success!

***Comment And Question From A Reader***

Frank:

I purchased your program earlier today and have gone
through the electronic version. You have provided some
powerful, straight-forward ideas.

Other than selling encyclopedias many years ago, I have
never been in sales. I lost my corporate job due to our
business closing. However, I have lost positions in the
past due to mergers or reorganization. I'm through with
working for someone else.

I recently took a commissioned sales position with
Farmers Insurance selling homeowners, auto, life
insurance and investment products. My goal is to have
my own agency within two years.

One of the first things Farmer's would like a new agent
to do is complete and contact a list of 100 people he or
she knows. I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel but how
can I portray to this group that I'm the expert when
they know that last month I was in an entirely different
field? Additionally, I have no desire to cold call. I
guess that's why your system is so appealing to me.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Jerry McAuliffe

My comments:

Okay, I couldn't help but laugh at your statement that you have no desire to cold call. Who does? We all know it doesn't work! Okay, so it will get you one lead for one hundred calls. In my opinion, 1 out of 100 is something that isn't working!

Regarding your question about contacting a list of 100 people you know, all insurance companies do this for a reason. It's not a very positive thing to discuss but I want to provide an accurate answer. Insurance companies traditionally have extremely high turnover in sales agents. Since they assume that most new hires will be gone in a very short time, usually due to burnout from the endless cold calling they instruct you to do, they want those who will soon be gone to at least sell one or two policies in order for them to recoup their hiring and training expenses. It's only logical that a new agent, possibly with no prior sales experience, will have the best chance of selling a policy to someone they know, particularly a friend or relative.

I'm glad to see you've moved beyond working for someone else, and have set a goal of having your own agency within two years. I really don't think anyone who is satisfied with simply having "a job" can become very successful. Since you're obviously looking for a lot more than a paycheck, it's probably safe for you to skip the "call 100 people you know" routine. It's clear that you're in this for the long run and bothering your friends and family with a sales pitch wouldn't be useful. I personally have never been comfortable with selling to friends and relatives for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it just seems inappropriate. If someone knows what I sell and asks me about it, that's another story, but to hit my friends and family up with a sales pitch is, to me, no different than asking for money.

Since you already have the book in your hands, I know you'll do very well with the ideas presented therein. We sell more copies to insurance agents than to any other particular field and all have given nothing but positive feedback on the results they've experienced with it. Just keep your focus on that goal of your own agency within two years, picture yourself in that agency several times each day, and particularly just before going to sleep at night and immediately after arising in the morning, and it will probably be yours quite a bit sooner than two years.

***Question***

Good morning Frank,

How would you suggest getting around the problem of
missed appointments? Too many of my prospects blow
off appointments, or I show up and they're not there,
or they're off for the day and it seems like they don't
even take it seriously. Are there any ways to get
around this?

Thanks
JK Kakstys

My comments:

That is a GREAT question. It touches on many of the things I feel passionately about and have written and spoken about on several occasions.

Part of the problem is with the obsession of most sales managers with getting appointments. If there's one thing that really irked me when I was still in sales, it was the endless chants and demands of "you need to get more appointments." It didn't seem to matter if the people I was meeting with even wanted to buy anything, just as long as I set appointments. I remember one idiotic manager whose vocabulary seemed to consist of nothing more than "two new appointments per day."

In fact, my blood was boiling after I lost a very big sale thanks to this obsessing with more and more and MORE appointments. The controller of a local city government's public transportation agency contacted me in response to a bit of personal marketing I had done. Their contracts on exactly the sort of service I was selling at the time had come up and they were in the decision process for a new supplier. True to my nature, I communicated with this individual mostly through email and with a few phone calls. We had not met in person at all. He received my preliminary proposal when he called requesting that I revise the quote to reflect some specific changes they had decided upon. Well, my manager decided to voice his extreme displeasure at how I was conducting this sale, and he demanded that I immediately set a face-to-face appointment with this prospect to go over the revised proposal. The time came for the meeting and the prospect was FURIOUS at me for requiring an in-person meeting simply to review a proposal. Even though I had been the front-runner all along, from that point forward I was shut out of the decision process and lost a huge sale that would have been worth five figures in commissions.

The point of the story is one that is the centerpiece of my entire philosophy: We are in the Information Age. The Industrial Age is over. I wish all of you dinosaur, "little dictator" sales managers would get this already and quit "managing" your salespeople to certain failure by ordering them to carry out old, antiquated, inefficient and ineffective Industrial Age sales activities.

How does this relate to your question, JK? Very simply, your prospects are probably blowing off appointments simply because they don't want to deal with appointments in the first place and didn't have the courage to say "no" to you when you called asking for one. The other reason may be that they were not qualified prospects to begin with, something else you may need to look at and deal with. In either case, be sure it's absolutely necessary to hold an in-person appointment to begin with. Although you didn't mention in your email what it is that you're selling, I'm guessing that there's a very good chance you really don't need to be face-to-face with all of your prospects unless THEY are the ones requesting it. That true story I just told was with a city government public transportation authority. You'd think they, of all people, would require a meeting, but in fact they bought without one and were very offended at my insisting on holding one!

Here's another true story to think about: When the time came to set up the www.nevercoldcall.com site, I obviously needed to set up credit card processing capabilities. I've been with one of the major banks for nine years and naturally went to their website to investigate and apply for a merchant account. To my disappointment, after clicking on the "merchant accounts" link, I was instructed to call them during business hours to speak with a representative. Since it was already after-hours, that wasn't possible. I continued to search online, wound up doing an online application with a different bank simply because they offered one, obtained an instant approval, and by the time I turned on my computer the next morning, the account information and activation instructions were already in my email. The only live person I ever spoke with was a customer service rep making a follow-up call to confirm that everything went well and that I was satisfied.

The irony here is that I am the victim of several cold calls each week from sales reps promoting merchant bank services. If that's not enough, a former co-worker of mine recently accepted a sales position with a major merchant processing bank and quit after only a few weeks. Why? Because he was required to make no less than 400 cold calls each and every week, in person, and to "prove" his activity by turning in 400 new business cards every Friday. Now, he's quite experienced, sat next to me in an office for over a year, and knows very well how to generate more than his quota without cold calling. He approached his manager to discuss some of the strategies that have worked well for him in the past. His manager's response? A very cold "we've done it this way for forty years and we're not about to change."

That last sentence is, in my opinion, exactly why we're seeing record business bankruptcies today. The world has changed, the economy has changed, the Industrial Age has ended and the Information Age has begun, and yet companies won't change. The ones who are immensely successful today are the ones who have adapted to change. Today we have people in their twenties, uneducated, easily becoming millionaires and billionaires thanks to this new Information Age, while college-educated fifty-year-olds with MBAs are worried about being downsized and how they're going to survive in retirement, if they can ever stop working in the first place. This is because they are clinging to old, dead, Industrial Age ideas that simply won't work anymore.

If you're not experiencing the sales success you'd like, perhaps it's time for you to begin making some changes. If you're like most salespeople, you've been run through an old, Industrial Age training system that teaches old, Industrial Age ideas, particularly the myth that the only way to be successful is to make lots and lots of cold calls, and if it's not working, then the solution is to increase your activity even more. If you're tired of this worn-out advice, perhaps it's time for you to get a copy of my "Cold Calling Is A Waste Of Time: Sales Success In The Information Age" program. It consists of a book and two full-length audio CDs. Yes, on top of these long newsletters, you get to listen to me blab for 2-1/2 hours! Seriously though, it's packed full of very useful and effective ideas you can begin using right away to attract qualified prospects. What's more, you'll get a downloadable .pdf copy of the book immediately upon ordering, so you can start reading now! To order and get the eBook right now, please visit:

Order 'Cold Calling Is A Waste Of Time' right now

You'll have the e-book in your hands in about one minute, and the regular book and CDs will ship within one business day.

(To order by phone please call (602)231-6711, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.)

Be sure to send in any questions you'd like to see
answered in a future mailbag. The email address is:

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And keep the success stories coming. Include "Success Story" as the subject
line and send to:

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I read those first!

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Thanks once again for your time and thank you for reading. Good luck and happy selling!

To your success,

Frank J. Rumbauskas, Jr.

PS: Imagine what it would be like if you never had to make a cold call - ever again. You'll be able to do exactly that with "Cold Calling Is A Waste Of Time: Sales Success In The Information Age" - get it right now:

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Copyright 2009 Frank J. Rumbauskas, Jr. and FJR Advisors, LLC. All rights reserved. "Cold Calling Is A Waste Of Time: Sales Success In The Information
Age" and "Never Cold Call Again" are registered trademarks of FJR Advisors, LLC.