These days when making a cold call it is important now more than ever before to make yourself different from the pack.. When you apply for a job that is advertised in the paper your app. will be amongst a thousand others. The same goes when you are calling a business, unless you leave a totally unique message for the person you are trying to talk to you will never hear from them.

I had a company for many years where cold calling was an every day thing. I knew from my work for so many other companies that you have to stand out. I named my business Global Online Deals and whenever I would call a company for the first time I would say just tell them that Jeff from God is on the phone. The initials of my company name spelled GOD. I did this on purpose. When first talking with a potential customer I would tell them that I had tried to get the url Godin but that some TV Evangelist who was doing time in prison owned that name.

Customers would call me back and leave a message "Jeff, did you know that your initials spell GOD, whats with this?" All I have to say on this subject is that it got me the call backs I needed. A lot of times secretaries would just start laughing and put me through to the person I needed to speak with. Seth Godin puts it this way ' You have to be a Purple Cow in order to survive in the today".

I had a salesman once who was playing phone tag with this customer he needed to speak with. He could never get a good call back from the guy. I made one call to the customer and left the message that I was with UPS and I had a COD Cashiers check package for the customer that was $100,000., needless to say the customer called me right back using the number that I left on his Voicemail and by the end of the conversation he was buying product from my company.

Another time we had this WordPerfect software that we had bought through a closeout. We were selling the older version for $100 per copy and my salespeople were not getting any orders for the software. I told my salespeople to give me one customer who would not buy. I called that customer and left the message that I had WordPerfect for $1. Sure enough that customer called me back within minutes. What I did was raise the price of each copy to $110 and told the customer that if he bought 10 copies he would get the 11 copy for only $1. My salespeople sold everything we had within days using the pitch I showed them.

in todays world in order to survive you have to be different from everybody else. Most businesses go out of business the first year. They lose money the first few years. With my business we made money our first year, in fact we broke a lot of sales records because of the way we made ourselves different. Someday when you have everybody in your company together buy them all lunch and have an intensive brainstorming session for ideas to separate you from all the other businesses in your locality.