Network Marketing cold calling is a marketing strategy for obtaining new prospects by calling them via phone and speaking to them directly about your products or services. Cold calling is a way of introducing yourself, your company, your service or product to others. According to Wikipedia, cold calling is the process of approaching prospective clients, typically via telephone, who have not agreed to such an interaction. This form of marketing is tough whether it's on the phone, in person or at a networking event. It is an aggressive tactic that demands initiative and perseverance. Cold calling is disliked, particularly by individual consumers, and is an inefficient way of selling, as the take-up rate is very low. Marketing in this fashion is the most universally despised aspect of sales.

What Are You Saying When Cold Calling?

By making cold calls, you're saying: you simply don't value time (theirs or your own), you've done no research to know anything about the individual prospect and you naively think your solution is for everyone or your product works everywhere - it doesn't. Most people hate calling unsuspecting individuals and there is a cottage industry of people making a profit by selling ideas on how to generate business without cold calling. Combine the discomfort and awkwardness of making an unsolicited phone call to a complete stranger with and you can get a pretty stressful experience. Usually you will face rejection.

Effective Cold Calling?

Cold calls can be used to obtain quality sales leads, references, and testimonials. Effective cold calling is suppose to result in good sales leads for your business. However, I have found that leads generated by cold calling are on average between 2 to 4 times more expensive than a company or sales rep can generate via the Internet. Cold-called leads are the least qualified, and they're the ones most likely to die in the pipeline. There are better ways to get prospects and increase your sales. What's more, the cold call leads seemed to be less qualified than leads generated by other means, for example the Internet. Even though the Internet leads were smaller opportunities and they closed faster and more often. Thus, in the short term the web leads closed better and seemed more effective.

Use the Power of the Internet

Cold calling prospects is dead in today's economy and is an expensive waste of your time.

So why would anyone put themselves through the agony of making cold calls when there are other alternatives such as the Internet? Cold calling is not the most efficient way of recruiting prospects in your MLM. The primary argument is that cold calling is a time consuming prospecting technique that has seen its day and in our modern age, today's technology gives sales professionals new and better approaches to finding prospects to sell.

Take it from me stop wasting your time with cold calling and use Internet marketing to get qualified leads and referrals. Aside from a waste of time, cold calling is an ineffective, obsolete sales technique that has no place in today's Internet-based economy. I think this new era of young entrepreneurship has ushered in a new way of communicating and reaching out to clients and cold calling is out and the Internet is in.