Cold Calling All Brians and Kevins

This article was written by Mike Carroll at Intelligent Conversations.
It stars me!
Thanks Mike!
Ev

Cold-Calling-all-Brian-s-and-Kevin-s

Yesterday, in celebration of St. Patrick's Day, my new sales person sorted his prospect list to create a sublist comprised of Presidents, CEO's and Business Owners named Brian or Kevin. I think he also searched for executives named Bridget, Molly, Liam and Fergus, but he couldn't find any in our database. The calls sounded something like this:
"Hi Brian, it's Everet Kamikawa."
"Hi.... Everet..."  
"Brian, it doesn't sound like you know who I am...."
"No, I don't."
"That's ok, I'm not sure we've met. Can I tell you why I called you this morning?"
"Sure."
"I'm calling everyone in my database named Brian to wish them a Happy St. Patrick's Day and tell them about some trends we're seeing in the market. Happy St. Patrick's Day!"
"Thanks, that's pretty funny. So tell me, what do you guys do?"
And that's how most of the calls went. This approach was both funny and unexpected, which lowered their "sales defense shields" and allowed Everet to get into productive conversations about how we help growing companies grow even faster by fixing the people, systems and strategies that impact sales. Out of 39 cold calls he had 7 conversations and booked 3 appointments, which is a pretty good day when calling the C-level.
Who says you can't have fun while making cold calls?