If you are in the business of sales, than ultimately, cold calling is part of your weekly, if not daily routine.

Let's face it, cold calling just isnt very exciting, and you need to make many cold calls in order to have success.

During my days working as a loan officer for a mortgage company, I would spend two and a half hours each night, Monday through Friday banging out my cold calls.

My goal was to take at least three applications per evening, resulting in fifteen applications per week, with a goal of turning at least three of the fifteen applications into actual loans.

I faced many challenges during those evenings of cold calling. Such as hang ups, and people saying things such as I already took care of that, and take me off of your calling list, etc.

One other challenge I came upon was the answering machine. There was nothing worse than selling to a machine.

But after much rejection from the actual live human beings I was dealing with on a nightly basis, I began to think of the answering machine as my friend.

I would use the answering machine as a tool to have my potential customers get to know me.

I would speak in a friendly upbeat voice, introducing myself and the company I worked for.

But, I would not just leave it at that. I would take the opportunity to describe in brief a product we had available that I believed would meet their needs.

I always kept it short and sweet, not giving the customer an opportunity to delete me because my message was long and drawn out.

Leaving your name and number simply is not enough to entice a customer to call you back, especially when cold calling.

So dangle a carrot in the way of one of your products and there will be a good chance your customer will call you back.