Cold calling to make sales is the slowest, most expensive and least productive expenditure of time and resource a salesperson has. Over time the sales organizations have studied the success and failure rates of various customers and have found the most and least fertile ground for any industry.

If you are a sales manager where a product or service is sold through the services of a sales person, your objective is to makes sales as reasonably as possible. Sales pretty much follow this pattern:

1. The easiest sales for any company is to sell to an existing customer. Many organizations attempt to put existing customers on a "cycle" and sell to them automatically as their cycle of need comes up on the calendar. A better approach would be to focus the sales persons efforts on selling to this customer at the top of the cycle of need. The odds of selling to an existing customer are 3 times higher than the odds of any other customer.

2. The next layer of sales efforts can most profitably be focused on former customers. These accounts were obviously in need of the product or service at one time and can be reactivated with incentives much cheaper than other classes of client. The fact they are familiar with company structure and policies is a major factor.

3. Cold calling is the most expensive form of selling. The number of sales attempted per sales made is the lowest on the totem pole. There is good reason for this! The customer is getting the product or service from someone at the time of the cold call. The cold calling salesman not only has to pry the customer away from existing relationships and then convince the customer to come into totally alien territory. Getting a potential customer to come into new territory, expose some part of their finances and then fit a new product or service into the infrastructure is a truly large size task.

If efficiency and costs are important to your sales organization, cold calling ought to be moved over to the "alien" department. Never to be used again!

If cost has not forced you to quit cold calling, maybe efficiency will! Why send a salesperson into the field to seek customers when they are available, for considerably less expense, through other venues! Lets look at a few of them:

A. The company with a product or service that doesn't send their sales force to at least 3 or 4 sales/product conferences a year should just close up shop and quit! Everybody who uses your product or service will be at

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