"(Cold Calling) … certainly isn't anybody's favorite activity of the day," says Chuck VanGronigen, assistant director of branches at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. as quoted in a recent Wall Street Journal article:

"But (cold calling) really can and does work."

In an informal poll of sales professionals we found that many sellers unfortunately think of cold calling as being as enjoyable as getting a vasectomy with a chain saw. Ouch! One of our clients actually said that! Now, staying with the metaphor and with a few new skills and adjustments in attitude the seller can quickly come to think of cold calling as better than sex!

Cold calling certainly does work and it works quite well. Many top notch sales pros who cold call can and do:

Schedule appointments with 2-8 out of every 10 calls made to prospects.

When the success rate is poor, meaning sellers neither schedule appointments nor get call backs from voice mail messages, they come a conclusion that costs them dearly. Without collecting input from successful cold callers, these sellers come to the erroneous conclusion that cold calls just don't work. When in fact, the failure comes from the mindset and the verbiage used by the sales professional.

Sellers are wordsmiths with high levels of discernment and phenomenal people skills. It is no surprise to sellers when these talents come together and click into place like pieces of a puzzle when those sellers are face-to-face with the prospects. However, as these same gifted sales professionals move to cold calling the pieces of the selling puzzle no longer seem to fit. What works in person does not seem to work well on the telephone. So, the sellers figure cold calling is a mystery, can not be done successfully at least by them.

Why do these sell-ice-to-an-Eskimo successful sellers experience disastrous results with cold calling?

Because these sales pros consistently fail to acknowledge and compensate for

The loss of visual cues taken in literally at the blink of an eye during face-to-face meetings. That may seem like a trivial matter but when you realize more than half of the information we use in communication is visual then you start to understand that adjustments must be made when communicating by phone. Successful sellers are also successful cold callers because they adjust to the loss of visual cues by applying laser like focus to the tone and pace of the call as well as every single word that is spoken.

Sales professionals who to cold call and let their emotional reaction stop them from calling prospects are making a big, big mistake. If this is you, know you are leaving a lot of money on the table and missing out on a truly profitable practice. Know too that simple albeit significant changes in your face-to-face presentations will yield extreme profits in your cold calls.