Phoning potential buyers

[DaveP]

Hi all,

What are your views/opinions on cold calling potential buyers, if you have say a name that you're 80% sure they will want but for whatever reason they haven't contacted you yet (possibly because they haven't realised it's for sale).

Do you think this is bad practice? How best to approach phoning end users directly?

Regards,
Dave

 

[websaway]

Hi all,

What are your views/opinions on cold calling potential buyers, if you have say a name that you're 80% sure they will want but for whatever reason they haven't contacted you yet (possibly because they haven't realised it's for sale).

Do you think this is bad practice? How best to approach phoning end users directly?

Regards,
Dave

There would not be many domains that you could be 80% sure they would want if they new it was for sale.
On the rare occasion that occurs the call should be pretty warm.

 

[ian]

Wouldn't it be best to either email or send them letter giving the details so they can digest in their own time, with your contact details. Then most importantly mention you will call them in x days to see if interested. Covers both bases then.

 

[fish]

Wouldn't it be best to either email or send them letter giving the details so they can digest in their own time, with your contact details. Then most importantly mention you will call them in x days to see if interested. Covers both bases then.

There is no better way to sell than to speak with the buyer. People buy from people. It is your best chance to create a need, to serve up the
opportunity, and to be able to provide a positive conclusion.

Emails, flyers etc might gain interest only if they are read ( & 90% will be dismissed in the 1st instance) even then you won't know that until you speak with them. Save yourself the time & suspense of waiting for the phone to ring, it probably won't. Be proactive.

When calling blind one in ten will tell you to go forth and multiply but that's the nature of the game, use that experience to sharpen your sales skills and resolve.

 

[Murray]

Personally I find people calling to sell me things very annoying

 

[fish]

Personally I find people calling to sell me things very annoying

How many calls do you get a week with people trying to sell you something, and out of those calls are they researched and of actual relevance?

 

[websaway]

Personally I find people calling to sell me things very annoying

It's never annoying when people phone to buy a name.

 

[ian]

There is no better way to sell than to speak with the buyer.

I assume in domain land rather than other industries, as I'm testament to that not being the case at all

 

[fish]

I assume in domain land rather than other industries, as I'm testament to that not being the case at all

Yes, I was referring to the OP case (domains).

Other methods of selling for example could be: if I want a kebab or curry delivered to my home then a flyer shoved thru my letter box that I saved & have on the shelf would be a good example of where that form of (latent) advertising could potentially be successful.

Given the above, you wouldn't do a campaign using flyers sent to all and sundry to sell domains - or would you, has anyone tried this?

As a matter of interest, what industry do you work in?

 

[Retired_Member39]

Hmm considering picking up the phone for some end user domains myself, guess its about becoming a tough salesman at times who can take a few knocks, go fig yourself type replys.

 

[scottmccloud]

Cold calling is a great way of selling domains. Emails can often be ignored, overlooked, put in the spam folder or even deleted before the intended recipient reads it.

Well researched, targeted and professional calls will get you talking with the decision makers. Maybe they're not interested this time, but the more you talk to people the more opportunities you uncover, maybe they know someone else who might be interested, maybe they need another domain for another project, can you help them?

There's a lot to be said as well for the old fashioned letter.

 

[Retired_Member39]

Cold calling is a great way of selling domains. Emails can often be ignored, overlooked, put in the spam folder or even deleted before the intended recipient reads it.

Well researched, targeted and professional calls will get you talking with the decision makers. Maybe they're not interested this time, but the more you talk to people the more opportunities you uncover, maybe they know someone else who might be interested, maybe they need another domain for another project, can you help them?

There's a lot to be said as well for the old fashioned letter.

Some good points here, thanks for sharing. Yes letters is another possibility i even read some story's of people adding scents to letters .
I'm going to go on the end user offensive within the next few weeks, i have got at least half a dozen domains which i think would be very good business for both me and the end user. I might set myself some targets of 200 emails, 50 phones calls in 1 month etc.
I did recently rebuild my website using a site builder (moonfruit) thinking this would look more professional and have a greater response rate when contacting end users.

 

[bretttina]

Cold calling is a great way of selling domains. Emails can often be ignored, overlooked, put in the spam folder or even deleted before the intended recipient reads it.

Well researched, targeted and professional calls will get you talking with the decision makers. Maybe they're not interested this time, but the more you talk to people the more opportunities you uncover, maybe they know someone else who might be interested, maybe they need another domain for another project, can you help them?

There's a lot to be said as well for the old fashioned letter.

Greta points,

I have found that calls work well and have a more direct impact and you can speak more openly about selling your product, most emails are sent to spam or just deleted straight away, where a phone call makes your points valid and sell your product much more easily, most people don't take emails but a potential customer will always be answered on the phone so you gain direct access to an end user .. even if you don't get a sale it's great experience in learning sales pitches and what and how people perceive our products..

Just my opinion.

Brett.

 

[DropCatcher-co-uk]

Selling domains via telephone calls

What are your views/opinions on cold calling potential buyers........

We've been selling domains for 14 years and have used virtually every medium.

A couple years back I hired an experienced and successful telesales manageress and took on half a dozen tele-canvassers. We wrapped it up after just a few weeks as we worked out with the benefit of hindsight that the major flaw to this approach is that the average business gets telephoned several times a week by all the pop up SEO "experts" who "guarantee" to get you to Number 1 on Google. As a result, any business owner, marketing manager or marketing director who has been in business for more than 1 week firmly orders their staff who answer the phone "DO NOT under any circumstances put anyone through that is trying to sell me anything to do with the internet".

In a nutshell, if you try and phone a business, 99% of the time you will NOT be put through to the decision maker. And remember one of the most insightful business rules of all time. "Never take a no from somebody who doesn't have the authority to say yes."

TELECANVASSING DOMAINS DOES NOT WORK.

We've sent batches of highly targeted (buy the Marketing Manager Yearbook annually, it's the best £350 you will ever spend) polite letters on Conqueror letter-headed paper for high value domains to the decision makers. This method does work for five figure domains and has netted hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Several years ago we naively bought disks of purportedly "opted-in" email addresses and then used bulk mail sending software to send tens of thousands of emails a day. It doesn't work. Again, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, who on Earth is every going to opt in and agree to be spammed by anyone that the list compiler sells the list to? After receiving hundreds of furious spam complaints and an ASA rebuke we realised that the "opted-in" lists were a fallacy. Although we sold hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of domains through what were, let's face it, spam campaigns, we decided to stop. We try and be good corporate netizens and I'm also a big believer in Karma. I knew that it wasn't right so we stopped it.

By far the most successful way of marketing domains is to send individually targeted emails to the decision makers. Sending one single email, totally unique, to one single recipient would not be classified as spam even by the most hard core rabidly anti-spammer.

If anybody genuinely believes that sending an individually personalised single email to a named contact at a company constitutes spam then you're a clueless idiot.

I think the proof of the pudding is that we receive ZERO complaints from end-users., the only complaints ever made now are my straight laced priggish Acorn forum members brimming with righteous indignation who obviously are content to be stuck with their soon to be obsolete .co.uk domains. If one of my teleworkers pitch DoubleGlazing.co.uk to the Marketing Directors of the Top 50 Double Glazing companies in the UK addressing them by their Christian name and asking them how they are doing and then ask if they'd be interested in drastically cutting their Google AdWords spend they might buy the domain and they might not, but they're not going to go absolutely berserk as its such a targeted individual pitch.

One further point worth mentioning is that under European Law B2C spam (the sending of 25,000 or more identical emails to persons that you have no prior relationship with) is a criminal offence. B2B spamming is NOT an offence. I am not condoning B2B spamming, we tried it and it caused far too much hassle. It upset lots of people and the sending of individually personalised emails produces far better results.

Please let me save you several weeks of your life and assure you that telecanvassing DOES NOT WORK.

I am not saying that nobody has ever sold a domain to a potential buyer over the phone. I know of several instances where this has happened. Its all down to the net ROI of the total value of the domain sales you make versus the number of hours put in.

Individual highly personalised one to one emails are THE most cost effective way for the optimum ROI on your or your teleworkers time.

 

[julian]

the only complaints ever made now are my straight laced priggish Acorn forum members brimming with righteous indignation who obviously are content to be stuck with their soon to be obsolete .co.uk domains.

some good points, but what do you mean by obsolete .co.uk domains, or do you mean this sort of metaphorically?