Cold calling and time management. Therein lie two of the biggest areas of concern for salespeople and entrepreneurs alike.

For most, cold calling is the sole source of generating leads. A typical workday will contain a significant amount of time spent cold calling, and many companies continue to use the outdated activity planning model of taking your quota and working backwards to determine how many cold calls you must make. Then, you block out portions of time in your schedule that are dedicated solely to cold calling.

That brings up the other major issue – time management. Salespeople are in a unique situation because most are forced to do the bulk of their work within business hours, when prospects are available to meet and otherwise be contacted. Cold calling must be done during business hours. Appointments must be conducted during business hours. Presentations and proposals must be conducted during business hours. And to make the time management issue even harder, mandatory sales meetings, training sessions, and other corporate-type activity also takes place during business hours. Time management then becomes a real challenge for salespeople to deal with. When you consider all of the work a salesperson must do to prosper – prospecting, following up, sales meeting, writing proposals, one-on-ones with the boss, mandatory training, customer service, post-sale activities – it seems insurmountable at times. Especially following a very strong sales month, when your customer service issues peak.

What is an overworked salesperson to do?

Well, if you take a step back and look at the big picture, the single activity that really consumes the most time is clear. Prospecting. And what does prospecting mean to most? Yes, cold calling.

Here’s my solution to the time management dilemma: Stop cold calling. Yes, stop cold calling forever!

I know that answer isn’t going to be popular with most sales managers and old-timers out there, but it works. That one change to my sales activity exploded my sales career and made me a top producer very quickly, so much so that word of my success spread fast and before I knew it I was a best-selling author in the sales world.

There are three reasons for this.

1. First, if you’re exceeding your quota by cold calling, then chances are that cold calling takes up a tremendous amount of your valuable time. What would happen if you could free up that time and spend it face-to-face with highly qualified prospects who are ready, willing, and able to buy from you?
2. Second, cold calling is a non-leveraged activity. In other words, when you are cold calling, you can only contact one person at a time. This is a slow and inefficient process. What would happen if you could put systems into place that would generate leads for you – more than just one at a time – while you are out signing contracts and picking up checks?
3. Third, statistics show that cold calling generates the poorest quality of leads of all. The close rates on leads generated from cold calling are significantly lower than those generated by self-marketing lead generation systems. When you figure that into all of the other factors stated above, it becomes clear that cold calling is not only the worst choice for generating leads, but it creates a time management nightmare.

If you want to achieve the numbers of the elite top producers, cold calling will never get you there. It’s time to stop cold calling, and begin your learning and education on systems and techniques to generate hot leads without cold calling. You’ll not only increase your sales numbers dramatically, but you’ll solve your time management issues as well!