If you are serious about selling then you need to be serious about time allocation and production and therefore you need to cold call and get to as many decision makers and prospects as possible in order to develop leads and close more sales.

Selling on the phone is not easy and you also know that many of the people you contact will be busy and they may be interested but perhaps not now. You need a quick pitch or invitation to open the door to have a visitation, but do not waste your time with a sales call or giving them a free lunch if they are not interested.

How can you find out if they are interested in 20 seconds or less? Well that takes practice and after about 20-30 calls you will get the hang of it rather than having them hang-up on you! Even veteran cold calling salesmen do a warm up session in order to get ready for their cold calling. You need a warm up call or two is what you need, as it takes the edge off and puts you into the proper state of mind.

It is recommended that you find a friend who you often network with and call them first as a warm up call and allow them the same privilege when they need to warm up before they start cold calling each week. Consider all this in 2006.