You Can Make Cold Calling Work For You in Your Job Search
You're trying to find a great break in your job search and you are tempted by the thought of cold calling someone in a company just to see if it just might work. Now as you contemplate this, at some point, it does occur to you that, hey, you're bombarded with cold calls all the time yourself. From telemarketers. And you hate them. Is there any chance that anyone who is a busy and important person at his shop at a company will appreciate someone just calling out of nowhere looking for a job?
Without a doubt, it can be a risky maneuver, using cold calling yourself. If you don't get it right, they're going to remember your name. You can't even apply the normal way at that company anymore.
However, you have to remember another thing the very companies that you're worried about cold calling, probably use cold calling themselves to generate sales. They probably send e-mails all over the place to see if anyone might be interested in becoming a customer. Basically, it's not about cold calling being a terrible thing. It's about how it is a terrible thing if used incorrectly.
All you need to do is to learn a few rules for how to make cold calling a success. It can be done.
The first thing that annoys you when someone calls you about the new furnace is that they don't even seem interested in how a furnace might be of help to you. They only seem interested in making a sale. It's all Me Me Me. That's not how you want to come off when you pick up the phone and call someone. You want to really, really put in time to research how you might be of use to these people that you're calling.
Do this when you try to call the hiring manager at a corporation. Research the business, spend days reading up about them, try to get some kind of idea what they might need. Think about how you might fulfill that need, and then then talk to them. You may not really have a point to make at all. But you have some knowledge about the company that'll show the hiring manage that you're really trying to do something for him for his company. That's what's going to work for you.
Of course, cold calling would never work this way with telemarketers. If they say that they've been looking you up on the Internet, that they know how much money you need for something or the other because you said something on Facebook, you'd be up all night looking out of the window worried about stalkers. But this does work when you're looking for a job.
What does that Bud Fox do in Wall Street? To get to Gordon Gekko, he's almost friends with the receptionist. The receptionist is the gatekeeper. She's never going to let you through if she doesn't like you. So you need to a whole cold calling exercise that's aimed just at her.
