The worst job in the world…

I received an email today from my young cousin and the subject bar reads “The worst job I’ve ever had.”

My 21 year old cousin has taken a job with a call center and it’s her responsibility to ‘cold call’ potential customers and persuade them to buy gas and electric from her.

I chuckled to myself as I read the email, not only because some poor sucker gave my cousin a job, but also because I thought ‘cold calling’ had gone out with the arc… It’s like hearing that MC Hammer pants are back in and we should all rush out to get a pair. Shocking news, and when you actually see people in them, you can’t help but chuckle.

When I called her to mock, I asked why it’s the worst job in the world. She said she hates ‘cold calling’ because people are so rude to her when she calls. “She won’t last long in this job!” I thought to myself.

My advice was to eliminate the term ‘cold calling’ from her vocabulary. It’s a horrible phrase and it conjures up all sorts of horrible scenarios, such as flicking through the yellow pages and calling people randomly at the very time they sit down to have their dinner. Annoying, frustrating, time wasting and plain bad marketing if you ask me.

“There are better ways” I told her!

Targeted or ‘warm calling’ is a much more user-friendly term and with warm calling, the people you call will warmly receive your offers because they have ‘opted in’ and put their hand out to welcome you first. You have permission to handshake in a sense.

I believe cold calling is a dying art, or I hope it is anyway. Having said this, rather than my cousin going back to the dole queue, I feel like I should help. And so I’ve decided to write a ‘Tips Booklet’ for her entitled ’10 ways to get great results from ‘cold calling’. The first tip will be to scrap the name cold calling…

I’ll have it done in a few weeks – just before my cousin gives up the job – so if you fancy a copy, please leave me a comment below and I will contact you for your address. If you don’t leave a comment, I promise not to call…

Thanks for reading. Toby

Get into the press

By Toby McCartney, September 2010.

A useful tip to help your business. I took this idea from Jurgen Wolffs book ‘Do something different’.

When Viagra first came out, a chemist named Independent DC wanted to be able to attract customers, even though the larger chains were offering the drug for less money.

They advertised that every customer who filled in a Viagra prescription with them would get a free bottle of wine to add romance to the moment.

The press, looking for new angles on the Viagra story gave the store major coverage, which led to an increase in customers instantly.

Just about any product or service can be made newsworthy in one way or another. In this case, the press interest in the Viagra phenomenon was already massive, but the big problem was how to find a different angle on it, and that’s what this store provided. If you can piggyback on a topic that is already of interesting to the media, its much easier to grab their attention.

Ask yourself which aspects of your business are most likely to be newsworthy? Can you think of a news topic that you can use as a basis for a promotion or contest.

Once a week or once a month, sit down with some colleagues with a pile of recent newspapers or news magazines, and mastermind together to come up with developing stories that might lend themselves in some way to being linked with your business.
If for example there has been a disaster, like a flood or a fire, can your business help in some way that could be of interest to the press?

Build up contacts with members of the press so that when you have a newsworthy articles you will know who to contact…

Sent from Toby’s iPhone 4 (September 2010)

Helping new business

I’ve been helping people move from Employee to Entrepreneur for some time now using both business skills and NLP. I love it, and I’ve put some video’s onto my YouTube Chanel for you, which can be found at Toby’s YouTube.
I hope you find them useful and would love your feedback on them. Please subscribe to my YouTube site and rate me. Thanks. Toby