Cold Calling - Part Two

Rather than venture into Mordor, I stayed in Australia and contacted camera shops in Melbourne and Brisbane.  Last night, I had a success rate of about 24%.  Tonight, my success rate was 30%, largely because I took a look at the individual web pages of the camera shops and cherry picked the places that I had a better shot of connecting with the store owner/buyer.

CAUTION TO THE REAL ENTREPRENEURS!  I do think that you can easily shoot yourself in the foot by doing too much research when it comes to cold calling.  In my case, I felt justified in skipping a shop or two because they we big box stores.  If I were doing this as a real entrepreneur (and not just someone trying to find a store owner to answer my questions), I would not discriminate a single call.  You never know who you might get connected to, even at a big box store.  In fact, last night I was able to get a separate list of supplier contacts from calling a store that I likely would have skipped tonight.  In the real world, it's probably better to put the blinders on, stick to the script, and think quickly on your feet if someone drops something in your lap.

38 calls and I have my 10 completed surveys.  Phew!  Only took me 3 hours, 15 minutes last night and about 45 minutes tonight.

Now, onto making all of this fit into a nice Word doc...

Cold Calling - Part One

The other ES assignment that is due for this coming week is the notorious and dreaded cold calling assignment.  Pretty much everyone who is planning on taking Entrepreneurial Selling at Booth has heard about the CC assignment.  I'll be honest.  When Professor Wortmann told us the first day of class that he was changing the syllabus up a bit, I was hoping this meant CC was shown the way of the dodo.  No such luck.  The assignment is due this Monday, and there was a lot to prep for.

For the CC assignment, each person in the class needs to cold call enough companies or organizations until they are able to successfully speak to 10 people with buying authority, and have that person answer a 5-question survey.

I'll be honest.  I hate it when people cold call me at work, and I'm not particularly nice to them.  My coworkers who sit within earshot of me are sometimes horrified by how I verbally assault cold callers.  I, of course, assume that everyone I'm about to call is going to be just as unforgiving as I am.

This should be rich...

First thing's first.  My groupmates and I needed to select startup to work with throughout the quarter.  Luckily, there are a lot of smart, enterprising folks where I work.  A couple of them designed, developed, and funded the production of an external LED flash device for iPhones.  It's called Nova Wireless Flash, it's unique, and very cool.  With Nova, you can actually take high-quality pictures with your iPhone in any lighting condition.  Head over to http://wantnova.com to learn more (and pick one up).

Now with an actual product to pitch, I needed to think about how to approach the cold calling assignment.  Here were my challenges.

1. Who do I call?
2. What do I say?
3. When the hell am I going to call them?  I do work full-time, and with my son recently out of his crib, he's normally asleep by 9pm.

Who do I call?

This one wasn't so hard.  From talking to the founders, they want to target B2B customers.  Nova is already available on Amazon for B2C, but identifying the right B2B targets has been a challenge.  For this, I decided to target digital camera shops.  With photography moving to phones, these shops need something to related to the pro-sumer/enthusiast market.  Nova is a perfect fit, in my mind.

What do I say?

Luckily, I'm married to a marketing executive, so the wife helped me structure my script and survey questions.  I tried to organize it so I could quickly identify the buyers and move on to the next store if I couldn't connect to the right person

When am I going to call them?

No bloody stores are open anywhere in the US at 9pm at night, so I'm kind of screwed there.  I know the assignment is going to take a while, so I need to be able to have a window of time where I'm not feeling rushed.  Plus, it's Thursday, and I only have until Monday to get this thing done.  So... I decide to call stores in Australia.  

Fortunately (I guess?), I work fairly regularly with folks internationally, and since the cell phone reception in my house is terrible, I  use Google Voice on my computer to make international phone calls.  It's cheap ($0.02/minute), and I can use my gamer headphones and mic.  Again, with Google to the rescue, I quickly identify a bunch of camera shops in Sydney, wrote down numbers, and start calling.

So... How did it go?

I started dialing at 9:45PM and made 29 calls to about 25 different shops until 1:30AM.  Of those 29 calls, I was able to have 9 people answer my survey end to end.  Of those 9, 7 were buying authorities, so not bad at all for the first night.  A handful of them were really excited by the product and wanted more info.  I forwarded those contacts on to Nova, so hopefully something material comes of this (other than my grade on the assignment)

I think it helped that I told people right away that I was from Chicago.  They were probably curious as to why the fuck I was calling and kept me on the phone.  I'll take it.  It was also incredibly helpful that the product is so compelling and has an actual legit website.  A few of the store owners I talked to loaded the website up while I was on the phone with them.

What else did I learn?

People in Australia are really nice.  The "rudest" denial went something like this: Me: "Hello, my name is Zach Malsom and I'm calling...", Her: "I'm sorry... Could you hold on a moment, please?" (hang up)

Karma does not travel internationally... I'm thankful there weren't a bunch of assholes like me on the end of the line.

What's next?

I need 3 more successful responses.  I may have exhausted Sydney, so I'm thinking I call Middle Earth (New Zealand) tonight.  I hear Sauron loves his iPhone.

Update:
Apparently I made some inroads.  The Nova team received some unsolicited emails from a few of the places I contacted last night, looking to distribute the product.  Cool!

Entrepreneurial Selling - First Trade

Ok.  After 5 years, I've finally found a reason to blog.

Fast forward from 2009, and I'm currently on classes 14 and 15 of 20 at Chicago Booth (fingers crossed for a June 2015 graduation).  First is Entrepreneurial Finance and Private Equity.  In this class, I will be dissecting the balance sheets, income statements, and cash flows of start ups and learning how to draft PE deals.  Pretty cool, if you geek out at Accounting and Finance, but it's going to kick my ass.  My second class is Entrepreneurial Selling.  This class puts you in the position as the founder of a start up and forces you to get out there and do what entrepreneurs need to do to get a business off the ground... sell the great shit that they just invented.  While the discounted cash flows and deal sheets of EFPE will undoubtedly be tricky, I'm going to have to push myself to work outside my comfort zone with ES.

I have a few assignments to do this week for ES.  The first is a cold-calling assignment, which I may explain another time.  The more interesting assignment starts this week and lasts for the whole quarter (10 weeks)... The Barter assignment.

Here's an excerpt of the Barter assignment:

Each student will be given a pen during the first session of Entrepreneurial Selling. Your assignment is to barter that pen for something of greater value, and continue to barter your goods for goods or services of greater value throughout the quarter. Your goal is to end the quarter with something of much greater value than the pen (approximate starting value is 25 cents).

There are some ground rules.  I can't barter with anyone I know.  I cannot use money as part of the exchange.  I can only barter for products.  I have to make at least one trade a week.

So, I was given a blue BIC pen at the end of the first day of class.  I take the L to work and back every day, so I have endless opportunities to try to barter with complete strangers, but folks on the morning and afternoon commute typically like to be left alone.  On Tuesday's commute, I forced myself to look up from Facebook to see if I might be able spot someone who would find a BIC pen valuable.  "Nope.", I convinced myself, and looked back down at my phone.  Leave them all alone.  Keep your head down and get to work.

After a group meeting for class, I took the typical L ride north.  I convinced myself that I would barter this fucking pen.  Below is a recount of the first trade.  I'll try to document each trade shortly after I make it for two reasons.  First, I think it's an interesting exercise, and second, I have to write a report at the end of the quarter, so if I'm going to log the transactions, I might as well do it here so I can (mostly) copy and paste later.

Trade 1

When: Wednesday. June 25 @ 8:30pm (after EFPE meeting)
Where: Brown line, between Paulina and Iriving Park
Who: Two unsuspecting young ladies who sat in front of me
What: $0.25 blue BIC pen for $1 KitKat

Play by Play

I got on the Red Line at Grand, and I was going to ask a lady who sat next to me, but she was writing an email, and I was concerned that I wouldn't have time to pitch my pen in time to make a trade before Belmont.  Total cop out.

I got off the train at Belmont to wait for the Brown, and I noticed an approachable-looking lady standing nearby on the platform.  I debated internally for a couple minutes whether I should ask her, but I'm pretty sure I gave her the creeps, because she walked to the end of the platform.

I got the train when it arrived and went a few stops.  Luckily, two young ladies got on the train at Paulina and sat in front of me.  Undeterred, I made my pitch.  I inquired whether I could ask a strange question.  They looked at me pretty much just like all those girls at the bars did 12 years ago.  To put them at some sort of ease, I showed them my student ID and explained the assignment.  Luckily, one of them had heard of the bartering assignment before and offered me a brand new KitKat. I accepted the trade and swapped my blue BIC pen ($0.25) for a tasty KitKat ($1.00).  It was quite a relief and actually pretty energizing.  As I was walking home, I thought of randomly offering my new KitKat to a passerby.  Baby steps, I suppose...

For my next target market?  Is it too skeevy to try to trade a candy bar at the playground (while pushing my son on the swing)?  Hey... I look legit, right?