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...