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!