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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

I would start with the many great books on sales. There’s really a lot of human psychology that goes into it. A lot of that psychology is fear driven.

That said, cold calling is a pretty low value marketing tactic. Any kind of warm lead will be massively more responsive to a call.

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I bought a recommended sales book a few years ago, and I feel like as a relatively shy engineer, the stuff in there was not appropriate for me. I've seen similar networking advice from people to whom it comes naturally, and seen when naturally awkward people try following that advice, instead of being themselves, and come off worse. Unfortunately the cliche of being yourself is largely true, which means it's tough to really find any playbook that will work.

I agree on the low value though. Cold calling is a numbers game - if you're selling sham-wows, call enough people and one will bite. Selling consulting is relationship based and may be much harder to cold call your way into a mandate.

Maybe you're already there, but I'd try and get (ideally) warm introductions, exploratory coffee chats, and then follow up with concrete proposals of what you'd do that would address some issue they are having. Whether you can or can't get a warm intro, messaging and asking for a meeting, framed as market research to understand what the challenges or priorities are in their industry could be a way to start a relationship

Cold calling is a variation on the hard-sell. Hard-selling is aggressive and few people are very comfortable with doing it (mostly because it violates a few social norms).

It's not the only, or even necessarily the best, sales method. My advice to you is to adopt a sales method that you are comfortable with -- the more comfortable you are, the better the results you'll see will be. If you really feel the need for a sort of sales that you just aren't built to do, then you need to hire or partner with someone who excels at it.

I'd be careful about definitions. It is one thing to dial a random phone number like a telephone pollster, it is another thing to do enough research to know it is plausible that a certain person might be receptive to an offer, it is a third to have a personal referral. I'd consider the first two to be "cold" calls even if the second one is a lot warmer.

Agreed. Also we could find a potential connection that we would bring up in a call that does not really make it a "warm lead"

I agree. Warm lead is way more important, but I think that cold calling, live meetings in general are also good strategies to bring your name out there. Warm leads also need basically to "cold call" your network and try to find leads. Email only brings you so far.

One tactic is to find flaws in there existing website, ads, etc. what ever your an expert in. and/or offer to do a free "audit"

make a list of bullet points of what the audit will entail and a benefit of each bullet point

by leading with value your in a whole lot better position.

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