Cold calling

Cold calling is the solicitation of business from potential customers who have had no prior contact with the salesperson conducting the call. It is an attempt to convince potential customers to purchase either the salesperson's product or service. Generally, it is referred as an over-the-phone process, making it a source of telemarketing, but can also be done in-person by door-to-door salespeople. Though cold calling can be used as a legitimate business tool, scammers can use cold calling as well. Cold calling has developed from a form of giving sales pitch using a script into a targeted communication tool. Salespeople call from a list of potential customers that fit certain parameters built to help increase the likelihood of a sale. This modern cold calling, sometimes called "warm calling", tries to "dig deeply to understand" the potential customer. With the development of newer technology and the Internet, cold calling has gained some criticism. Jeffrey Gitomer wrote in a 2010 article for The Augusta Chronicle that "the return on investment on cold calling is under zero." Gitomer believes that cold calling will only annoy customers and will not attract business. Gitomer also believes that referral marketing is a better form of selling and marketing. According to Gitomer, there are "2.5 basic understandings of a cold call": Cold calling is the lowest percentage sale call. Cold calling has a very high rejection rate. Multiple rejections can change the salesperson's mentality and make it more difficult to act friendly and complete calls. Since the rise of the Internet, social media and instant text messaging, a significant portion of people tends to prefer texting over calling and ignores incoming phone calls from unfamiliar numbers. Cold calling has also been used by scammers. One such example was when groups of impostors posed as members of the Microsoft support team. The impostors called several homes from a database of Microsoft owners. The Microsoft customers were then told that there was a virus on their computers, and in order to fix it, they had to download a specific program.