There is a HUGE difference between cold calling a prospect and being willing to interrupt a prospect. In fact, due to the Internet and LinkedIn, Face Book, Instagram, Twitter, Wikipedia, you name it, cold calling doesn’t even exist anymore.
Back in the day prior to all of these applications we now take completely for granted, we did call people cold and out of the blue (people about whom we knew absolutely nothing) and we introduced ourselves and our product(s) or service(s) cold.
If the person we were cold calling cold didn’t hang up on us, we introduced ourselves and our service(s)/product(s) straight away and asked to meet with them to discuss how our services/products might help them. Most of the time, those real cold calls went nowhere. But, sometimes or perhaps in a week or month or even a year if we kept calling that prospect, those real cold calls led to an appointment, a face-to-face meeting and maybe even a sale.
Today, because we have LinkedIn, Face Book, Twitter, Wikipedia, Instagram, etc. there are no cold calls. Today, we know or can know every thing about any one. Today, ALL of us are open books.
So what about our world of open-book-ness?
Jeb Blount, a much sought-after thought leader and sales acceleration specialist, believes our world of LinkedIn, Face Book, Wikipedia, Twitter, Instagram, etc. has given us a world in which, as he says, “There are no strangers.”
And because “there are no strangers,” there are no cold calls to a prospect. There are only interruptions in a prospect’s work/personal life. Again, because “there are no strangers,” our interruptions are informed and we can make them relevant to that prospect’s work/personal life.
For example, if you work for an insurance company and your supervisor gives you the name and contact information of an ongoing client who already home and auto insurance, you can call that client, introduce yourself, tell her that you’d like to meet with her on a specific date/time to discuss filling in the gaps in her insurance coverage. She’ll say yes/no/maybe and/or suggest another day/time. This is NOT a cold call. This is an interruption.
This interruption can be a phone call, a text, an email, a post on social media, a message on LinkedIN, a whatever. This is an interruption…an informed interruption that has the potential to help this person.
The very same thing is true in real estate. You can research a prospect on whatever post/page/feed/app you choose to get information about the prospect. Once you have that information, you need to make your interruption relevant and potentially helpful to that prospect. You are in charge of making that interruption meaningful to her/him.
Blount believes that it is the willingness to interrupt…the willingness to interrupt relentlessly…that is the difference between sustained success and failure in any type of a sales or marketing or public relations or advertising program.
To pursue sustained success as a real estate agent…you must be willing to interrupt relentlessly.
