"Don't Ever ______... It Doesn't Work" Oh Yeah? The Reality...

We like hearing that we're correct. Any day, any time, someone says "you know what, you were right!" and we eat it up! We all do.

That's why when we've given something a try and just found it didn't bring desirable results, we look for someone to agree. We look for folks to tell us what doesn't work. Because it validates our experience.

Now, before I go any further, I want to say that there are choices you can make in business that are better than others for a number of different reasons... and I say that because I may challenge what people think about certain methods that most people are already dismissing before they've even tried.

Here's an example: buying leads and cold calling.

I can feel some of you cringing. Gritting your teeth. No one's going to shove it down your throat. I'm not going to tell you that you ABSOLUTELY must give it a try. That's not the spirit of this post.

I can find tons of people willing to tell me that neither work. If I look hard enough though, I CAN find people who have made it work. Those who've been wildly successful with it. Who can prove it, too.

The reality is, before you can completely dismiss a business practice as unusable, consider the following:

1. Are there any similar practices I've tried with success, or have known to be successful for others?
2. Have I tested it properly?
3. Upon testing, have I made changes according to my results?

There's a lot more to be considered, but that's enough of a start to get anyone to see better results from every action they take.

Let's take cold calling for example:

1. For those of you on Facebook who are hoping to get a bite by requesting tons of friends, how is cold calling really any different?
2. Did I call the entire list as soon as I got my hands on it, or did I break it down into groups and test it?
3. What kinds of challenges did I encounter, and how can I solve them? In the case of cold calling, could it simply be that my script isn't as appealing as I thought it was? Perhaps a different script is in order...

If you dismiss cold calling after the first few calls altogether, you'll never know what kind of success there was to be had with it.

I'm sure, as in all lead generation advertising, that failures in cold calling fall into these three categories:

1. The message doesn't match the market. What are you saying to them? Why?
2. The offer isn't compelling enough. Why should they pay attention?
3. The goal of the call is to make a sale, not to begin a relationship, and it's obvious. Whose best interests are in consideration here?

Like I mentioned, there are some decisions that are more productive than others, but if you do take an action that shows less than favorable results, do the absolute best you can with it so it's not a total waste. You might even find with a slight tweak, that the activity becomes your best method of generating leads for your business!