Using website statistics to turn visitors into customers - over the telephone

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Oct 28, 2006

Telephone cold calling is one of the most frustrating activities that salesmen and entrepreneurs must do when growing their businesses. In my career, I’ve used two cold calling approaches - buckshot and rifle. The buckshot approach is purely a numbers game; I call up to 30 prospects a day from a targeted leads list that I purchase from various trade associations and list brokers, with little research about each prospect. The buckshot approach is effective, but is also tiring. In contrast, when using the rifle approach I may call only three to five prospects in a day, but I research each prospect in depth before my call. The rifle approach consumes as much time as the buckshot method, but results in higher close ratios and more profitable sales. For the past three years, I've exclusively used the rifle approach with high success. One of my favorite tools for building my “rifle list” is the Visitor Detail report from one of the three analytics applications that monitors our website traffic. With this data, I can easily build a list of prospects who have visited our site, even if they do not contact me through our website.

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