The most satisfying marketing techniques are those over which we have the most control.
And that’s one of the reasons I find telephoning (often called “cold calling”) most satisfying.
While I don’t put much faith in specific ratios of how many calls it takes to achieve specific results, my own experience has definitely proven that with more calls comes more freelance and consulting assignments.
The results don’t necessarily come with the very first call of the campaign. In fact, the first few days of intensive phoning can be sort of discouraging because few people may answer and even fewer are interested in my services at this time.
Still, with consistent effort, there are results.
And while we can’t control the results, we can measure our efforts.
Over even a short period of time, effort and (happy) effects go hand in hand.
Many of the other marketing techniques are far more difficult to assess and therefore seem much less rewarding.
Into this category I place article writing, inbound links from comments on the blogs of others and other techniques to optimize (SEO) our online presence. There’s really no telling how long it will take to get solid results or even a way to relate effort to results in the same direct way that can be done for telephoning.
It’s much more motivational to measure and meet our action goals than to measure and meet results because we are fully in charge of the former.
Which is why once we get over our initial hesitancy to phone for work, we begin to feel really good about the measurable effort we are putting forth and find it easier to motivate ourselves to stay with it.
Originally posted 2-7-11