In all my years in marketing, I have probably come across hundreds of ways professionals market their services. Some are ingenious, some are simple, some are a waste of money, effort or time and some are just so complex that by the time the person applying the promotional tactic is done crafting it he or she is confused as hell.
In the creative freelance field (photographers, writers, illustrators, designers, modeling and so on), the ultimate promotional technique will have to involve a third-party raving about your talent, skill or service. I will say it now and will repeat it very often so get used to it 
Let’s take cold call, a technique that many marketing consultants recommend to freelancers.
You supposedly pick up the phone and call a list of carefully targeted prospects (suspects, sorry… because they have not shown an interest in your service yet!) and eventually, you are going to land some new business. And hey, it even works on a percentage basis (so it’s “scientific”). So, if you call a hundred people who have not asked for you to call them, three or four might end up being your clients.
The rationale goes on: the more “suspects” you call, the more business you are going to generate because cold calling is a number’s game.
Before all the direct sales pros have my head for breakfast, I will tell you this: cold calling does work. The question is: At what cost?
I don’t know about you but as a businessperson who provides services to clients, I don’t have time to spend calling gazillions of strangers and chit chatting with them in order to have their business.
Cold calling is a tricky bugger because you have to sell three things:
- Sell yourself to the person to the other line so that he or she can give you “a few moments” of his or her precious time.
- Sell this person onto your services
- Sell the person on the price of these services that you offer.
Those are three tough sales to make especially if you are a “little guy/gal”. If you are the shy, nervous or sensitive type, your chances of succeeding with cold calls are so slim that your response rate might never go over 0.5%.
The problems with cold calling are not hard to spot: unsolicited, lack of credibility and too resourceful (time, money and energy). I will not even go into the whole “do not call lists” implications…
My message to all freelancers using cold calling as a promotional method is to stop for a minute and let the common sense kick in. Wouldn’t your time, effort and money be better spent elsewhere?
And it does not matter if you are successful. You still are wasting that precious asset called time. Even if you are currently doing well with cold calls, you certainly would triple your response rates if you applied more effective and efficient methods.
Cold calling is a waste of your marketing time and energy in my humble opinion whether or not it works. You may get a gig or two but your chances of building a highly profitable freelance business are very poor.
No love for cold calling.
