To some extent, cold calls are the junk mail of the telephone – you don’t really want them and they’re rarely targeted at you.

But, even if cold calls are disliked and sometimes considered bad practice, marketers and sales people keep on calling.

Here’s why… beyond possibly leading to sales or leads, doing cold calls is the fastest way to iterate and improve a value proposition (what you sell and how you sell it).

Only direct interactions (calls or face to face) can give you the real pulse. By listening to your prospects’ intonations, reactions, questions and comments, you’ll get much further, faster, than any survey or data set will take you.

It’s hard (really hard) but, calling targeted people out of the blue is definitely worth the stress and trouble.