Happy Friday.

I’d like to discuss three things in this post (as you might have guessed from the title of this post). I’d like to chat about my cold calling training and adventures this week, the reason why I am tickled pink/slightly annoyed and I’d like to give you a little peek with what I am doing with my time at the moment.

Cold Calling

I’ll start this off with a bit of background. About a year and a bit ago, I met a chap from down South who had written a few books, one of which had been a best seller a couple years ago when it was published. He writes about business and has run a few business outfits himself as well. I was actually trying to help him break into the Internet marketing industry with some of his material. Long story short, I was doing the work for free and making very little traction with it (this was back in 2008). I took a job in online marketing and as you know, parted company with that particular outfit in December ‘09. Having left that company, I re-contacted my friend and he mentioned he was now selling a training program to companies with large employee numbers. The problem was, he really needed a sales force that were skilled in getting leads and getting selling the course.

Having done a *tiny* amount of training and assessment in B2B sales in London, and having a bit of time on my hands I decided to offer my help. We agreed between us that I would make a few calls for free, and if I got anywhere with it  and sales emerged from my efforts, then I would earn a commission. It is high-margin stuff so it’s worth my time looking into it and having a go.

Long story short, I spoke to a chap on Skype for an hour this week. This particular guy is a professional “1st contact” sales specialist. Drop around 10k USD and he’ll guarantee 10 meetings with company execs and decision makers in the industry you are targeting. He is good at what he does and runs his business and his life from a very exclusive location in Europe. He said; “If you have to be on the phone all day, it’s a good place to do it from”.

He gave me an hour-long crash course in speaking to business people and cold-calling them. He gave me tips, tricks and secrets, and little helpful tactics to get me through the calls. He talked about intonation and the formula he uses when speaking to his prospects.  His voice sounded like he should be on a radio show, and he definitely had a good telephone manner. He slipped seamlessly from explanation of techniques to demonstrations. I was lucky to have had such training for free, other’s would pay thousands just to have that phone call with him.

Armed with this training and a belly full of nerves, I am now dedicating a few days to cold-calling and trying to get appointments and meetings with some big shots. It’ll be a useful skill. I am looking to offer my own services to people (businesses) in the close future. Once I have cracked doing this, ringing up “mom and pop” businesses is going to be a cake-walk (I hope).

Tickled Pink (Kinda)

This will just be a mini-rant. For that reason, I will keep this part of the post short. I came across a blog today of some one who has never made money online for themselves in any niche, talking at length about how to make money online. And not just talking about it, talking about it like they were Frank Kern! It was CRAZY.

But how do I know this guy has made no money online? Because the idiot announced it to the World on a public marketing forum. A VERY popular one. He talked about after years of effort he made *zero* money and how he was desperate and had very, very, very little cash left. He was begging to find out ways to make money. This was less than three months ago. Now the jerk has the audacity to teach people how to make money online and openly claim he has the “secrets” to making lots of money online. Good for him, why isn’t he applying it then? This guy may think this is cool, but he’s been trying to teach people how to make money online for a while now. The guy is a lunatic, and he is giving out advice which could be potentially dangerous to people who don’t know better. It both amused and annoyed me today in my morning online reading.

A Social Network

I’ve been pretty evasive about what I am doing ever since December. This has been deliberate. I am in a very transitional stage of my life (as pretentious as that sounds, it is true). I have had a couple of job offers, which have been good job offers, but not right for me. I have turned them down. I was meant to be starting up a business with a friend of mine but he quickly got distracted by another business model he knew exceptionally little about. It was a social network. This was a business model I had a better grasp of. My friend was partnering with another friend of mine, and they offered my minority shares to play a small consultancy role in the company on the online marketing and business model aspects of what they are doing. I accepted and accepted for two reasons.

1) It’s an exciting project with a lot of potential.

2) It’s a challenge.

I have put a marketing plan together and I am busy budgeting for the project for a meeting next week. It keeps me busy and my goal is to be instrumental in turning this into a national sensation in 2010 (in the UK). I can’t say too much more as it is pretty secretive at this stage, and it could go either way. It’s one of the biggest projects I have got on my hand’s at this moment in time and it could really make a name for me and the others involved, or it could just be  a total flop. I am hoping for the former of course. But I will be laying out everything on this blog, including the plan I have for marketing it, how we approach it and how well it works for us. As a side-note, I am drawing a lot of inspiration from the Four Hour Work Week Blog. Check it out, it is well worth a read and I can’t recommend the book enough.

That wraps up my Friday afternoon post today. I think my next post is going to be a bit of a multi-media affair. I am going to go into specifically what I did last year, how it ended, what I am doing now and what I hope to be doing in the future. I am going to reveal some of the websites I have created and are involved in working on. I’ll probably also add a couple of photos to of my home office etc. It should be a good post, and is going to take a while to create, so bare with me on that. But I’ll be sharing some unique information on my business and hopefully that will give you some food for thought on what you are doing as well. Should be good anyway, photos, text, podcasts and maybe a video or two! Sublime!

Speak soon and have a GREAT weekend.