If you are spending a significant amount of time cold calling, take it as a sign that your sales and marketing process is not effective. You need to be “out there” with your value proposition when your prospect is searching for an answer to their problem; Branding, referrals, internet marketing, trade shows, advertising, blogs, etc are all methods that can be used to spread your value proposition so that prospects can find you. I would rather fire a shotgun in a tree with lots of birds than to hunt with a sniper rifle in a forest full of trees. Cold calling is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Warm calling is fishing in a pond stocked with fish. Marketing is having 100 fishing poles in the water, waiting for the hungry fish to bite.

I have been learning a whole lot about website marketing and it is extremely interesting to me. I am one of those strange people who find infomericals to be completely fascinating. It is advertising, marketing and sales (ABC) 101 all within a 30 minute time-frame. Internet marketing has some of the same aspects as an infomercial, except it needs to take place with a 30-2:00 time-frame. The attention span and ability for a web surfer to quickly close out a window and open another resembles the person watching TV who can just change to another channel….but they stop at that channel while they are skimming (how many people do you know who purposely tune into an infomercial channel…ok, besides me!) and the next thing you know they are entranced in this wonderful opportunity to purchase an powered toilet scrubber.

I think there is STILL a tremendous opportunity to make money on the web with creative sales, marketing and advertising. I also think that since the world is getting flatter (see Tom Friedman’s “The World is Flat”) by the day, the opportunities with worldwide consumers is endless.