I think it really depends on your approach. In my case I generate around 2000 subscribers via the internet every single month, so to try to contact all of those individuals by phone unless I have a huge telemarketing room would be absolutely impossible.
For me, the very first contact would be email, and really there’s a qualification process. A lot of people get on my email list and they realize that they don’t really want what I have to offer them, so they opt themselves out. Really, that’s fine; if you’ve been in sales, you know that it’s not necessarily about how good your product is, it’s about how well you can communicate how good your product is to the very people that need it.
If you’re talking to people that don’t need you, then really you’re just wasting your time. It doesn’t matter how good your sales pitch is, so I really use email to qualify people and see who really wants to learn more, and then we can take it to the phone.
The email process allows me to pre qualify before I get them on the phone. You see, I spend a few hundred bucks a month with aweber, and they send out like 20,000 emails some days for me, and it takes me like 5 minutes to queue that email each day – but if I get on the phone and spend an hour with someone – that costs me. I only have about 30 hours per week that I can spend on the phone – and so I want to make absolutely sure that if I am on the phone with someone, they are qualified to talk with me.
If you are not qualifying prospects before you get them on the phone, you are probably not making as much or as many sales as you should be able to. There are really simply ways that you can automate the prequalification process using aweber or other autoresponders.