Sales leads - cold calling industry codes

Who out there likes to cold call? I didn’t think so. But for most of us, it’s a necessary evil. A great way to get prospective leads, as pointed out in our “Where do sales leads come from?” post, is to look up SIC codes that your customers fall into.

You can run to the local library and look up SIC and NAICS codes for businesses that you typically sell to and then generate a list of similar companies. After you generate that list, you cold call your heart out and get to the right decision maker in each new company.

This can often be a dreary way to spend your time, as you might only get to actually talk to one in ten people so I’m not going to go through the steps to make this happen here. It will be covered in another article or two. I do, however, think cold calling should be at least a small portion of your overall lead strategy. I try to spend about two hours a week cold calling once I have a stable customer base. That’s not enough time to wear me out, but it helps bring new blood into the sales funnel.