Cold Calling and Creating Opportunities

Jordan Belfort in the Wolf of Wall Street asking someone to sell him the pen in his hands.
Jordan Belfort in the Wolf of Wall Street asking someone to sell him the pen in his hands.

For most of my life, I’ve been pretty reserved. I usually tend to keep to myself and prefer my work speak for me. However, for the endeavours mentioned in my previous posts, it’s clear that this approach isn’t conducive for creating new opportunities.

Today’s post will mainly focus on how my process with reaching out to potential clients for freelance work has evolved over time.

When I first started, I genuinely didn’t know where to start. I knew very little about selling myself, let alone cold calling or emailing. In fact, the most motivated I had ever been about sales came from the ending scene in the Wolf of Wall Street, when Jordan Belfort went around the room saying “sell me this pen”. I thought to myself “ok, my freelance services represent the pen, let’s do this”.

The first thing I did was make a spreadsheet of businesses that I was going to reach out to. There was a list of 20. I thought to myself, “this is perfect!”. I was going to have 20 new clients. I went through google to find templates for sending cold emails. This is what my first email looked like

“Hello, my name is Joshua and I am a web designer and developer based in X. While doing some quick google search, I noticed that you didn’t have a website. Having a well designed, informative website improves your online visibility and lets potential clients know more about the services you offer.

I specialise in building websites that help businesses improve their online presence. I worked with an X to build their website that resulted in increased sales. I’d love to help you do the same. Let’s hop on a call to discuss this further. Would tomorrow afternoon work for you? Alternatively you could choose a time that works for you on my calendly link here"

(For the sake of transparency, above I left the grammar mistake that I made.)

After only a small number of replies to these emails, I decided to move onto cold calling. I remember hanging up after the first ring. I was too scared to go through with it. I wrote a script and called back. I remember the person picking up the phone as I rushed to say everything on the script about who I was and if they needed a website. “We’re not looking for one right now, thanks”.

In this moment, I realised I couldn’t sell the pen. How was I ever going to become a successful freelancer? Analogies aside, I realised that I have a habit of using way too many words and not being brief enough when speaking. It didn’t help that both the emails and calls were heavily templated and chat-gpt inspired. It didn’t sound like me at all.

I went back to the drawing board and actively tried to be more direct and concise. I wanted my emails and calls to look like this:

After tweaking my process a little bit, I decided that I wanted to stop emailing before calling first. People were a lot more responsive and although it didn’t result in any new clients, running this experiment landed me some work at a design agency. I called with a brief intro, mentioned a project they had worked on that I liked and asked if they needed any extra hands with their projects. From there, I sent a follow up email and later hopped on a zoom call.

Originally, after following up, the head of the agency actually took a few days to get back to me. This showed me that my approach wasn’t entirely bad but rather, sometimes people don’t see an email or they might be too busy to respond. I also learned the importance of personalisation. Ultimately, I’m learning that the more you do something, the better you get. I’ve also realised that it’s a numbers game and I still have a lot to learn, but I really like it.

To conclude, even though most of my work comes from referrals or people personally reaching out, selling myself is something that I want to get better at. Although I’m still a work in progress, going back to the drawing board, analysing my approach as well as continuing to offer value in these interactions will help me to create more opportunities moving forward.

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