Value Added Sales Calls

So one weekend morning I was trying to take advantage of a nice quiet house and an empty schedule for the day to catch up on some much needed sleep. I was doing well until the phone began to ring around 9:00AM.

Knowing it was probably a telemarketer, I tried to ignore the first call and go back to sleep. It worked! That is until another call 15 minutes later. I thought very hard about getting up and yelling at the person calling but my bed was just too comfortable and the phone was so far away (on the nightstand next to my bed). I finally lost it when the phone rang again at 9:45AM. I answered with the full intention of really ripping into the poor soul on the other end for disrupting my late morning slumber.

"Hi Mr. Duke, this is Kelly calling for Mother's Against Drunk Driving (MADD). How are you today?" (I could have picked EITHER of the other two phone calls and have been set up perfectly to blow off some steam, but no...I get Mother's Against Drunk Driving....How exactly am I supposed to be mean to them?)

"I'm doing well Kelly, how are you?" (I always try to be polite to the person as they are just doing their job.)

Kelly went into her speech about why she was calling. She was not calling for a donation, she assured me. She explained to me what MADD was all about ( I feel I could have taken a pretty good guess) and how they have a program (here it comes) in which they offer a discount subscription or renewal of your favorite magazine as a way to support MADD. They get 16% of each subscription as a donation. Given I was due for a renewal of the ONE magazine I subscribe to I figured why not help out a good cause and renew my subscription? So I asked Kelly if they had that magazine available and (surprise!) they did not. Oh well I figured, I'll get a different one then. We went through a couple lists a finally settled on one.

One $50 Popular Science subscription later Kelly thanked me for my time and told me the information would be sent to me in the mail very soon. I thanked her for helping me to spend $50 before I had gotten out of bed and told her to have a nice day.

This leads to an interesting question. Undoubtedly nearly everyone that has ever been in sales currently has or will continue to make cold calls. What did Kelly do that was different than most other telemarketers? She offered me value (the magazine) on top of the good feeling of donating to a good cause (MADD). When you cold call your customers are you offering value other than the product or service you are selling? You may think the product or service you are selling is the value you are offering but does your prospect see that?