I think it really depends on your approach. In my case, I generate about 2,000 subscribers through the Internet each month, so trying to reach all of those people by phone unless you have a large telemarketing room would be absolutely impossible.

For me the first contact would be email and there really is a qualification process. Many people get on my email list and realize they don’t really want what I have to offer, so they opt out. Really, that’s fine; If you’ve been in sales, you know that it’s not necessarily about how good your product is, but how well you can communicate how good your product is to the very people who need it.

If you’re talking to people who don’t need you, then you’re really 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 receiving them over the phone. You see, I spend a few hundred dollars a month with aweber, and they send me like 20,000 emails some days, and it takes me like 5 minutes to queue that email every day, but if I get on the phone and spend an hour with someone – that costs me I only have about 30 hours a week that I can spend on the phone, so I want to make absolutely sure that if I’m on the phone with someone, they’re qualified to talk to me.

If you’re not qualifying prospects before you call them on the phone, you’re probably not making as many or as many sales as you should. There really are easy ways to automate the prequalification process using aweber or other autoresponders.