Cold-Calling Beats Aggressively Waiting by the Phone…. EVERY TIME!
Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 8:00AM 
I’m constantly amazed that so many salespeople tell me, “cold-calling doesn’t work!” They call it “old school.” They go on to tell me about how they could (not that they DID) leave voicemail after voicemail, and that would NEVER get a reply. When I ask about e-mail, the conversation degenerates more. I hear, “My e-mail’s are just SPAM! I don’t read SPAM, and neither do my prospects! They are one delete key away from the bit-bucket!”
So what’s the answer? We teach salespeople to identify their Top 5, and attack them like a fat man goes after a wedding buffet table. For the next 20, keep a presence. You can send e-mails, do research, or look for a contact. For the rest, include them in your marketing campaigns for awareness.
This week we were told that we were the selected vendor to train a fairly large company. The salesperson, Dan - a member of the team for several years, contacted the executive by cold-calling him. He didn’t cold call them, only once! He left message after message over the past 18 months. Every quarter Dan would be “tickled” by his CRM system to call three of the executives at this company and leave them a message. These were just a few of the THIRTY calls Dan makes every day. When this company started looking at training, they made one call, to Dan.
To most salespeople, that sounds like a lot of work. It’s work they DON’T like doing. Their option is to sit by the phone and wait for it to ring. And, when the phone doesn’t ring, (and it won’t); they blame the economy, the marketing department, or some other convenient excuse.
I believe cold-calling is an essential part of selling. Maybe we should call it “networking to find people with problems we can help them solve.” If you do it religiously, over the long run, you will see results.
Reader Comments (5)
I am sorry but you are wrong. Although I would agree that cold calling does still have a place in the sales cycle, it is much less important than it was 10 or 15 years ago. I will give you an example:-
One of my salesman was having trouble getting in to see a potential customer, he had tried all the usual contact methods e.g. phoning, intro letter, messages, e-mails but got nowhere.
As it happens, I knew this guy really well from a previous job and phoned him on his mobile. I asked him why he would not see my salesman. He told me it was because as soon as he got the enquiry, the first thing he did was google us, he thought our web site was rubbish and could not determine what we were offering from it.
He said he was sorry but he just could not waste the time talking to people if he had at first not established for himself that they were offering something he needed. If he had read the information we had sent him he would have seen that we did, but like 99% of people, he would rather check out our web site for himself.
This is happening more and more, phone systems are used as call monitoring devices, e-mail blocks most messages as spam and unless you can afford a direct marketing campaign, writing to customers gets very low results.
When you are looking for something, say a plumber. Do you dig out yellow pages or do you look on-line.
As for story about the dogged colleague getting the training contract, he got lucky. Every salesman I know can tell you a story about "the big order "they got when they called in on the off chance.
Cold calling still has a place but firstly you have got to have your on-line strategy in place or your just wasting your time and money
Hi Paul:
Thanks for taking the time to read my blog entry and send me a note. I can see you are very passionate about your view and I admire that. You and I both know there is not just one way to create interest with a new prospect. I talk to salespeople every week and hear stories about some technique that didn't work, and they will never use it again. Some tell me the problems they had with administrative assistants when cold-calling. Some tell me about the voice-mail's that were never returned. Others tell me about the e-mails that went to someone's spam folder, or died at the hands of an unmerciful delete button. NOTHING WORKS 100% of the time! I think the key is to look at your target and try use the technique(s) that is best for contacting them.
I think everyone would agree that warm calls are best. In your reply, you mentioned how you called a former colleague on his mobile phone. With your experience and at your level, you can do this. I teach a lot of salespeople that are not at your level. I think they should use several techniques, and cold-calling may be one of them. It is the one that many salespeople are uncomfortable with. Thus, it is the first technique to be "thrown under the bus" as ineffective. They would rather blame their lack of new business on the ineffectiveness of their company's web page, the marketing department, or the economy. The real reason might be they are unable to articulate a customer-oriented message that is compelling enough to get a shred of interest out of their prospect.
I know you called my "dogged colleague" lucky. He has been lucky four times this month. I have been working with him for a long time. I finally realized, the harder he works, the luckier he gets. I feel cold-calling has a place with all the other techniques salespeople use today. I very much appreciate you sharing your thoughts. If you want more information, Please give me a call.
Mac
Mac McLoughlin
(858) 259-6693
Comment 1: Sorry I must be missing something... If you knew this person that your salesperson was trying to get a hold of, why did they not know that and leverage your existing relationship? It is good that you found out that your website needed a revamp, but why waste resource cold calling when leveraging an existing relationship would have made things go a lot smoother?
Maybe as salespeople we should first see if there are existing relationships we can leverage before hitting the phones...
Thank you for reading my blog post and taking the time to comment. I agree with you 100%, a good salesperson leverages his/her relationships FIRST. One of my consultants and I are undertaking a project to match my contacts to their current LinkedIn profile. This is a very labor intensive process. As you know, in the world of sales, people move so often, it is VERY difficult to keep track of them.
The situation I talked about was a company where we had NO contacts. Some salespeople would use this as an excuse to move on. My salesperson left a few voice-mails for the VP Sales. The message was NOT about our company or our training. He simply said "we have helped other VP Sales with these problems, if you're curious, please call me." Too often I hear salespeople discount the value of cold-calling. There's NO tool that works EVERY time. I certainly think warm-calling is a better alternative, if you have a contact. But, I hear too many salespeople categorically dismiss cold-calling. I think if they (1) target the high potential opportunities, and (2) warm, or cold-call the executives with a customer-issue focused message, they might be surprised at the results. Other salespeople are NOT doing it.
Thanks again for taking the time to reply. I would love to talk to you more on this subject.
Mac
Mac McLoughlin
(858) 259-6693
Back to the original poster, if he already knew the prospect from his prior job, why didn't he just call him directly, instead of sending his salesperson running around trying to track him down? It seems to me that's what effective sales managers do.