Compelling Argument Against Cold Calling
Doyle Slayton | May 27, 2009 | Comments 99
I recently read an article that offers a compelling argument as to why cold calling is not worth the time an effort. With the author’s permission, I am reprinting the article. I promised to share it with all of our readers to get your opinion on the ideas outlined in the post. In the coming week, I will share my own thoughts on the subject in a post titled “Cold Calling Dead or Alive“.
Sales People Don’t Cold Call
By Jeremy Miller
Cold calling is described in heroic terms: beating a path to the prized customer; crossing the many obstacles and walls of protection to find the elusive buyer; wrangling and competing against the many other sales people pursuing the same prize. After breathless battle and hard work the sales person wins his customer. His cold calling has paid off. He is a hero.
Too bad it doesn’t work that way. Cold calling is an act of frivolity. In today’s market, cold calling is the most ineffective lead generation tool out there. Just look at the numbers and it quickly becomes obvious that cold calling is a “get lucky” strategy. It takes 8.4 dials to reach a person, and 2% of all calls results in a meeting. If 30% of these first meetings convert into opportunities and a sales person closes 25% of these opportunities, he will have to make 1,000 calls to get 1 sale. If he is pounding the phones making 50 cold calls per day, he can get 1 winnable sale every 20 days. At this rate he can acquire 12.5 new customers per year. I am sure you can adjust these numbers to fit your business, but no matter which way you slice it the return on effort is terrible!
An average business-to-business sales professional earns $60,000 per year and up. Why would you pay someone that much money to cold call? It makes far more sense to provide the sales reps with “sales ready” leads. By feeding the sales reps you maximize their time, and focus their efforts to where they truly deliver value in selling: building the business case, helping customers evaluate the options, establishing rapport, negotiating terms and closing the deal.
You can look at the numbers and agree that cold calling does not warrant the time and effort it receives, but what else can you do? Cold calling is so ingrained in sales culture, that sales forces come back to it time and time again if marketing does not deliver the leads. Do not fear – there is a better way.
At any given time, only 3% of your market is ready to buy your services, but at this point your prospects are likely already engaged with you or one of your competitors. If a sales person is engaging an opportunity at this late stage the odds are stacked against her. The RFP has been distributed to several competitors, relationships are well entrenched and decisions are being made. Typically the only option to win the deal at this point is price.
The odds of winning a sale increase dramatically if you are able to engage a prospect much sooner in the sales cycle. By positioning the service well before a company is shopping, you gain a deep competitive advantage. Information on the company, the environment and its business challenges can be acquired. Relationships with key decision makers can be solidified. The service offering and value proposition can be established. By getting in early, you will be the first call when the customer is ready to buy.
Demand creation is a distinct function in the sales force. It sits in between marketing and sales. The demand creation team’s goal is to introduce, engage and nurture the prospects until they are ready to evaluate a solution with a sales person. Demand creation is a process oriented function, and requires a great deal of phone work to be constantly engaging companies in your target market. The calls are not designed to sell, but rather to position your services for when the company is ready to buy them.
Sales forces are implementing demand creation functions for several reasons. The first is sales people do not have time to give both the prospecting and selling the time they each deserve. By separating the functions, the dedicated demand creation resources will increase the quantity and quality of activity happening at the top of the sales funnel. The added supply of leads allows sales people to be more effective, and work on solid opportunities with a high probability of closing. Demand creation is a distinct skill, just as selling is. By assigning the right people to each role, the company can improve sales performance, reduce costs and reduce employee turnover. The other primary reason is employee costs.
A key argument against demand creation is lead squandering. Since the sales reps are not generating their own leads, then they will not value the effort, money and time that went into getting them. This is a valid argument, but one that can be effectively managed with training and metrics. The demand creation team and sales reps must work in tandem, and constantly be tracking their activities and successes. By managing the conversion ratios to move a prospect through the sales funnel, management will have the data and intelligence on what is happening with the leads. Metrics are essential to an effective demand creation strategy.
Lead squandering is also unlikely when sales people are able to work on qualified, “sales ready” leads. A sales ready lead is a prospective customer that is fully engaged and ready to enter the sales process. These are the opportunities great sales people love. If that is all they had to work on every day, their job would be amazing. They could establish rapport, demonstrate options, block competitive threats and acquire the customers. They become far more effective sales people.
Companies who combine lead generation and selling to the sales people are doing themselves a disservice. When sales people are required to cold call to achieve quota, the company faces two distinct issues: a higher cost of sale and higher turnover of sales people. Yet when a company takes a keen interest in feeding its sales people, the opposite happens: increased revenues, improved sales force productivity, and an improved working environment. When sales people are enabled to sell more, it is a great environment to work in – everyone wins.
Jeremy Miller is a Partner with LEAPJob, a sales and marketing recruiting firm in Toronto, Canada. You can reach Jeremy at 905.281.3090, Ext. 22. For more information on LEAPJob please visit http://www.LEAPJob.com.
OK sales team… What do you think? Whether you agree or disagree, share your opinion and… this last part is very important… your ideas on potential solutions!
Check Out These Related Articles!
Filed Under: Blog • Featured • Guest Authors • Sales • SalesTaxi
I believe that lead generation is a full function of marketing as is sales.
If marketing are truly doing their role properly they set the direct of the company based on their research by gap analysis
and then build demand in this perceived gap in the market.
When they are successful at moving the identified clients-to-be to a stage 2, out of 6 (stage 2 is contemplating), they would involve the sales team. The sales team then work hand in hand with marketing until the client-to-be commits to becoming a client, stage 4. The sales team then “returns” the client to marketing process for them to track their progress start the process all over again for another service or product; simple isnt it?
I like this analysis of lead gen vs. selling. The only challenge that I forsee is the relationship piece, let’s say a lead generator has been cultivating a relationship with a potential customer and then when the prospect is ready to buy they lead generator passes the customer on to a completely different person who is now the sales rep. So the question that I pose is how would you make the transition between the two people smooth so that no relationships/business is lost?
I am a “Sales Enablement Specialist” or lead generator for three consulting firms. I have an extension, email address, and access to the company CRM system to indicate my progress on leads. I cultivate leads in the database until they are ready to meet with the expert. I do a small amount of cold calling if/when I have exhausted the database. My objective is to qualify a lead to understand the degree our service may fit the prospective customers need. Once the the prospect and I agree our solution is a potential fit for the prospect’s need I book an appointment on the expert’s calendar (I have access to their calendar too) either for a phone appointment or onsite needs meeting with the customer. After the appointment takes place I work hand and hand with the expert until the lead closes. From the start of my communication with the prospect I am selling the expert, not the product. The expert has the credibility from the start and the my goal is for the prospect to trust in the expert’s guidance. This has proved to be a very smooth transition in my experience. By-the-way, I am available for hire depending on the fit I may offer a particular organization.
This is a well written argument against cold calling. We are a start up (small company) and trying to figure out the right roles for sales people & marketing in lead generation.
On the whole, my gut instinct is, cold calling should be the absolute last resort. Cold calling with preparation improves odds of engaging the potential prospect.
My company develops tools that help automate lead-generation (lists for cold calling) from the Internet. So I very interested in hearing what others have to say on this topic.
Thank you for bring this article.
Chandra Bodapati
ceo / founder
http://www.egrabber.com
I can agree with Jeremy’s main premise which is that cold calling takes much more time than if the sales people only had to go out and sell the product to eager prospects. I would love to find a way to only work with warm leads in my job and hopefully in a few years I will be able to rely on a well established, satisfied client base that is willing to continually refer business my way.
Unfortunately for a sales person that doesn’t have an existing network of business prospects and doesn’t work for a company that has the resources to warm up all the leads before they get them, we must resort to cold calling or finding other ways to get our foot in the door.
One thing that I have done to help access somewhat warmer leads is to get familiar with my present clients and what industries they are in so that I can use that knowledge to try and access similar potential clients in that same industry. This takes some time because you really have to do some research on your own and put yourself in the shoes of a business owner or decision maker for that industry. However when you can say “You might be dealing with XYZ issue becuase of ABC problem” and make a connection with a real pain that they have, you are able to build instant rapport with the potential client. If they feel like you know some of their pains, they immediately feel a little more comfortable with whatever else you might have to say.
What it really comes down to, in my humble opinion, is caring about what you are talking about and who you are talking to. Attitude is 80% of being a successful sales person. Products and Services, Features and Benefits, Problems and Solutions, all of these things change and can be taught to anyone. I think the best sales tool you can give yourself is a positive attitude that doesn’t quit.
I am in agreement with your position on cold calling. I am a sales mgt. consultant…I work with companies who don’t have a sales mgr…or mktg dept. Sometimes cold calling is a necessity, not a strategy. That said, your approach to profiling existing customers and then looking to find similar companies/industries to pursue can aid in making the cold calling process more targeted.
If your most profitable customers are in XX industry and they love your product/service…ask them why…how does it help them, what pain does it alleviate. I agree that the best way to differentiate yourself is to become a subject expert in your deliverable..that your prospects come to respect and seek out. Eventually, they will seek you out to buy. The challenge with all of the approaches here are that they require time. Time is an investment that you make in future sales…it all comes back to building and maintaining your pipeline. Thanks for your feedback!
So the point is not that cold calling is ineffective, but that someone else should be doing it to free the salespeople up to do what they do best, sell.
Nice concept.
Haven’t siding companies, insurance agents, and others been doing this for years?
A whole lot of marketing speak here for an old strategy. It is one that is still effective after all these years, and anticipating response… It isn’t appointment setting… it’s demand creation.
Sounds like a great book title, when can we expect it?
Dan: I was hoping someone would save me the trouble of saying this. Bottom line is this: at the end of the day someone has to make the initial contact with a prospect. Whether that’s done through great marketing, cold calling or “demand creation”, it’s a task that can’t be left undone.
You’re right: salespeople have been trying to get someone else to do the dirty work for them for years. While I agree that (as Carlyn stated above) cold calling is a necessity, not a strategy, it has to be done. Until you’ve established yourself or your company as the only game in town and people start calling you, you are going to have to call them.
Now then, what’s the solution? Doyle nailed it a couple of weeks ago with this post (sorry Doyle; hope I didn’t ruin any surprises you had planned). A quick summary of the post is this: use the cold call as God intended, namely, to gather information and establish an opportunity for following up.
As many other have commented here, I won’t ramble on any further. I’ll just say that anyone who wants to be in sales without having to cold call is looking for frustration.
Jerry Kennedy
The Motivation 101 Blog
I completely agree with you, Jerry. I’ve been on both sides – lead generation and sales/closer. While I prefer closing the sale, it is most rewarding when I’ve been involved in the sale from generating the lead all the way to the close.
I block out time (typically 9:00am to 11:30am) to make cold calls – it’s part of my schedule and a high priority. Although it’s not the most plesant part of my day, cold calling will fill the pipeline when done consistently and as part of the overall marketing strategy.
Any salesperson worth their salt is not afraid of the challenge of starting from scratch, making the calls, filling their pipeline and closing the deals. A rewarding sales career can’t be handed out on a silver platter – it must be earned.
Shelly Arens
Here here!
I believe cold calling, a lot of sales folks believe, is a time-suck. It’s not fun, and at first seems fruitless. You do this for the future. Make contact, re-contact regularly (I typically get express permission to do this), stick to promised lag-time and make it as personalized as professionally acceptable. After six months at this company, almost a quarter of my calls in a day are to folks that know who I am when I call.
I pull 75 names a day from the database, and it’s nice when the percentage of these that are warm calls continues to go up.
On the blocking out time, this is critical, and is my #1 priority in a day. 95% of everything else can be adjusted to fit around your blocks of time. I don’t have just one large block, however. I have three smaller ones. Your chances of catching folks at their desks are greater right after they start the day, and right after they get back from lunch. Therefore, I start calling my first round as soon as I sit down at my desk (coffee waits until I finish this- usually in an hour). Then another hour right after lunch. Then another 1/2 – 1 hour late in the afternoon. This makes it easier to fit in projects, meetings, other calls, oh… and lunch.
I’m reminded of a talk in church when I was younger. I recall the speaker getting a large pickle jar and putting a bunch of sand in it (representing the small, insignificant things in your life), then tried to fit an impossible amount of larger rocks into the jar. It simply didn’t fit. Then he dumped out the sand and then put the rocks in which fit beautifully, then poured the sand over the rocks. It all fit.
The moral of the story is get to the big, important stuff in your day first (this this case, it was prayer, charity, etc). The rest will also fit in your day. The the case of typical Inside Sales (maybe Sales in general), get the demand generation part of your day done first, the rest can fit in around it.
I would like to know any thoughts on leaving voicemails. I know they can be effective, but I have opted to not leave them, just try the three different call-blocks to try to catch them live. I can make more dials in a day and I’m less exhausted at the end of it. Has anyone else done the same?
Cyd
Cyd, great post, I do something very similar. When I first started cold calling in my career I would leave messages, my manager and CEO told me to do so. In fact over the first two years I tried over 100 variations of messages. I had the greatest success when I used names, something personal, or left a very short message with no reason why I was calling.
I had the greatest success with what I call brute force calling. I might call them two or three times in my calling block three times a day. Sooner or later everyone would pick up. Heck some people I probably tried 100 times before they answered.
John
Great post! I agree with you, Cyd. I think your emphasis on the importance of having a schedule to make sure the most important things get done is something that is not stressed enough in sales. Too many salespeople seem to think that using a dayplanner is either too boring, or too much trouble. On the contrary, it is a valuable and necessary tool that helps you make the best use of your time, as well as make sure you follow up when you said you would.
I also agree that there is no substitute for putting in the time and effort yourself to make the cold calls. As uncomfortable as it may be at first, cold calling is a “muscle” that every salesperson needs to have and strengthen to truly be a sales person and not just an order taker.
Regarding the use of voicemail, I think it’s valuable to make judicial use of it when cold calling. I don’t think you need to leave a message every time you call, but since so many people have caller ID today I think it’s both a courtesy and a way to begin to warm up your contact by leaving a BRIEF message at least once. That way, when you do eventually catch them, they already have some idea of who you are and who you represent.
I’d be interested to know how much you are making use of social and professional networking sites, like LinkedIn, to flesh out your cold calling efforts.
Jerry, you are right on the money. A good salesperson should be cold calling to establish business contacts and start working them through the sales process. The goal should be to establish enough clients that cold calling is a smaller percentage of your week, but you have to start at the begining.
Jay has an excellent point. Many deals are lost in the handoff because the Lead Gen person made the relationship personal and not professional. In a personal relationship, acountability is to the individual and thus, does little for the company if that person leaves.
On the other hand, a strong professional relationship is based on ALL employees of a company being represented by the relationship, as in “I would never turn you over to someone I don’t trust to handle your business as well as I would. Everyone here is great.”
This latter relationship is well branded and supported by strong Customer Relationship Management — personalized correspondence, no spamming, strong anticipation of need, and the prospects belief that their rep is truly happy and well regarded by the company.
This relationship requires maturity, company loyalty, and empathy. These are traits that, while still highly valued, are rarely found in today’s migrant sales force.
The sales reps who can manage this kind of relationship, are usually the ones who can tighten up the numbers on those cold calls. They listen and provide; they don’t have to sell.
The title of the article was most enticing for someone who is not a natural cold caller, but to my logic the content did not really support the arguument. The intent of giving one’s sales force warmer leads is, of course, marvellous and potentially far more profitable. I have, however, two objections; firstly to get in a position whereby one can drive demand creation one still has to ascertain who the decision maker is and their contact details. That sounds like a cold call. Secondly, the whole demand creation concept could easily be construed as a time wasting exercise by the recipient of the phone call. Having said that it is also probably true that what works well in the US market may not have the same effect in the UK or Australian markets.
I think this article simply states that there is a fundamental difference in sales and marketing; Demand Creation. The company that understands a marketing effort is not combined at the sales executive level can be more efficient as using cold calling as your only marketing effort can be heavy lifting.
I never believed in cold calling, and never wanted to do cold calling. I am in a business that used telemarketers to generate leads. I have a lot of networking, and have taught proper networking. Depending upon the business you maybe able to NOT cold call. I have developed a system, where I expect and do get 2 appointments with every 20 people I cold call. 20 calls takes me 1 hour. If done properly cold calling can be very effective. See my blog on “Sobering Sales Statistics.” The truth of the matter is that from behavioral assessments only 8% of sales people can be considered hunters, and only 1% have the right skill set. So you are right most people cannot cold call, and it is a waste of time, if you do not have the right attitude and skill set.
I wonder what it would be like to work for a company that has such unique products that the customer is aching to buy, or who has such deep pockets that they have a dedicated, well trained phone staff that understands the sales process so well that they give me a hot list so I can swoop in and undercut the account that is “ready to buy”.
A “cold call” is the easiest thing to make – it is a win-only opportunity.
Well, where do I start?
How about starting where I totally disagree with the statistics on cold calling. We all know that statistics on cold calling are relative to many factors such as the industry, sales person, methods, etc. Personally, my stats differ dramatically than the author’s. From using the phone to walking in the door, I have been quite successful in making cold calls and not to toot my own horn, but I’ve received the rewards and accolades in my various sales positions as a result.
Yes, I believe there are various industries where cold calling is likely not the best method in reaching sales goals. But generalized statements such as made in this article set a negative tone for those in sales who right now particularly are challenged to reach their ojectives and must cold call more to do so. I mean, do you really believe any employer would allow their sales force to close one sale every twenty days unless a long sales cycle is the norm? Of course in some industries that is a short cycle and in some the opposite.
Now for the concept of demand creation, it sounds interesting and something that companies sometimes already do through various means such as creating buzz (Budweiser basically invented it) through word of mouth, marketing and advertising to keep their business at the top of mind position. Essentially all advertising would fall into “demand creation” or as a preacher one said, advertising is to create discontentment by telling you about all the things you don’t have and therefore probably don’t need. I of course work in advertising!
So, is demand creation meant to show a potential buyer that they need something they may not really need so a sales person can come in and push them over the side to close the sale? If that is the idea, then I’d be totally against it. Now if there has been a challenge the business is having and it’s been identified and through demand creation the business owners are made aware of solutions available then I suppose the demand was identified and not created. I guess the more I think about it, I’m not convinced we need demand creation. I don’t think it would have the customer’s needs at heart but would rather be devised to satisfy the desires of a company selling something for their own benefit and not the benefit of the customer.
So far as lead squandering, I would never waste a warm lead given to me. That would be like having a friend or good customer making a referral and never following up. For me that just doesn’t happen but I can see where with some sales people it could be of concern because they likely aren’t good at their follow up skills anyhow and the company paying for this service would be out the money and the sale by an ineffective sales force squandering the leads.
Well, enough opinion. Hope I didn’t ramble too much.
This post remains me of a great lecture by Guerrilla Marketing legend Jay Conrad Levinson. Jay was asked which marketing methods “work” – his answer was that NO marketing methods work; what works are marketing combinations – Direct Mail + Telemarketing, PR + Advertising, PPC + SEO.
I agree that far too few sales people have what it takes to cold call. The few that do are the real hunters that can dramatically impact business results. It’s essential to Top Grade and get the right person in the right position.
Cold calling can and does work, if the hiring manager selects only the combination of right skills and right aptitude.
I agree this is a compelling argument, I could be compelled….but I have some reservations.
The context here seems to be a more complex/expensive sale. (Getting ready here for slaughter now) – I have an objection to the whole technical dissection of ‘Sales’ – as if we can create a ‘machine’ of humans who churn out this product called a ‘sale’. We keep thinking we can solve human problems by logic. Logic/rationale is useful but NEVER supercedes intangibles like the human spirit (e.g. since when did we ever win by winning an argument?)
Yes we need to break it down to understand the Sales process so it is repeatable, but I think we can find better answers faster by working from the BUYER’s point of view. It appears to me, sales success has a lot more to do with psychology and behaviour than what appeals to logic.
While I don’t argue that perhaps Marketing should have a greater stake/integration with the sales process (definitely!), my biggest problem with dividing the steps is the human element. Relationship and trust with the ‘salesperson’ (the face of the company) is unavoidably a huge factor in sales. e.g. Who can disupte that at the highest levels of decision making, it’s “who you know not what you know”?
Theoretically the Salesguys in this article can be motivated by metrics and logic; but metrics don’t live, breathe, inspire or reproduce values. To be able to sustain perspective and grounded in reality, the Salesperson NEEDS to have a stake in the broader picture. Do you remember how you felt when the farmyard animals refused to tave a stake in Henny Penny’s bread making efforts? Weren’t you a bit outraged? “Those animals should have participated through the process if they wanted to eat the bread (commission)!”
Having said all that, the article states a lot of truth. What it does for me is raise some BIGGER QUESTIONS like:
*Do companies have unrealistic expectations? (of Salespeople, cost of sale, product value to the market)
*Are the companies investing in and developing their Salespeople – or just plucking stars from competitors? (henny penny’s farmyard again).
I reckon we are in for a lively discussion! Let’s never forget the bigger picture that commerce is about excellence in fulfilling purpose through stewardship of resources.
I agree with Lisa, the argument is big on stats low on facts. I love it when people knock cold calling, because it provides an excuse for those that can’t do it not to do it. Which allows those of us who are good at it to play with the vast number of people who just need to be approached properly and engage them in a conversation I call the sales process.
Tibor
*standing ovation*
Well said, Tibor. The whole time I was reading the article, I was having visions of salespeople trotting into their managers’ offices, waving the article and demanding the creation of a “demand creation” department so they don’t have to do the “unnecessary” work of cold calling anymore. After all, it says right here that cold calling is a waste of time!
If salespeople would spend less time trying to get out of cold calling and more time doing it, they might find out just how effective cold calling can be.
Jerry Kennedy
The Motivation 101 Blog
Jeremy,
Your stats skew and obfuscate the real argument. Cold calling is not dead. It’s just not practiced very well. I agree that it’s prohibitively cost ineffective for sales people to make cold calls. However, when done well, cold calling is quite effective. I know, because my firm does this for clients, and does it well.
You’re playing to a popular sentiment right now. Sales people hate to cold call. Wrong audience. The managers who own the results aren’t open to an argument that basically says a door can’t be opened through effective 1:1 calling.
I won’t take it out on you personally, but I’m actually tiring of “experts” who don’t tactically understand the nature of the cold call and its effectiveness when implemented correctly.
In sales, nothing happens until a conversation takes place, and that’s what that initial call accomplishes.
I have the data to prove that cold calling works. I challenge you to actually prove the opposite. Your data is based on telemarketing.
Game on.
Nice! My money is on you, Brian.
Jerry Kennedy
The Motivation 101 Blog
I think the premise here is quite sound. There is a strong trend in early adopters to engage “people” on their level that will ultimately create auto generated sales leads for every industry. Get engaged in social media / new media spaces, be human, provide value and customers will seek you
Cold calling is a must in all sales career, but the ammount dedicated to it can differ dependint on different factors, the maturity of the market, the actual pipeline of a salesman, but I think that networking is getting overrated and cold calling underrating. I forsee that the ture salesman must have a balance between both, but never abandon any one of this.
Gap analysis and demand creation are worthy terms and valuable pursuits. This is a useful article certainly. Would someone please kindly explain: Just what precise form of contact does one employ for the very first attempt to engage with a company with which you have no prior relationship?
Email, letter, call, LinkedIn request, networking, text, smoke signals, other?
At the very beginning where no relationship exists (let’s call this state “cold”) it could be argued that someone has to make the first pro-active move. Is this a cold call or something else?
Good cold callers can perform both gap analysis and demand creation roles. Cold calling as other respondents have pointed out, is very often done badly. No surprise it has a poor reputation for some and lousy figures for those that only focus on it leading to a sale.
Applying old-school linear sales thinking and processes to the relationship driven, web 2.0 enabled world we now live in is surely incompatible at best.
Calling on the phone is in the mix: cold, warm, research based, as a logical post-event contact, etc. It shows no signs of disappearing. As with any other tool, it’s up to us how we choose to use it.
After reading all of these posts, one thing comes to mind that I read lately. Oddly enough, it was the “15 Rules for Becoming a Top Producer” by Doyle Slayton (the person who runs this site). My favorite are the pages about loving cold calling (pgs 8-9?) Ever since I read his ebook the other day I truly have had a change of attitude. I know as a salesperson that I am going to cold call at least some of the time. Even if I am having a good week or month and the sales are coming in, I know there will be a time where I will need to cold call again to fill my pipeline.
If I know I am going to have to do something a lot in the near future maybe I should simply embrace it and become the best cold caller I can be, rather than spending all of my time trying to get out of it.
I love what Tibor said and totally agree. If you are a sales professional, the only reason that you get paid as well as you do for selling is that it is hard and you do it better than most. If sales was easy, everyone would be in sales and we wouldn’t make any money at all.
My other suggestion would be to take a look at http://www.smileandmove.com/video. If you have a chance to order the book it is a very quick read and well worth your time.
As I said previously, Attitude drives success and if you have a bad attitude about what you do, maybe you need to get a new attitude or get a new job….
I love sales and will always be in sales in one way or another. I will embrace cold calling and make it my mission to become great at it.
Well lot’s of good stuff to read. What I get from the article is that someone else is going to get me my leads, tell me they are qualified and then I call them and re-qualify them with the hopes of setting up appointments. “Bless the marketing deopartment”. However, no one said I was a good sales person and knew what to say, when to say it and how to say it to a prospect. Some marketing director told his team of telemarketers “go get leads for the sales people” They probably get paid per lead or something in that realm.
So I get the leads, whew, what relief. I don’t have to have my own list of targeted companies or prospects. Now I have these “wonderful leads”, and guess what. I’m cold calling. Sure someone supplied the leads but they are not sales people, they do not really know how to qualify and if they did maybe they would be selling not calling.
Whether you like to cold call or not is not the question. I don’t think anyone likes to cold calling but have you looked around your networking meeting lately? How many real decision makers are there? Has social networking taken over so that everyone can talk about how hard it is out there? Business is slow, people are not spending money like they used to do. Well for starter, one should make sure your company has the right people in the right seats that will over achieve and be effective in the market place (another issue)
Cold calling works. You are in control of the call, from who to call to setting the appointment. You talk to the decison makers, ask the right questions get a compelling reason for them to see you and go to work.
Maybe companies should supply up to date lists to their sales people to call on.
Very often during the coaching session I provide to sales force development experts I find myself suggesting to them that when they find themselves facing a presdient /CEO who says they have no money to develop their sales organization, who by the way are the folks who generate the revenue, then I suggest they ask the question as follows ” If the sales team is not closing as much new business as you would like and not being effective, why not take some of the marketing budget and out it to good use, in to the sale team so that they do not waste the marketing dollars spent generating leads they can’t close. Look at your sales team first.
Unless you have a large referral base, cold calling works. Get over the fact you may get a lot of “NOs”. Remember, “Some will, some won’t, so what next”
And if all fails, read some of the books or take a course in Cold Calling.
Evaluate your people, make sure they are the right people to be on your sales team, train your people with the right skills, give them an up to date list, a telephone, the right words to say, questions to ask and let them find the business. It’s out there even if we have to work twice as hard.
This is an interesting point and theory that you state within this article. There is a lot of time wasted in getting an experienced salesperson up and running by “pounding the phones.” With voicemail, it makes it very challenging to reach your prospective clients and you’re forced to either leave a message, which a call is never returned, or to “catch” the person at their desk.
In an entry level sales position, cold calling is part of the job and should be but as a salesperson moves through their career and has proven themselves to be a good salesperson in closing business, the demand creation concept would be a more cost-effective process.
Demand creation is a good start for those who desire to step into a sales role so they know what it will take later in the process.
A mentor of mine once said that a sales person that does not know how to successfully cold call and win new business is simply an “order taker”.
If you’re company is in position to spend massive amounts of money to bring in leads and you have too many incoming leads and business is great, then sure, why waste time cold calling.
But most businesses are not in that position. Especially in today’s economic climate.
To be a highly valued asset to a company, a sales person would need to know how to successfully cold call and win business when inbound leads are low.
And what about calling on old customers for up selling? That is part of “cold calling”. If you think your competitors are not calling them, think again.
Jeremy,
While well written, I have to take exception with your article on Cold Calling.
I don’t think anyone making cold calls views them as heroic or a battle. If they do, it’s a mistake. A cold call is simply one of many ways to reach a prospect and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s the most cost & time effective method for doing so. It should be a prepared, yet gentle way of contacting someone who might possibly be interested in meting with you to discuss their situation and your product or service.
I question the validity of your statistics. As a professional sales trainer I am often called upon to train sales teams how to cold call. The first thing I teach them is the need to accurately track their efforts. I can tell you, from personal experience, that when I cold call I reach a decision maker 50% of the time. (that includes decision makers returning my calls because I know how to leave a voice mail message that gets them to do so) When I get a decision maker on the phone I get the appointment 50% of the time. That said, I’m a highly experienced professional and I don’t expect the people I train the get the same results as I do immediately but I can share with you that last month I spent a day training a sales team from a large, well known cable providor how to cold call and the next morning we got them on the phones for 3 hours. They got through to decision makers 32% of the time and got appointments 37% of the time. I’m not telling you this to brag but these numbers change the point of your article.
There is, most assuredly, no argument when you say it makes far more sense to provide the team with “sales ready” leads. Please let me know where to get that list of people who are “fully engaged and ready to enter the sales process.” I’ll pay for that list! In fact, any company that does this for their team IS paying large amounts of money and time to find and nurture those prospects. I’m not against it at all but I am saying that the cold call is still less expensive and quicker.
I do agree with you that most people hate cold calling. I do too and I do everything possible to make sure I have to cold call as little as possible. But, when the rubber hits the road and we find ourselves in a challenging economy where the prospects are harder to find, even with all theother efforts I make to make contact with prospects i still find myself having to cold call. When done properly, it gets results.
btw – I also take exception with your theory that the only way to win a deal when responding to an RFP is on price. There are ways to change the game when dealing with RFPs and anyone who is willing to play the “I’ve got the lowest price” game is missing the point. The name of the game is show prospects enough VALUE and they’ll pay your price. The RFP game is stacked against you but it doesn’t have to be that way.
All the Best,
Jeff
The eternal debate reguarding cold calling effectivness is as intense as ever, so I must put in my.02! In this day, how many calls are truly”cold”? How likely is a decision maker to spend time with a salesperson who simply shows up? How likely is the salesperson to meet with a qualified buyer? What’s the prospects perception of the walk in sales person? How many doors will one enter thinking I will be successful selling by showing up unannounced?
At best, cold calling is but one (marginally successful) prospecting strategy. It is a very inefficient, often ineffective selling strategy. Top sales people know there are better ways to obtain sales. To bad many sales managers haven’t learned this. New sales people must focus on cold calling as a prospecting, information gathering call to prepare them to return “warm” better prepared and more likely welcomed.
Cold calling at the CXO level is an art, not a science. Successful salespeople are comfortable with cold calling at this level because they understand business needs and are able to think strategically like a high level executive with Life, Mission and Business critical needs.
“Sales ready leads” are for Levels I and II salespeople who are not skilled enough to create and sustain a symbiotic relationship with a top executive at a major corporation. The article should qualify the level of sales expertise more precisely since salespeople come in all shapes and sizes and skill levels. The top salespeople who close high volume sales with attractive margins while forging long term relationships use effective cold call methods everyday. Effective, results driven cold call selling is not for everyone particularly if the skills do not match the demands of the assignment.
JCT
You made some great points, a couple facts that are not quite exact, but missed the biggest factor.
It is true most experienced sales people with over 4.2 years experience earn $58,000. The other half of lesser experienced direct sellers average $29,000 yearly.
The big overlooked factor is that so few new agents, managers, and even better trained agents know the difference between a suspect and a true lead.
85% of sales presentations are given to good suspects, lacking in some areas of prospect qualification. That is the reason for low closing ratios, and high turnover. Cold calling produces very few true prospects for the time spent.
Internet lead programs produce few prospects and mostly suspects. You can not afford wasting your time on anything leading to giving appointments to suspects.
Suspects are objectors, prospects are buyers.
True lead generation, developed by yourself will produce people willing to buy. If you have a 35% current closing rate, and change it to at least 70% does it not double your income?
When I wised up, I quit cold calling, developed my own leads and only worked the best of those. Expensive? Yes. However a 90% closing rate provides the time, money, and income. Believe in yourself, don’t scrounge for maybe sales.
Cold calling is a home office company scam to cover up the lack of good leads, which is expensive. Ask yourself if you want to be a company slave or a successful sales person.
Side comment: If you fired half your business sales force and provided the best with training and good leads, sales would double.
Everything that has to be said has been said. And the conclusion is …….COLD CALL.
Every sale starts cold! It is the speed with which you move the temperature guage to HOT that pays off. Building a network of trusted business advocates that can make personal introductions bypasses the COLD call and exponentially increases success ratios! That is developed over time and with a high degree of giving first to build value based relationships. Invest in others and your long term gains are immeasurable…
I have to agree with Jay. Especially in my industry we truly depend on “earning” the loyalty through building relationships with our clients. And you have to start building that relationship from your very first cold call. In my belief I am the one that has to follow up when I say I am going to. If a lead generating company is doing all of that for me, then how would I personally earn the loyalty from them?
Hello to all!
I have to say that this debate for or against cold calling is older than we are.
Therefore I am looking to the basics: the mixture between Marketing and Sales. This is a symbiotic relationship and can’t be broken or separated. The sales process start in fact with Marketing answering a few simple questions: 1) What we are selling?; 2) Where we are selling?; 3) When we are selling?; 4) To whom we are selling?; 5) At what price we are selling? This is the Marketing job.
The Sales job is to take the answers and and find the answer for them: 1) How we are selling?
Most of the CXO people does not understand that, as well most of the Marketing and Sales from big companies or corporations. As a result of this misunderstanding Marketing is doing PR & Advertising and Sales are whining that they have to cold call. BUT, think about for a moment that you are in a small company, you are the only sales and have a colleague that is doing for you market research. What you will have to do to sell? Of course, COLD CALL. If you don’t do that you will not sell, with all the consequences.
Brian Tracy said that 20% of all Sales people make 80% of the worldwide revenue, and from that 20%, 3% of the sales people are thinking that they are self-employed, either they are in a corporation, small company or self-employed. Those are THE BEST sales people that are making LOTS of money.
I don’t want to take your time too much! My conclusion is that sales should cold call. How much? When? With what costs? Those are not their problems, but is the problem of Sales Management. And from here we can start to write a book…
Attitude is everything in sales.
My best regards to all of you!
20% of the sales people do not make 80% of the revenue. I have been studying this for over 25 years. 20% of the sales people make almost exactly 50% of the revenue.
Sorry Brian, 80/20 is not correct here.
You could however say of successful sales people 80% of the sales are made without cold calls, and 20% originating from cold calls.
The sales job is not to take answers, it is the sales person’s job to ask questions that must skillfully uncover the emotional pain of the prospective client. There are 6 main emotions, and almost all sales are based on emotions. Without exposing the pain, you cannot present the logic for buying. Attitude is important, confidence is king. Any confident person does not need to cold call. A good sales person can confidently sell to anyone that is a true prospect.
Donald –
The point of the 80/20 principal is that activites generate uneven results – not that the exact 80/20 percentage happens every time.
Some activites = dramatically better results. The point is to find those activities and avoid ones that have poor results.
Cold calling arguements aside,I would argue that there is a tendency for management to see lots of “activity” – especially in a down economy. But, you can certainly be “busy” in ways that don’t create more results.
Back to the article – there are a couple of points that no one has addressed yet.
* The article describes a symptom of having high turnover in the sales team.
What I’ve seen at my company (my first corporate sales job), is that we keep hiring people who have years of experience at other sales companies and they quickly dislike our atmosphere. We have a sales approach that relies amost exclusively on cold calling. With extremely long sales cycles, I don’t think my company provides a base salary that supports the length of effort and time it takes to develop these deals. We also just split up the territories and hired more people to make sure we have enough “coverage” – basically to make sure we’re cold calling on as many people as possible. I have found I’m really good at cold calling – have about a 75% closing ratio when I get someone on the phone. But it still takes 9+ months to close a deal from initial conversation. The comp plan and the expectations don’t really keep this in mind. The result = high turnover.
Overall – I agree with the article…………that if you have to cold call, you really need to figure out how to integrate that in a way that’s efficient and be realistic about how much it will cost, and how long it will take to produce a deal.
I’m been in the Sales Management and Distribution Consulting game now going on 25 years, so I’ve already heard most of the pro and con arguments on the subject.
Regardless of what anyone might tell you, Cold Calling -these days- is a complete waste of your time. Embrace it all you want, but if you do, keep a journal and account for your time to understand how much you’re putting into your “marketing effort” and what each net sale must yield to just cover these costs.
But, be careful: Sales is not Marketing; and Marketing is NOT sales. You must have a plan for both.
Your chances of forming a genuine “relationship” from a cold call are about the same as your accepting a “please donate to the sheriff’s fund” during YOUR dinner time. Think about it!
Couple of thoughts:
Good article, especially for those new to this subject; and, I’m sure, there a quite a few of you.
Here’s the thing about Cold Calling:
#1, it’s not 1988 any more, so get over it.
#2, just do a little research to learn how many times per day we’re all bombarded by “sales” messages to understand why most all “buyers” are completely turned off at this intrusion;
#3, what do you do when you get a “cold call?”
#4, why would you possibly waste your time talking to anyone not predisposed to buy from you??
#5, obviously, industrial sales, for example, is quite different from financial services (etc.), but the goal is the same. So, move now (right now!) into a plan for referral selling, playing off a very good marketing plan.
Yea, there are many articles and books on the subject, but the top shelf ones are:
- “Getting to VITO” by Tony Parinello and his whole series on the subject + his website;
- “Never Cold Call Again!” by Frank Rumbauskas as a very good backgrounder;
- “No More Cold Calling” by Joanne Black, though it’s more for the corporate level than the “street” level.
Let me know how I can help You!!
Jim Cotton / Atlanta
All good comments from everyone.
I learned many years ago (I am one of those “more than 20 years of experience sales Executives”) that every GREAT sales person MUST at some point in time cold call (my hint is preferably earlier on in your career-so as to build your network)
If noting else to keep your sales skills up to speed and even to this day, as a Senior VP of Global Sales I use as many tricks in my bag to help bring a REAL deal into the sales pipeline (and not what I called the sales “pipedream” back in 1992)and I monitor the activities bby our sales team the old fashion way; I am involved with EVERY Executive on each deal moving down the sales environment. I don’t need a SFA tool to tell me what going on. Pie charts make nice presentations; sales leads are a dime a dozen (guess what if you have them so does your compitition so what is your advantage?) and all you need to do is ask the questions and get engaged with clients (and no texting them does not count).
Instead of worrying about demand creation, why not create YOUR own demand (since you know doubt told your employer when you came in you had all these great contacts anyway). What I do with each new sales person I have ever hired was to write a contract with them.
They tell me what they are looking for (“demand” for salary, better OTE at the end of the year, etc…) and then I tell then what I expect. At the end of 120 days, we then sit down and see who has met the expectations (and from there we see whose “demands” have been met).
Today we have more sales tools at our hands than ever before, and seem to have LESS accountability, and MORE excuses as to why a deal went South! Reminds of watching the Glen Gary/Glenn Ross movie; about excuses- and that the “leads are weak” (another great excuse).Is it tough out there? Sure it is; but no tougher than it was a few years back.
Maybe those who are looking at lead generation from the company should read Og Mandino’s “The Greatest Salesman In The World” (warning it will take a year to read)and from this you’ll at least have a BASIC understanding of why we enter this great profession (and why many leave it).
Having trained and mentored over 10,000 salespeople and recruiters in the IT consulting industry, there is one thing that remains constant- and that is the COMPENSATION plan you sign up for! At the end of the day it is YOU who needs to feed your family; not the marketing team, not the senior management, not HR, not anyone else but YOU (and yes, even today I am carrying a “bag”)
So, I would encourage everyone who has not read Og Mandino, or Miller-Heiman’s LAMP and Consultative Selling or probably one of the other 10,000 books on selling (yes and I published one years back as well) to take it upon YOURSELF to get in the game and stop being on the sidelines.
Yes, you’ll get bloody on the field- but for goodness sakes you’ll at least have some real accountability for your job (and will feel better about your “sales talents”) in one of the greatest professions there is; SALES!
Cold calling for the sake of cold calling might not be dead BUT it is fruitless or nearly fruitless.
This of course assumes the sales person has no intelligence or knowledge of the Trigger Events that make solving a specific pain a high priority.
The secret to acquiring new customers is timing – getting to those decision makers who recently experienced a Trigger Event and are highly likely to buy – BEFORE YOUR COMPETITION
The challenge with cold calling is it’s a brute force way of trying to make timing happen.
The other way to make timing happen is to analyze the sales you have won (aka won sales analysis) to identify the specific Trigger Events that brought you past customer and then call on those decision makers you know have, or are highly likely to have, recently experienced those specific Trigger Events.
For those who are interested you can download the Won Sales Analysis template and instructions at http://www.shiftselling.com/worksheets/won-sales-analysis/.
Have an eventful week!
Craig Elias
Creator of Trigger Event Selling
+1.403.874.2998
Wow…what a lot of effort went into this debate. But, when push comes to shove, it boils down to one thing.
Having qualified prospects delivered to you is always great! Hopefully you get enough to make your quota. But, if you are not that lucky, you might actually have to pick up the phone and initiate an “unexpected introduction”. Help me people…I am trying to kill the phrase cold calling and replace it with “unexpected introduction”.
With all the information and social media/networking available you can find out everything you need to know about your prospect except what they had for lunch. Use that informtion to develop a compelling introduction and you have launched your sales process. As Nigel Edelshain says “Don’t Cold Call…Social Call”. He has a great white paper out on that very topic.
Great conversation – enjoyed it and thanks for listening.
Hey Doyle,
The article calls cold-calling an act of frivolity. I see it as an act of desperation.
There’s usually two sides to blame:
1. Marketing isn’t doing it’s job. (full disclosure – I am in marketing and not sales) If marketing isn’t generating the number of qualified sales leads agreed upon the sales team resorts to cold calling because they don’t know what else to do.
In my previous statement, note the words “qualified” and “agreed upon” because those are both critical to making sure that marketing does its job.
2. sales leadership is also to blame because they aren’t giving the sales team the education they need to do the activities in the field that actually do work e.g. networking and referral selling. To make matters worse, these same sales leaders probably haven’t taught the team how to cold call effectively either.
All the best!
Melissa
http://www.themarketingsurvivalist.blogspot.com
In my role at a market research firm, I am the demand creator, the salesperson and the marketer. Perhaps separating those functions may be good for a larger organization, but in our boutique sized firm it would be detrimental.
First of all, it’s a battle just to get someone to remember your name. Why would you want to introduce one person and then pass them onto another so soon in the sales process? I want to build a relationship with my customers and increase my network, and not trust someone else to do that for me.
Secondly, there is nothing wrong with cold-calling. It’s simply saying “hi, I exist!” It’s the first step in any relationship with the outside world.
Third, the most important part of cold-calling is identifying those prospects by their titles that represent your best chance. With the tools out there now, there is no excuse for not being able to do this.
Last, you have to be relevant to your customer from the get-go. Use trigger events as mentioned about. Put some effort into it so they feel you have a grasp of who they are and what they do, and how you can fit in.
My 2 cents!
Rebekah
Today’s sales people need to work smarter and more efficiently. Cold calling, or churning and burning through lists of potentially unqualified leads, is not productive in this most challenging of economic times. Making less calls, and only to those leads you have qualified and researched, can net a higher response rate for engagement and eventual appointment setting. These leads can hear or read your interest in their company via your voicemails, emails or mailings. Leads generation includes promoting your personal brand as well, in a low-key manner, within your email or written signature. Put yourself in the shoes of your prospective customer. Whose phone call or email are you eventually going to choose to respond to? A commoditized cold-caller or someone who has taken the time to begin to understand your business situation?
I love the article. If you are starting out as a brand new sales rep somewhere, without leads or accounts I agree that cold calling is a necessity. However, if you’ve been in your business for a couple of years or more I think it’s possible to run a successful business without it.
I love these ideas and I believe having top performers shooting where the geese are is a fantastic idea. I’m also finding that with the times as they are people are much more willing to buy from someone they know of than off of a cold call situation.
Obviously there are a lot of strong opinions on this subject…but I would wager through effective on and offline networking a salesperson can excel without ever making a true “cold call” again.
I bet my business on it every month and am seldom disappointed.
Wow!
What an amazing conversation. I am really excited to see the volume and quality of this debate!
I thought it would be helpful to share what inspired me to write this article. I used to live in the “dialing for dollars” mentality of selling. That was how we built our business through the 90′s and early 2000′s. We were disciplined, focused and good at it. That being said, by 2004 cold calling was failing us. We were investing 6 hours per week per sales rep of focused pit time, and we were lucky to generate 1 new customer per month per rep. It was demoralizing.
An even bigger problem for us was the customers we were generating through cold calling were not very profitable. We were finding the cast-offs and the highly competitive accounts. We were finding the customers that everyone else had.
At the end of 2004 we made a decision to change. More bluntly, we vowed never to cold call again. And we haven’t!
We took the topic of demand creation very seriously, and looked at all of our options to generate leads. My industry has a fast sales cycle, typically 30 days, which means timing is crucial. If we cold called on the right day at the right time we could get a sale, but chances were pretty slim we would. That meant we needed a lead generation program that would establish relationships with customers before they entered the buying process. Our goal was to build a program that would make us the first can when our customers were ready to buy.
As we entered 2005, we anchored our lead generation programs on opinion based content. The article you have been reading, “Sales People Don’t Cold Call,” is an example of this content. We write these articles to speak to our entire market, and provide value to people whether they are shopping for our services or not. We distribute our content through email newsletters (you can subscribe at http://www.LEAPJob.com), our website and magazines. Beyond content we also employ public relations, networking, public workshops, speaking and search engine optimization. Each is a focused program with dedicated resources, metrics and accountabilities.
The results have paid off:
1. We have reduced our sales cycle from 60 days to 2 calls.
2. We have not cold called since 2004, and we have increased our lead volumes by 4 times. In addition, we have reduced our advertising budget from $75,000 per year to $11,000.
3. LEAPJob’s sales are up over 100% year-over-year. This is even more significant considering our current economic state. A recruiting company should be in a crisis in a recession, but we are growing.
Cold calling is a tool. For some businesses it works, but for most, there are far better methods of engaging your market. It is time to push the fold, and look for better ways to find leads and feed your sales force.
Great conversation guys.
Happy to chat further
Jeremy Miller
I fundamentally disagree with this extremely dated ‘field sales’ friendly and wholly innaccurate view of an effective cold calling telesales engine. With the right name behind you it is perfectly possible to get through to senior decision makers and have really value add conversations in order to understand your potential customer. I teach people how to do this and I have been working with HP for the last 12 years internationally making this happen. At the end of my classroom training I always ask the group for the name of a large corporate that are not using HP and for the switchboard number, no names. I then on speaker phone do the call cold in front of the group, always get through to a CIO or equivalent position, that person always tells me everything I want to know (conversations last a minimum of 15 minutes) and a productive relationship between HP and the given organisation is started. I must have made 100′s of these live calls to very large corporates and I have a 100% conversion rate. This goes against the statistics quoted in this dangerous and insulting article.
I am tired of this ridiculously out-dated view, usually spouted by terrified field sales organisations, that telesales does not work. If playing golf all day and living of ‘sales out reports’ from your resellers is your way of justifying the enormous cost of a field sales person then I am afraid you are a dinosaur who is reacting quite understandably to the threat of a far more cost effective and wholly more efficient way to cover your market, THE PHONE!
Territory coverage is everything. Field sales people tend to maintain relationships with their top 20 accounts when for example that have a total of 400 accounts to manage. Business as usual (and scarily accepted for some reason) is to leave the 380 accounts completely alone. When an effective telesales person is married with a great hunting field sales rep coverage becomes a 100% more efficient. The telesales person calls all 380 ignored accounts, profiles them all top to bottom through multiple senior decision maker conversations and engages the fieldsales counter-part at the right place and at the right time, which clearly is CONCEPT stage of an opportunity.
I would be happy to discuss my views further with you Jeremy at your convenience. I hope you don’t mind my tone in this note. You aggressively attack my area of expertise, I therefore aggressively and passionately defend it.
And here, dear friends, is the money quote from this, ugh, ummm, opinion:
“…for the last 12 years internationally…”
Closely followed by, “With the right name behind you…”
Huh? Internationally cold calling using some “big name?”
I do agree that occasionally an effective B2B campaign may be effective, but only occasionally.
Blind squirrels do find a nut now and then.
Quite a few of the readers to this post are in the Financial Services Industry here in the USA, which requires, if cold calling, contact on a personal –read: Home number– level. A phone number now bound by the Do Not Call List, domestically speaking.
And, frankly, I do mind your tone.
Although, I guess the buggy whip salesman used the same tone in his day.
/s
Ahh it gets better. You follow whatever you will follow and I will follow what I beleive in. Who stays in business and ends up with a leaner and more efficient and profitable business in future will be the proof in the pudding.
When I talk to a customer I don’t ‘pitch’ and blindly hope for a bite, clearly that is your philosophy to sales, I understand thoroughly and make informed recommendations based on what I have understood (all on the phone), this is sales my friend.
I wish you luck with your anti telesales rant and hope you continue to get responses from like minded thinkers.
Sanjoy.
Sanjoy:
COLD CALLING IS DEAD. That is why you have to TEACH someone to do it. I could Teach you to kill a deer with a BB gun, but this does make it the best way. Sales people should not put up with their company to use them as disposable slaves to drum up business.
This is the internet age. Are you still teaching people how to use typewriters? (Just because something will work, does not make it smart.) If you instruct people long enough they can imitate you, however imitation is short lived. Creativity and adaptation are what bring lasting success.
Donald Yerke
haha, great logic Don, so you’re saying the process of learning something makes the subject to be learnt defunt as you have to ‘learn it’? OH PLEASE. So lawyers are not needed as they need to study it??
Whatever Don.
Sanjoy.
Sanjoy,
YOU would be out of business, which you should. Sales people do not need to cold call, nor do they need to pay people like you to teach them outdated techniques.
Sales agent turnover is so high because of backward thinking sales managers, and people like you. I NEVER cold called after three months, I learned far superior methods of not trying to force people.
Letting people buy because they have a need to do so, and want to take care of the need avoids pressure. It also eliminates cold calling coaches and needless trainers of handling objections.
Donald Yerke
Donald, I don’t know you or the person you are responding to, but saying “Cold Calling is dead” and “this is the internet age” makes you sound very 1998. Remember the “Bricks and Mortar company is dead, the world is going on line”, when the NASDQ was trading above 5,000 floating on internet bubbles that popped and went poof, along with the new Nirvana they were supposed to deliver.
I would like to hear some specifics about this “creativity and adaption” you speak of. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in the range of tools you allude to, but the fact remains that it only touches about 10% – 12% of your market, the ones engaging with the internet to address a need they have at the moment. Let’s not over look the subtext that leaves sales people in a very reactionary mode, I prefer to be proactive. I buy your approach for reaching this group, but my question to you is what about the gold in the remaining 88% of your market, the ones not actively seeking, the status quo that can be engaged on proper terms of value?
Yes Cold Calling is dirty work, it is the blue collar part of sales, but for those willing to pick up their pick, and go and find those nuggets of gold, polish them up using social media and other lead nurturing tools made available by the internet, there is a lot of money to be made, a lot. Because when I get to one of the 88% who can buy my product through proactive out reach (cold call), I shape their vision, understanding and value perception before they go to the “Internet”, and compare you to all the other shiny SEO types.
It is also a question of where you play, and if you are playing in the Fortune 500 playground, you find that the real decision makers, the “C” level guys, will send the recommenders to the web, but will take the right call from the right person. They are seeking valuable input, and will respond to a good cold call, while their minions are out on the web.
So the real question is which camp is really adoptive? Me with my dead tools combined with the value of the internet? Or those that rely on one effective tool that is only effective in 12% of opportunities containing more lookers than decision makers with power and money.
But I am open to ideas, teach me
What is amazing is that absolutely nothing has changed? To Quote Dave Cooke, the Sales Cooke, “You have to think of Social Media as the new Newspaper, Radio, and TV”. Those are all tools to help you MARKET better NOT sell. Marketing opens the door, but sales brings them to the promised land. Some are lucky because marketing built a good enough brand that “Cold Calling” is not quite as daunting or is not necessary, because leads come to them. Even the fellow that consults for HP has a brand behind him.
I totally agree with you Allan. Marketing plays its part, sales can leverage brand presence if it is there. Really tough cold calling is when you don’t have a brand behind you.
I find if a sales person is used to selling with no brand behind them then cold calling WITH a brand is childs play. A frustration I face with HP is that 90% of my students are straight out of university and don’t appreciate how easy they have it in cold calling terms with a brand like HP. The few who have come from truly no brand tough cold calling back grounds usually find it a lot easier to have success when working a great brand finally…
Tibor:
MOST (not all sales reps) start out with cold calling where no research on who they are calling has been done beforehand.
To these true Cold Calling is Dead. Most do not know the difference between a suspect, prospect, and lead regardless of what they are selling. Blind cold calling is to suspects. Suspects are not buyers. Their chances of being a winner are as good as a lottery ticket for you.
A Prospect can be called for further fact finding. A prospect is a person you know can make a quick decision to buy a product, has an emotional need to fill, the money to purchase, and meet the product qualifications of benefiting from your product or service. ALL conditions must be confirmed, yet you must know many exist beforehand.
Ask me to switch phone service because you can save me money, and I am a suspect. If I believe in you and want to save money, and dislike my present carrier, I show some traits of a prospect. But I am not yet a lead.
A lead is a prospect who has not been forced with eight no’s to agree to meet with you to discuss a product or service . A lead has the authority and means to purchase, and may have been obtained by various methods – rarely a true cold call.
There are many ways, including social networking, direct mail, and more to get good prospects. The sales rep must determine from these prospects who to see, as time is very valuable. This is why some sales rep in the same industry have a 30% closing ratio when fellow reps experience 70% or higher.
The sales reps job is not to force interviews and waste countless hours on suspects. Stop suspect cold calling and spend your time on your best prospect from a target, refined list of the best of the best. Those most closely matched to your product benefits. No need to be a garbage picker for the company. The company is using you, in sales you are always in business for yourself.
I have written over 200 articles on sales and marketing that can be applied to almost all sales fields. They are free to view at http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Donald_Yerke
I am NOT selling you anything except the concept that true COLD CALLING is the worst initial method of wasting a sales persons time to try to get prospects.
If you are calling real targeted prospects you are NOT “cold calling” suspects like most sales reps are. Over 90% of sales reps don’t last 4 years, most because they rely on stupid blind cold calling concepts.
Cold calling needs to go hand in hand with lead generation and marketing.
On statistic in the article says that for each executive you get on the phone, only 2% schedule a meeting.
We cold call into executives in the Fortune 500 daily for our clients to arrange introductory meetings, and I find that the percentage is MUCH higher than 2%. I would say 60-80% of the time our sales team gets the correct executive on the phone, they get the meeting.
If your number is 2%, your message isn’t compelling and is getting lost in the ‘vendor static.’ Your call needs to be valuable; pitching features & benefits won’t get you an appointment.
You can see why if you’re scheduling a meeting with 60 % of the correct executives you speak with would make cold calling much more valuable.
Well, I like the intro, very passionate, I like the words, I am waiting for the specifics.
So am I. In particular, how to achieve the following more efficiently…
“Territory coverage is everything. Field sales people tend to maintain relationships with their top 20 accounts when for example that have a total of 400 accounts to manage. Business as usual (and scarily accepted for some reason) is to leave the 380 accounts completely alone. When an effective telesales person is married with a great hunting field sales rep coverage becomes a 100% more efficient. The telesales person calls all 380 ignored accounts, profiles them all top to bottom through multiple senior decision maker conversations and engages the fieldsales counter-part at the right place and at the right time, which clearly is CONCEPT stage of an opportunity.”
Not always, but often it is a weak sales person that needs to hide behind a brand. They are selling brand and comparisons. Almost every product worth selling has good brands or they would not be in business long.
CUSTOMERS BUY FROM THE SALES PERSON
A true sales rep can discover the need, and explain the benefits so the prospective client wants to buy regardless of the brand.
Brand sales people are often order taking company representatives. Independent or adaptable sales people offer the client the actual best, regardless of brand name, and the client buys because of faith in the sales person. Money and brand fall far behind.
Sorry but cold calling to suspects and not to prospects has long been dead no matter what brand you sell. Why drag a dead horse, when so many other more effective methods exist?
Only one of 10 sales people hired to make sales should have been accepted. You match the right sales orientated person with the right company or products and you have a winning combination.
Cold calling suspects can only break new sales reps, and rarely ever make them.
Still haven’t given any specifics I see but just ranted on subjectively…
Lets see…
We sell 4 things in B2B and all in a certain order, they are:
1.Yourself
2.The Brand/Company
3.Productive B2B Relationship
4.Product/Services
When selling there are two basic scenarios, you can be selling the concept of the product and then the brand (after selling the concept why they should take the concept from you and not another brand) OR they are bought into the concept and therefore you should ONLY sell the brand as the concept is sold.
Information Technology is a prime example. All organisations are using hardware and software, technology generally. There is no need to sell the concept of technology as every customer is sold on it, you do however had to sell the concept of YOUR brand of hardware/software. Once this is understood sales is a lot easier. This basic is not understood by 90% of sales people who continually push on concept when it is clearly sold and the customer is objecting to the sales person and therefore the brand (as the sales person IS the brand to the customer).
There will be times when you have to sell the concept and the brand which is harder. For example when selling a financial service where your customer has not bought a private finance plan before one has to sell both the concept and the brand. If one is already investing privately then you don’t need to sell the concept of private investment (as they already do it and would continue to invest further under the right circumstances, ie what your brand in particular offers over and above everyone else) however WHY THEY SHOULD INVEST WITH YOUR COMPANY.
Feeling these basic scenario’s out in a financial services cold call at the beginning or being aware of them, I would have thought are the basics, are we selling just the concept or the concept and the brand?
But still Donald, you are not being specific about anything. Lets stop arguing and taking chunks out of each other. I am sorry if my tone was inappropriate in my first post, no offence was intended at you. Now please…
Rationally answer with the specifics you have been asked for.
1.Cold calling is just another method of communication.
2. It still happens today and can be successful.
3. If you haven’t seen the success, you simply haven’t seen it performed correctly.
4. The understanding of the purpose of the call and proper support from all departments unvolved makes the cold call convert to a more than satisfactory ROI
5. Take you blinkers off folks and stop taking opinions as personal slurs.
I think this is a process that can be successful in a team selling environment. If you have someone to make the cold calls and qualify them for your sales team they spend more time in the selling process. The key is in the hiring process. You are not looking for a telemarketer.You need a person who may not be ready for full sales responsiblilty but understands how to qualify leads and can get your salesperson in the door. Anyone who thinks they don’t need assistance in lead generation is not using their time wisely.
Cold Calling is alive and well. It seems to me that the core of Jeremys argument is predicated on accepting his stats, which I don’t. So with a few small changes we get vastly different numbers to wit:
Industry standard numbers are for a contact with a prospect (in the UK) is every 4 -5 dials not every 8.4. Lets call it 5 as a compromise
The metrics I used for my sales force was 1 meeting for every 10 prospect conversations, not 1-50; frankly that’s just a rubbish number and if Jeremy thinks that’s representative of sales staff generally common sense should slap your face and tell you that it would be impossible to sell the number and variety of products or generate anything close to a developed countries GDP at 12.5 customers per year. So my recommendation is, Jeremy, fire them then fire yourself and get some decent sales staff and a half decent sales manager to show you how it’s done.
Enough of my rant let’s move on to see what else might change. I’d expect a close rate of around 30% not 25%, plugging in these numbers you get a vastly different outcome of 1 sale for every 165 calls, at 50 calls a day that’s 1 sale every 3 and a bit days. So with those few small changes cold calling becomes, as it always was, a viable option. I know it’s increasingly fashionable to pooh-pooh cold calling but it is a fact of sales life and particularly in tough economic times it stands up well to the “lets never make a cold call again” brigade. There are also industries where cold calling is the expected method of selling and connection. In the UK this is true of the construction sector and much of the manufacturing and engineering sectors and where using other marketing techniques as the primary source of lead generation would be about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Now being over 50, I might be a bit of a dinosaur, but, what’s clear is that with all this new technology led marketing, lead generation and networking, sales results are no better than they were 25 years ago, and in many cases worse. The reason, I submit, is because sales people and their managers have let themselves be seduced away from cold calling, not because it doesn’t work, but because it’s the most unpleasant part of the job.
If I had a web cam, you could see me giving you a standing ovation right now!
Jerry Kennedy
The Motivation 101 Blog
Hi Jerry,
Thanks for your support I’m flattered
Kind Regards
Laurence Ainsworth
Right on Laurence, right on!
Tibor
Hi Hi Tibor,
Thanks for your support I’m flattered, I’m following your blog and you on Twitter.
See me @ laurenceexigent
Kind Regards
Laurence Ainsworth
[...] in the ongoing discussion over at SalesBlogcast, in a series of comments sparked by a post titled “Compelling Argument Against Cold Calling”; while the entire discussion is worth reading, a comment this past Friday by Laurence Ainsworth, [...]
You can’t comment on cold calling until YOU KNOW what these 4 words truly mean.
1. Suspect
2. Prospect
3. Lead
4. Prospecting
Regardless of method for initializing contact, most sales people are suspecting and not prospecting when cold calling.
Professionals use qualified prospects to call. Rookies and brain washed company trained salespeople think they can turn suspects into buyers.
Followers of company training cold calling rarely last 4 years (10%). Independent adaptable thinkers become sales professional leaders.
Hi Donald,
Of course cold calling is suspecting, but intelligent sales people, or well trained sales people don’t just pick up the phone and randomly start dialling; they set some criteria about who and why they are calling.
Suspects do turn into buyers. I always have a Plan A and a Plan B. Plan A is for companies who appeared to have a fairly immediate need for what I was selling and Plan B was for those people who might be interested but were some weeks or months away from starting a buying process.
Cold calling had enabled me to identify these people as suspects but more importantly the information I gathered during a cold call enabled me to understand their time-scales and reasons for their future purchase. This enabled me to keep in touch and turn these plan B suspects into plan A prospects and thence into buyers.
Rgds
Laurence Ainsworth
I have been watching this blog with interest, mainly because we have been training appointment-making for 30 years and very successfully. Nothing has changed though. Salespeople generally will spend more time arguning against anything that involves work than they will actually working. If you drop the word “Cold” and remove the emotion, you are left with “calling”. Most salespeople don’t even do that. Most salespeople don’t call, never mind cold call. They don’t want to call people – not unless it’s a sure bet. We know this because 99% of all pipelines that we audit when we first meet a prospect are 80%+ fiction. Why? Because the salesperson is hoping the phone will ring. When you argue against “cold” calling, most people are secretly arguing against “calling people who might say no.” I have news for you: as a salesperson your job is to call SOME people who will say “yes” – a mere handful and then call the ones who will INTIIALLY say “no” – the majority. That’s your job – to change people who won’t change on their own. Why do you think you’re a salesperson? To order – take?
Of course, the whole issue people have with cold calling goes back to a root problem: most salespeople are not really trained to be anything other than people who are in sales. So, they get emotional about “cold” calling and difficult things they actually don’t know how to do. If most people really knew how to cold call they wouldn’t argue against it. When the sales (training) industry argues against it, they compound the problem, so pipelines remain works of fiction. We all love the short-cut to success and it’s especially the way salespeople think, encouraged by people who should know better. I left a client today – in a very technical, sophisticated industry – and she was appalled 3 weeks ago when I suggested she “cold” call large food companies. She had 17 reasons it wouldn’t work – a key skills amongst salespeople! Once she got over her initial skepticism, we sketched a very short script (we call it a “lyric” by the way) and looked at the 3-4 typical negatives she would encounter on the phone calls. Today she has 8 appointments (fully booked with a time and date) in 3 countries with senior managers. How many of them would have rung her? Maybe at best 2 of them – if she lived long enough. How many will buy from her? Well, more than would have had, she sat on herr backside sending new contorted versions of an email. One of them will probably buy ANYWAY. Now she has the chance to change the status quo of the rest and she will likely get one more. That’s down to her performance face-to-face. But now she has a chance. I am already anticipating the wave of comments csaying these are “bad” appointments, unqualified, “tire-kickers”. One of the things we have observed over 30 years is that a lot of salespeople don’t actually want more meetings because they don’t know how to sell to people who didn’t ring them.
At DEI we say that sales people don’t lack training (most sales training doesn’t work anyway), they lack a sales education. With the main criterion to be in sales being the ability to speak, is it any wornder the level of discussion tends to be so low and poor old “cold” calling ends up taking the rap! No other industry would spend so much time railing against something it has no intention of ever doing. Another special sales skill!
Michael McGowan
CEO DEI International Sales
RE: DEI Int’l Sales
Nice try … but I don’t think so.
Nice ad for DEI, though…
Isn’t DEI Schiffman’s creation, built almost exclusively on a cold calling training program?
No, it’s built on pipeline management, with cold calling as the most controllable way to consistenly keep you pipeline full.
If you look at people’s pipleines it will resolve all sales arguments.
Really, because when you think DEI you think Schiffman, and Schiffman is cold calling. Pipeline management seemed an after thought based on a project management concept. I don’t know, I think Jim is right, when you look at Schiffman on Amazon it’s all about cold calling, same with his web site. Don’t get me wrong, I think he has a good approach to cold calling, but pipeline management? what’s the next step and moving cards is just a way to sell cold calling. I think control comes in the qulity of engagement not in what you have where on a board.
Controlling your income comes from 2 things:
1. The number of times you do something / the number of prosepcts you have (“A” = Activity)
2. The quality of the engagement (“E” = Effectiveness)
TARGET($) = A x E
It’s a zero sum game; both have to be greater than zero. Most sales training focuses only on the second – Effectiveness – or “how to sell” and misses the total equation i.e. ignores the need for the right level of activity. The truth is that you can control activity far more easily than you can control effectiveness, especially in the short term. Most people try to play with the “words” of selling rather than manage their time, activities and then their skills. In a full career in sales, what you actually find is that the long term business developers are successful because they figured out how to spend their time in order to satisfy “A x E.”. Also, the people with the best quality of engagement also have had the most and best practise (“A”). When you start to look at sales this wasy – which is a universal view – you begin to see how the likes of cold calling is but one narrow and highly “emotional-ized” variable. Actually, what really drives the whole formula – and the total performance – is the self-checking methodology that a salesperson applies to their pipeline and in particular, acknowledging that most of their so-called prospects are not moving anywhere. In sales diagnosis, it’s knowing where leads to the right behaviors. “Sight” is a better driver than opinion.
As for cold calling selling our pipeline program, it’s the other way round. The pipeline program drives cold calling! On Amazon, “pipeline management” is not going to attract much traffic, no matter who writes the book!
Michael McGowan
I like the formula, Value Selling has one too (or is it ValueVision), they have a couple of other variables, I guess they have it wrong too. I do like A&E, good programing, especially Intervention, when they go in and help some confused soul. Perhaps thay can help me, is it pipeline I need to manage, or time.
My point about Amazon is that Schiffman (=DEI=you) is all about cold calling, which is good, was good in the 90′s, he is not recognized as pipeline guy, sortta got wiped out with the visibility computers allow.
I do agree it is about activity but there has to be an end, and I think we just found it.
It appeared like computers and CRM etc would increase visibility for sales managers and salespeople. The opposite has now happened; CRM systems for example have proved an almost complete failure as sales management processes. They are what they are: data capture tools. I watch managers every day work with the “wrong” picture and salespeople filling in CRMs to exacerbate the poor picture!
This still leaves us with the big issue: how to get a common language that specifies the standard of measurement into the company’s sales process. What almost every sales organisation lacks is agreement on what to measure. Go to any “Monday Morning” meeting and just listen to what goes on. In fact, listen to what gets asked and you’ll see that most managers are still “managing by conversation.” Computers – as they have been used to date – have not improved that. In fact, they help to perpetuate stalled sales performance. It’s not the computer’s fault though; the sales industry are suckers for new toys where the process has not been validated.
The debate seams to have moved on a bit, since I last looked in and I agree broadly with Michael. I would say that Pipeline Management is a Sales Management activity and not really a salesperson (salesmans) activity.Why? Well salespeople as a breed are dreadful at coming up with a detailed and appropriately qualified pipeline. Firstly because sales people as a bread just hate reporting secondly for self preservation; once you can get a detailed understanding of salesman’s pipeline you can immediately get a view on his bias and performance constraints.
Thirdly, just lack of training. Pipeline management requires a clear understanding of how well each prospect is qualified and thus what work is needed to close (and with a bit of experience) the likelihood of a close. This has stuff all to do with CRM CEM or any other acronym its about understanding how to qualify your prospects and developing the skill to ask precise questions which the sales person cant easily fudge.
Once you have a clear understanding of where you are it will naturally indicate how aggressive your prospecting needs to be.
Agreed – This goes along with my theory of ‘stop sounding like a sales person’. Have a conversation with prospects, understand them and their needs instead of blurting out your features, benefits & accolades.
The Demand Creation Team would fulfil this role perfectly, and the Sales team would deliver the all important solution/fulfilment stage in the cycle.
It’s time Sales moved into the 21st century with this sort of intelligent approach.
Danny Kitchener
interim.sales.consultant@gmail.com
It’s not “cold calling.” It’s simply making introductory calls to new friends. Over the years I have gotten more and more repeat business from past customers and referrals. But 10% of my sales still come from introductory calls. And they tend to have the largest average tickets. I can’t ignore this fact and I can’t afford to resist the importance of this part of selling, even though I get to kiss a lot of frogs in the process.
I agree with you on most every point. I do “introductory calls” and build relationship from there. We look for a fit. Regardless of what terminology you use for outbound calling, business development people should have the discipline and the skill set to pick up the phone if they have to. I wish I could field incoming calls all day but that’s not case where I work so I have to do the part of I have control over, and that means picking up the phone, in addition to the networking I do. I’ve landed almost every client engagement from introductory calling and they’ve been good fits because of the level of qualification I put them through in those initial conversations. I have spent time and money getting trained on the phone and have had good results. Hopefully at this time next year, I will be fielding more incoming calls.
Doyle,
Jeremy makes some valid points but any salesperson worth his/her salt knows that it is worth it to cold call. I would luv to sit on my hands and have leads fed to me but in a small company, even in a bigger company is it worth it?
For example, even when people, go to your website, look at your materials, show some interest, that does NOT guarantee they are are a good lead. The sales rep needs to qualify further to ensure it is a warm lead.
So the point to my ramble is that I cold call because I know the questions I need to ask in order to qualify a lead, and cold calling does work for me. I am sure other sales reps will concur…
Regards,
Mark Secko
Mantralogix
msecko@mantralogix.com
Marc, you might be surprisd how many salespeople disagree with you and maybe even more surprised how many sales managers and senior (sales)people have a poor understanding of the nature of cold calling, so they are afraid of it. Many of the people against cold calling never really did it or did it badly. And so the viscious circle continues. How salespeople expect the phone to ring the right number of times with the “right” leads is beyond me: unless you work for a big brand or you don’t need to do a lot of business development and you live off the famous referrals.
Everyone has different views on cold calling but my view is simple, 100 ‘cold calls’ per week leads to 12 new meetings per week which then leads to 8 new clients per week being generated within our business.
Cold calling along with marketing, networking are key growth strategies within our business with no strategy having more of an importance over another. Cold calling is always made easier by carrying out extensive research on key decision makers firstly and then having an email/written proposal to follow up on
I somewhat agree with Jeremy on his argument that cold calling is the most ineffective lead generation tool out there. However, the reason that it is not effective is because sales people believe they deserve a sale out of every call!…, and when they don’t they turn into the ‘pushy’, ‘aggressive’ ‘talkative’ professional that noone likes or respects.
However, Cold Calling is THE BEST tool for understanding why your prospects ‘DON’T’ but from you, and why they buy from your competitors, what their buying motives are and what their decision making processes is.
Don’t just Cold Call to sell your product – Cold Call to understand your customer
Danny Kitchener
Interim.sales.consultant@gmail.com
Many opinions are that “cold calling doesn’t work for us/our business/product/service.”
What business are you in and does cold calling work for you?
[...] woeful inefficiencies inherent in cold calling metrics, Jeremy Miller, in his excellent article “Sales People Don’t Cold Call”, unequivocally states, “Cold calling is an act of frivolity.” [...]
You would think that the statistics that cold calling proponents cite to say that the practice isn’t dead would also recognize that the relatively small efficiency and few number of “super-stars” that are really good at it actually makes the point of the original article.
I also cold call out of necessity, usually to fill the pipeline, as others have already said. Saying that proves further that it “isn’t dead” as a practice. But whether it SHOULD be dead is another story!
I don’t think those that work hard to utilize more effective and efficient means to produce sales should be considered lazy when they opt for a more marketing-heavy approach to get customers to call them.
Working on leads from inbound calls, at least in the complex sales I’ve been involved with, does not relegate me to being just “an order taker.” There is still needs analysis and qualifying to do to make sure the sale is worth pursuing.
It is much more effective to start with a potential client who already has some investment in the relationship by their action – dialing the phone, writing an email, or filing out a form online – than for us to show-up unannounced (in person or by phone/email). Their initiative doesn’t remove the need to further qualify, but that is what professional sales people do.
I have to say that although we have to acknowledge that cold-calling isn’t dead, I believe that perhaps it should be. Not because I’m too lazy to do it, but because people hate to be on the receiving end of it.
The general public hates it so much that some regulators have had to take up their cause with laws and penalties to prevent it. I suspect that many of those folks also occupy the offices and job sites of those we are trying to reach.
I wonder how many of the cold calling proponents here are also personally annoyed by the siding salesman’s call at dinner time.
One last thought regarding the absence of the “fun” factor that people, even proponents, have noticed with cold-calling? Could it be that it lacks fun because it lacks results compared to the amount of effort it takes? Isn’t it a worthy trait to want better results with less effort? That’s not lazy – that’s smart business. Also, it is often the source of game-changing innovation.
When will salespeople release they are being used by untrained trainers, and money grabbing sales companies?
In 40 years, I see that few do, which means that horse and buggy slave practices and brain washing has not disappeared. What a shame, as sales should be fun.
10 years ago, 6 out of 100 salespeople lasted through 4 years, now in 2010, that has increased to 7. Out of those 7, less than 3 face reality, and 4 keep following the cold call pipe dream.
I made more money by doing just the opposite of what I was taught. If you follow others, you even up like others- on a nowhere path with a job instead of a career.
Most of the cold caller enthusiasts do not realize that cold calling has little to do with sales. Cold calling is a form of marketing, and the worst for those that want to spend their time selling.
Minimum wage people do cheap cold calling, professionals develop a marketing system that is not cheap, but effective and consistent.
A good salesperson does not face objection. They realize that for someone to buy they must trust in YOU and like you – it is really that simple.
A cold caller is begging for people to buy. I could outsell any of them doing the complete opposite. Ask a person to buy and they think of all the reasons why not to.
I could tell clients “maybe you can’t afford it, or need it” and they would think of all the reasons they could and should. Try it on someone–and ask them what goes through their mind with this statement. A half dozen creative ideas, no one else would do, made me reach my goals and far beyond.
Think of how you can sell and market different that anyone else. If you have to cold call you lack Confidence, creativity, and ability to develop your marketing program.
Rely on yourself, think how you can sell yourself. Be a leader not a follower to the slaughter house!
The fastest way to generate business is still to call and talk to them. Is cold calling simply taking names out of a phone book? I think that’s too conservative a definition.
To me cold calling is simply calling someone you’ve not spoken to who doesn’t know you. You could very well pick out a list of all the CFOs in your local city or vertical and give them a call with an appropriate value prop. That’s a cold call in my book.
Just running through lists of random people is by definition cold calling, it’s also an impressive waste of time.
Cold calling is an effective sales tactic if it’s done properly. at some stage, you are going to have to pick up the phone and ask a complete stranger if they want to buy your products. This is exciting & fruitful! because it helps you know/learn/understand different peoples with different perceptions in regards to your service, business & product.
I like the way you catch the essence of the concept, truly good writting manner, I enojoyed it!