Cold Calling Dead or Alive
Doyle Slayton | May 31, 2009 | Comments 28
If you missed the last post, Compelling Argument Against Cold Calling, it is piece you have to read several times to take it all in. I think there are two key issues. The first is cold calling and the second is lead generation.
I’ll set the record straight. If you are in sales, cold calling isn’t optional. It is a must. If you don’t want to cold call, get out of front line sales. Go into marketing and help develop some lead generation strategies to help your sales teammates. Another option is to go into account management and focus on building loyal customers that will speak highly of your company and refer new leads that turn into new business. That’s not meant as a jab or a brutal attack on those that don’t want to cold call. It’s an honest request to team up with someone who understands the battle… who knows about the scraping and clawing that goes into hunting for new business.
Most organizations are not being strategic enough about their cold calling approach and many are not focused at all on lead generation tactics. Jeremy states that cold calling as a “lead generation tool” is ineffective. There is no doubt, it can be time consuming and difficult to fight through, but we can’t paint everyone with the same brush. Generally speaking, cold calling as a lead generation tool works quite well with non-complex accounts where the sales cycle is short. On the other hand, a complex sale with a longer the sales cycle makes it more difficult to cold call your way to qualified leads.
Believe it or not, Jeremy’s breakdown…
“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!”
…is very real for many sales people out there. That’s why they quit cold calling, miss their quotas, and eventually start looking for another job. Let’s be realistic. I don’t care how tough you are, the ratios above won’t take long to break a person’s spirit. That’s why the best sales managers who face this challenge find ways to put their people in a position to gain little victories along the way.
Jeremy shares that “when sales people are required to cold call to achieve quota, companies face two distinct issues: a higher cost of sale and higher turnover of sales people.”
Going into the financial breakdown is too complicated, so I won’t comment on the cost of the sale, but I can tell you that turnover rates are high because most people are not mentally tough enough to battle through the challenges of cold calling to generate their own leads month after month.
Cold calling on unqualified leads is like trying to chop down a Redwood with a dull ax. If you’re tough enough, you’ll eventually get through it, but it’s going to take some time. Once you knock it down, you’ll have plenty of fire wood. Sadly, most people don’t have the energy to get there.
The good news is there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Remember the 2 Simple Goals for Cold Calling Success. The best way to get away from cold calling is to stay put and work hard to build your pipeline. You can move out of the cold calling business and into the follow-up business by sticking with your present sales job, improving your skill-set, and building a strong, very large list of warm follow-up prospects.
So, this is where we come together again as a cold calling army of sales professionals to share best practices. The real solution is to call… call… call… and build a pipeline with the most reachable, most qualified, most interested prospects.
Share your lead generation strategies and best-practices for building your lead base with new opportunities. Depending on the number of responses and quality ideas, I’ll compile a list of my favorites and post another article in the coming weeks spotlighting the best-of-the-best contributors!
Doyle,
I have a question that has perplexed me since SalesBlogcast.com started. Why does cold calling have to be an either or in the sales process? As you know I am an experienced salesperson and a consumate networker.
I have found that both skills are necessary to be “Top Dog”. Warm referrals are by far the best of all. But if you can look at a cold call as a “networking event”, then it becomes another weapon in your sales aresenal and I would be happy to prove it!
Regards,
Bob Getz
Doyle,
I have to disagree on one thing here: I personally put cold calling into the “lead generation” category, as opposed to the “sales” category. You can check my profile and it will tell you that I’m an “Account Manager”, however I have to generate my own leads, too. Having said that, I don’t feel like I’m actually “selling” until I get in front of an audience and present my product, as opposed to simply placing a call to setup a meeting.
As for the article and your blog post in response to it, I agree with you both. To Jeremy’s point, I believe that the old way of just giving a guy a list of phone numbers and telling him to call them is dead. We have too many resources to help us gather information about our prospects to take that approach anymore. To your point, Doyle, I’d say that any salesperson needs to be comfortable making tough calls. Be it cold sales calls, “I’ve got bad news for you…” calls, counter-offers, etc. I don’t think that cold calling is dead, and I do think that it is a good skill to have, but I also don’t think that it is a necessity anymore.
Thanks for the post and for SalesBlogCast overall… Very good stuff!
Ryan Clifford
247 Security Inc.
&
http://www.CareersWithoutLimits.com
Doyle,
Hello, let me share my experience. I work with many small business owners and sales professionals. I believe cold calling is a preference of choice. It is up to individual to choose if cold calling is an effective means of getting business. One of ten business people that I work with love cold calling and do very well at it. I believe in the future; it will be very difficult to continue to use cold-calling as an effective means to get business, because consumers do not want to be sold, but want to buy. As of right now, Cold Calling in not dead. Lastly, I love this article.
I have been in B2B sales for 20 years and cold calling is just part of the game. The key is to turn all cold calls into some type of warm call. Here is an excerpt from my recently published book. It is just one example of a tactic of turning a cold call into a warm call.
——————————————-
Setup and Approach
Your investigation and preplanning is key to setting up a strategy
for “increasing your odds” to secure an appointment. The first step is
to gain intelligence, so you can use my “Turn a cold call into a warm
call” technique. This information will substantially increase your odds
of gaining an appointment.
You have to become a “PI”, private investigator. Do you or anyone
inside or outside of your company know someone in the targeted
prospect company? This is a hugely important step to your success. I
have talked to others in my company and gotten a name of a medium
level contact. This is usually not the decision maker but someone who
would be a warm call to help me in my intelligence investigation of
the company. I am amazed at how many times I have taken a little bit
of time and found a contact name in a prospective account. I would
call the contact, introduce myself and tell them who gave me their
name; and in a majority of times, I received a positive reaction. For
example, “Garth told me that you would be a great person to help
me find out who to give a quick call, so I could give that person a
update on how we have been helping ABC company this last year. By
the way, Garth said to tell you hi.” I also tell them that I am a very
user-friendly salesman and they usually laugh. Remember, you are
NOT trying to sell this person your products or services. Your goal
is to gain valuable information to help you formulate your approach.
Many times, the person has given me important information, such as
the name of the decision maker and problems the company has been
having that could benefit from my company’s services. Sometimes, I
learn that they are using a competitor; sometimes they will even tell
me things their company likes or dislikes about my competitor. This
type of upfront investigation can help substantially increase your odds
of gaining an appointment and a sale. Pieces of key information, such
as who is their present vendor, help you strategize the next steps in
your approach.
——————————————-
I have been very successful with cold calling. Well, at least turning all cold calls into at least “luke warm” calls. Many experts say cold calling is a total waste of time. Many of those same experts haven’t been out selling in the real world for years. Well, cold calling has help me for years make my numbers, month after month. Cold calling isn’t the whole sales game but an important part of the game.
Thanks,
Scott Marker
20 years B2B sales veteran
Author & Publisher of Let’s Get It On! “Real”istic Strategies for Winning the Sales Game
When you introduce the word “cold” into a sales discussion, it leads to a lot of mythical conclusions. Our experience at DEI is that most salespeople omit not just to “cold” call, but to call at all. They typically call the same – few – people all the time. The reality is that you have to work with the RIGHT numbers and if they don’t come to you, you have to go find them. This means – for the average business development salesperson – that (cold) calling is a MUST. Where it all goes wrong is:
They allocate too little time to it, whether to lead generation or actually booking appointments. A day a week is on the low side!
Their technique is terrible. Most salespeople over-qualify, hoping to have “half the sales” made before they start a real conversation with the prospect. And they fail to sinply ask for the appointment using a time and date. (Our original founder – Steve Schiffman – has proven the latter over and over i.e. you can transform your appointment-making with thr right technique).
I also notice that the people with the strongest views on cold calling either don’t do any of it or are in the privileged position of having a fixed customer base to call on or enough people call them anyway. In the current recession, we notice people are quietly tiptoeing back to their (cold) calling scripts.
Our overall experience at DEI (and we have trained over 600,000 salespeople over 30 years) is that most sales operations COMPLETELY underestimate the time and resources needed for lead generation – including cold calling – and their salespeople SPEND FAR TOO LITTLE TIME MAKING APPOINTMENTS. In other words, they spend their time the wrong way. Until a sales operation or a salesperson fixes how they spend their time, no amount of technique or hope will work. There aren’t any more short-cuts to sales success; the halcyon days of automatic demand and big levels of inquiries are over. Salespeople now have to WORK. Yes, it’s called work!
Doyle,
Thank you for the additional insight on “cold calling.” I like a lot of Scott Marker’s comments about developing the strategy to increase the odds of success of the cold cold but I have a strong reason for taking that approach. My career has involved for the most part a high-price($million+), complex (subject matter, technical nature, size and level of decision-making team)sale that has a limited number of targets. By that I mean I may only have 100 or less target companies in some instances, so it is important before I make the call to the CEO’s office (or develop another approach to meeting the CEO) that I have a strategy that greatly increased my odds of moving to the next step as a 1% track record will not make the numbers. After developing a strategy, I may then send a well-designed letter to the CEO’s office and then make my cold call. The cold call is necessary because the CEO’s Admin may be sitting on your letter. I try to time the call to get the CEO to pick up the phone which occasionally happens but if the Admin picks up, I treat that person as if they are the CEO. There is more but this is meant to be a short response. If there are others who also focus on a limited size audience but also need to call calling as part of the strategy, I’d like to hear more about your approach.
Regards,
Bill Moore
bmoore01@gmail.com
It has been very interesting to read everyone’s comments around the highly debated topic..cold calling! We are a small recruitment company and have recently had to change how we generate new business, as we had been fortunate over the last few years to rely on our marketing mail out and repeat business.
Our sales team are all for the first time all responsible for generating new business. It has been challenging but at the same time exciting.
I agree keeping the sales team motivated can be ‘interesting’. We have ensured everyone has small milestones to achieve daily, weekly and monthly. While building a pipeline it can be frustrating when you do not see the result/sale. They have targets for increasing the number of contacts and company’s daily amoung other achievable milestones. As Michael McGower said we ensure everyone does at least 3 hours every day, we call core business generation time.
At the same time we want to ensure we are using our precious time wisely, so we are being strategic in who we are targeting based on criteria the team have identified through the workshops we run for getting ideas and buy in from the team.
We are also focusing on converting the potential/warm leads into workable roles. Like anything we believe if you focus on something it will happen.
I agree with Jeremy about the number of dials to contact a prospect, but as well as this you need a comprehensive follow up process that is strategic and most importantly is implemented religiously. We are still working on our follow up strategy.
I would love to bring a book to eveyone’s attention, which I have found fantastic. The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes – it is awesome!
It has been great sharing ;0)
Tabitha
Jeremy claims that it takes 1000 cold calls to get a sale. This may be true.
However, he has made a huge leap from his statistics, to his conclusion (which apply for lousy salespeople only). On balance (aka: for the average company), Jeremy may be correct, because the vast majority of salespeople ARE lousy and will never make the 1000 cold calls to which he refers. This skews the hell out of the stats.
Cold Calling is the BEST way to generate consistent business. But it must be done consistently and correctly. Great true hunters, those callers with mental toughness who are willing to do the things that weak salespeople will not, are ALWAYS at a premium.
If have only one skill–consistently dialing the phone and having effective conversations with decision makers, you will ALWAYS beat every competitor that you sell against. This was trune in the industiral age and CONTINUES to be true in the information age.
If know how to hire great cold-callers and support them with strong process, coaching and sales management, your competitors will still come in a distant second.
But hunters are a needle in a haystack. A good solution lies in the UnCommon Sense© Formula for Success.
Happy Hunting…
Joe
If I had a nickel for every cold call I made….
I DO!
In my practice, I use M. Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Traveled as a metaphor for a sales professional’s personal sales cycle. If you are interacting with the same people in the same track every day, it is a comfortable journey. “People buy from me because they like me” is what this sales person says. I have found this is the 80% of the distribution curve where the average sales person lives in every organization.
If, on the other hand, you are taking your journey down the Road Less Traveled, your sales life will be filled with moments of opportunity. This is where your message and systems blend with your network and market. “People buy from me because I reduced their costs or increased their volume” is what the excellent 5% of selling professionals can be heard saying.
It is up to the sales professional to define what cold calling is in their world. There is no better way to increase your sales than to find a buyer who has a business problem you can solve before the competition. Just don’t stand in the longest line! Whatever your definition, you should be innovative and tenacious so you can enjoy more moments of excellence in your selling career!
Doyle,
Great article – although I have to admit I’m quite biased.
To me cold calling not only helps build new business, it also helps sharpen your sales skills.
Over the years, many sales people turn to Account Management. And along the way, instead of utilizing the skills we can sometimes lose them.
Even if you do it every now again, it will help you sharpen up.
Many Thanks
Spot on Terry
cold calling (or prospecting as I prefer to call it) keeps you on your toes and keeps your ability to turn people around on top form
it is neccessary, it is important and it is suprisingly fun when you get it right
Rgards
Cold Calling vs. Strategic Cold Calling
Hail Mary’s vs. Play Book
If you made a living recycling pop cans how would you go about your job. You would not start walking down every street in your neighborhood – you would go to the baseball diamonds, parks, arenas etc.
So when you are trying to generate business you have to “find out where the pop cans are congregating” The best way I found to do this is by using the following cycle.
Decide a nitch market that will be profitable (Doctors, Farmers, Business Owners etc)
Learn the industry and why they are a good nitch.
Become an expert in that industry
Call within that industry and become referrable.
Nitch Market + Knowledge of an industry + Experience in that industry = positive lead generation and ability to close within a specific nitch.
I am not saying limit yourself – but concentrate on specific (profitable) nitch markets for extended periods of time. That might just lead you into another nitch market.
I call this strategy – strategic cold calling. but cold calling none the less. Its a contact game people – just contact with purpose!
Doyle,
As always – you’re making people think. Which is exactly what cold calling is all about.
I’m always interested when people debate about sales being a numbers game (yes vs. no), is cold calling dead, etc. It seems to me that everyone’s comments are about perception of the activity vs. the activity itself.
People have talked about turning cold calls into warm calls. Strategy and tactics about how to. The amount of time it takes. Lots of great stuff.
It all comes down to this: as salespeople our job is to find people who buy what we sell and need what we do.
Only then can we help them understand why it is better to change than continue (and it is always easier to continue than change) vendors.
Lynn
Hi Doyle,
Thanks for posting this. It has been an interesting read. If nothing else, Jeremy’s post has forced us to think about the value of cold calling. As a 25-year successful sales veteran, I feel I have to weigh in.
In Favour of Cold Calling
Those in favour of cold calling recognize the inherent value of having salespeople who are not afraid to pick up the phone and talk to people. Nothing is going to happen until someone initiates a conversation. More often than not, that someone has to be the salesperson. So as far as hiring people who have the mental and emotional grit to make their own luck, I agree.
Missing Jeremy’s Point
However, I think most people missed Jeremy’s point. He didn’t say calling was dead. He said cold calling was dead. With respect to calling, here’s what he said,
“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.”
I couldn’t agree with him more. The world has changed. Cold calling is a process that was born in the Industrial Age. The Industrial Age was the age of the manufacturer. Manufacturers created products, educated sales people on the product features and benefits and, in turn, salespeople educated the customer. In this “supplier-centric” world, manufacturers felt they had every right to interrupt people to tell them about their products and people never questioned the authority of corporations to interrupt them.
Today, we live in a different world. Primarily because of the rise of the Internet, but also because of the glut of suppliers of every product and/or service, power has shifted from sellers to buyers. As this power has shifted, buyers no longer appreciate being interrupted (witness the rapid fall of traditional, interruption-based advertising across all media).
Cold calling is just another form, albeit far more personal, of interruption-based advertising. It was fundamentally designed to serve manufacturers not buyers. We need to wake up and realize the world has changed. Jeremy made it clear that Demand Creation requires a great deal of phone work, but it is different phone work. Rather than forcing a purchase, Demand Creation is designed to create value even if one is not yet ready to buy. As a result of delivering value so early in the process, the firm wins attention, permission, good will and trust. When the buyer is ready to evaluate a solution, the sales rep is in an enviable position.
In fact, my firm has developed a program called The Demand Creation Program and it is designed to help CEOs avoid the Product Push Trap and transform their businesses into client-driven organizations. The Demand Creation Program is fundamentally different from sales processes that were designed in the Industrial Age. Every step in the process is designed to create value for C-Level executives and to win their loyalty early. Our clients enjoy dramatic increases in sales performance as their salespeople become more focused on a stream of real opportunities with C-Level executives. Processes are put in place to create value for executives who are not quite ready to engage in a buying process.
Conclusion
This debate over the fate of cold calling will no doubt continue. However, I predict that within the next five years, as new technology emerges and the power of buyers reaches its zenith, cold calling will continue to lose its effectiveness and no respectable company will be engaged in Industrial Age, interruption-based marketing of any kind. We will all be engaged in permission-based marketing and processes that support the buying process.
Cold “calling” may be a misnomer in this day and age. Today I think it means personally reaching out to prospects you don’t know by e-mail or phone, not necessarily just phone calling.
I built a million-dollar business with personal sales calls. As a self-employed person, I still prefer to reach out to contact people at companies that meet my ideal-client criteria rather than rely on referrals who are often very enthusiastic about working with me but aren’t necessarily the most profitable clients.
Way back when, I employed a call/send/call strategy. But these days, I think e-mail/call/postal/e-mail might be better. Everyone now is busy and has Caller ID. I myself would prefer to ping back a response about how interested I am (especially if the answer is “no”) rather than speak on the phone initially.
I read Jeremy’s post a while ago and laughed. Having been a lead generation expert for the past 5 years, I know for a fact that cold calling still works well. Of course there are many factors that will determine if it works. Among those include: the product being sold, market saturation, a salesperson’s skills and tenacity, the economy, and a good calling list.
My cold calling last year for a logistics company helped generate new business in the door worth $500,000. This year, my lead generation efforts will help generate six times as much revenue.
I’ve cold called for several industries working for companies that do nothing but lead generation. It’s not all created equally. For some industries, it just doesn’t work because of some of the reasons I mentioned above.
The best results I’ve had from cold calling is when I’ve had a primo list from an association my company may belonged to or warmer leads as a result of a follow up call from a download (such as a White Paper). Purchased lists have been good to me as well, when the data was accurate. Of course, the product or service has got to be worthwhile.
Cold calling is not the easiest job in the world. It takes tenacity, skill, and the ability to repeat success. I’ve seen people quit in 2 weeks, and I’ve seen people earn six figures per year doing nothing but cold calling/lead generation/appointment setting.
Companies should measure their return on investment versus other means of getting new business to see if a cold calling campaign makes sense for them.
Best regards,
Emanuel Carpenter
Author of “Dead Guys Don’t Buy”
The reason the debate will continue on and on and on is because people are still comparing apples with oranges. STOP calling everything “cold calling”. The process has evolved and so should the naming. There are 3 levels to calling and depending on what you sell and to whom, you need to pick the appropriate approach/naming. It’s like calling your CD’s…records. First is “cold calling”, second is “warm calling” and the third is “nurture selling”. Chemlawn “cold calls” me monthly….and yes I did try their service…so yes “cold calling” works. They have a list of names and numbers and somebody literally goes down the list “cold calling” everyone. “Warm calling” is more strategic and it also works and works better than cold calling in certain industries. Take the software space for example. Losts of software companies have figured out that cold calling from a Hoover’s list is stupid, but putting together a targeted list of contacts/companies that you want to get in to, coupled with pre-call due diligence on each company makes sense. The third approach is “nuture selling”. This is the Web 2.0 world of calling where buyers not sellers have the upper hand. I created a blog to start talking with folks about this topic in detail, so please visit and comment http://insidesalessaas.blogspot.com/ Adrian Davis hit the nail on the head….great post Adrian! I believe lead generation is a function of marketing and that is where it should stay. Sales folks, both inside and outside, should proactively reach out to prospects depending on a ranking system. How do you rank prospects? First you need to put contacts into your database. This gets them into your marketing drip. Next step is to provide industry specific content, not maketing slicks, to the audience so that they start to look to you as the industry expert in your field. You want to be that epicenter for valuable content and information. Your company would then sit down and rank prospects depending on what you think is a high-value contact and a low-value contact. Next once you have built up a following of fans is to create a community for these prosepcts. We have entered the world of social marketing, where prospects want to talk to prosepcts to compare and shop…regarless of the industry. Cold calling into this community only discredits the reason why your prospects joined the community and perceived your company to be better than the rest. You can choose to call the high-value contacts at this point because you built credibility with your prospects. I am passionate about this stuff, which is the reason I joined this discussion and have enjoyed reading everyones posts.
Thanks for your very interesting article.
Being a business developer, I do a lot of “cold calls”, and I believe that I have a higher rate of success than what Jeremy suggested…
I usually try to “pre-warm” the calls a bit, by trying to identify the right person to call (through LinkedIn, other social networks, and even google). Next, I try to get or guess the email address of the person, and send a short intro email, and only a couple of days later I make the call.
This way, when I call, they either know what is the purpose of my call, or are embarrassed that they didn’t read my email yet
That’s a lot of preparation work, but it’s worth the effort.
If a company/organization wants to grow sales revenues rapidly and significantly, their sales team MUST MAKE COLD CALLS. No ands….ifs….buts about it. 25 years of sales experience with clients in over 50 different industries is my basis for this statement.
I can see by the responses that cold calling is a hot topic.
I think your view on cold calling depends in your business lifecycle.
Are you in growth phase or profit phase?
If you are in growth phase, you must have a systematic prospecting element to your sales process. However, if you are in profit phase, your sales emphasis will be on retention and referrals.
I’ve found that keeping the prospecting process separate from the sales process delivers the best consistent results. This means having a dedicated “prospector / door opener” for the sales team.
Cold calling is not dead. There is much statistical data out there to prove that a large fraction of business generates from cold-calling. The key is to never approach it at that, a “cold call.” Use tactics when making these rounds of calls to ensue relationships with a ‘warm call.’
Doyle, you mention that the realm of sales is cold calling and if this does not intrigue you, then enter marketing to generate leads. As a marketer for Vorsight, an inside sales training and meeting scheduling company, cold calling is not dead for us either. We can use as many techniques to promote our service, our event, and our product, but the end result is the same: lead generation. Our marketing develops the initial relationships, but they are nonetheless cold. Our prospect has never spoken to us directly; they may have attended an event, browsed our website, or saw our professional profile via one of many social media sites, but essentially we are cold calling them. We can use our previous ‘contact,’ so to speak, to enhance the cold and instantly turn it into a friendly exchange, which is the key with marketing cold calling.
This article was very helpful in bringing new insight on the topic of cold calling—clearly not dead because we still have much un-discussed territory!
–Priya
http://www.vorsight.com
Cold calling is not the end all be all, but it is a necessity to effectively build your pipeline. And Doyle is right, you can’t get discouraged when cold calling efforts do not immediately lead to appointments. It’s about gathering information and setting up future warm opportunities. It’s about moving the ball up the field methodically. And if you stay tough and do that for a few quarters, you will find yourself with a robust pipeline. You will be selling more and cold calling less (although you will still need to cold call, to keep you pipeline as robust as it is). To conclude, the best way I’ve found to approach cold calling is make it a game. Set mini goals for yourself (i.e. I want to have 4 meaningful conversations before lunch). Track your metrics (calls, conversations, appointments) daily and analyze them periodically. If you work in an office, challenge your neighbor to who can get the first appointment of the day. Most of all, act like a P.I. – the more information you gather, the more your efforts will pay off in the long run.
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Cold calling can be made easier by having fun while you’re doing it. This involves a ‘conversation’ and not a ‘sales pitch’!
The best suggestion is to stop sounding like a sales person! This can be achieved easily by;
a) using fresh and unique conversational approaches (not the same old patter that the prospect has heard 1,000 before!)
b) appealing to the prospects needs and NOT your company’s accolades (they don’t care about them!)
Danny
interim.sales.consultant@gmail.com
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Hi Doyle,
I left my successful sales career (mostly because I now have 2 small children) to work as a contractor doing “lead generation” as would be defined as “cold calling” from my home office which is alive and well.
With the less complex, revenue requiring, solutions I’ve been able to obtain an average of 1 on-site appointment for every 20-30 calls made. Those numbers are specifically with IT Directors and CIOs to discuss virtualization with a near term opportunity.
For the more complex sale the number of calls made to appointments set/leads generated that number is definitely higher but they’re still very much attainable via cold calling. I’ve personally had success with some of the nation’s leading 3PLs, Food Manufacturers and Food/Grocery Distributors.
What I’m seeing are more and more companies who are looking for ways to take some of the cold calling off their sales reps plate so they can focus on what they do best, selling. And, as a result, I get to do the hunting which I enjoy! It’s a win-win for everyone involved.