Cold Calling- Dead or Alive?

You mean I can’t just pick up the phone and call a prospect anymore?  It looks like most of us have figured out what Sales 2.0 is all about and just in time. But watch out,  Sales 3.0 is next or is that just the new way of announcing you are expecting your 3rd child like Robert Scoble ?

There’s all this talk about Cold Calling, is it dead or alive?  Its like wondering if Bin Laden is dead or alive. But cold-calling, despite what you may believe, is very much alive. It’s the old approach that’s dead.  

Many books and articles have been written about the death of cold-calling. Yet a 2008 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide by MarketingSherpa, found that 30 to 50 percent of buyers said that as a result of a “cold call” they took an action that benefited the caller (such as attending a webinar or adding the vendor to their consideration for a purchase).

 When you’re selling in a Sales 2.0 environment, it’s important to analyze how your customer wants to receive your message and determine the best way to send it. As Brian Carroll, author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale (McGraw Hill, 2006), writes in his B2B Lead Generation blog, “Time and time again it is proven that customers want the salespeople they deal with to understand their business, their needs, and the pressures under which they operate. These people are called trusted advisors.” 

When top decision makers who manage large budgets were asked what they considered to be strong sales introductions, they knew exactly what they did and did not want to hear on both voice mail and e-mail. Here are some examples of what they said:

• “Someone who has done their homework and knows about my company.”
• “When a salesperson sounds professional, succinct, confident, and provides value with their message, I will listen to it.”
• “I delete so many messages a day and the only thing that stands out for me is a strong, short personalized message that gets to the point”
• “I don’t want to receive a prospecting call on my cell phone, that is an instant turn-off.”

            The bar for salespeople has been raised. Ignorant cold-calling-dialing executives without getting background on them, their company, or their challenges-is dead. But informed prospecting-where salespeople use Sales 2.0 tools like Hoover’s, Jigsaw, Genius.com, and LinkedIn to make well-prepared and highly targeted calls-is alive and kicking.