Cold Calling Is Dead... Combination Selling Reigns

"Opening is the new closing." - Anthony Iannarino.

The world of selling is the size of a pin – forgive me for the click bait but oh goodie - it's about to get raucous on this little page that is my bully pulpit on the interwebz. It's laced with tribal knowledge. But you've gotta ask yourself, where does Bruce Lee go to train? There is something to be said for the word on the street. The reality is that a brutally small amount of salespeople actually are succeeding at all.

This is the technique that's actually penetrating the Fortune 1000 bequeathed to me by a trusted advisor who learned it from the 7-figure champion. He had a bucket of trophies, plaques with 7-figure checks without the need to beat his chest about it. I feel a little bit like I'm exposing Houdini or Copperfield but here goes nothing:

Social selling vs. Referrals vs. Cold Calling?

Cold Calling, Warm Calling. Potato - potaatoo. Pre-call due-diligence. Script, no script. 6 of 1, half a dozen of the other. A debate is raging on this topic throughout cyberspace. They all get in the ring but who wins?

Is cold calling really dead? Is a social selling revolution upon us?

It's actually just more complicated, hiding in plain sight in its simplicity.

I would say that LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the ultimate tool ever made for "finding the right people" to target. It's a living, morphing social CRM (the world's most valuable business directory) for working in real time for creating sales funnel. But then once you locate the targets, it's mission critical to get the human voice involved. The human voice: the ultimate weapon. Why? The endorphins it releases in the brain of the prospect listening on the other end - the millions of neurons processing something millions of years mysterious.

"OK wow, not a robot. I can trust a voice. Maybe more than the 1,700 emails in my inbox (and LinkedIn Inbox) my executive assistant screens." - Mr. CXO

A star is born. The Birth of the Triple.

A voicemail, followed by a vmail, and then an email – all executed in under 2 minutes flat – will prevail every time over just social, just email, 5-12 times – in some random cadence in SalesLoft (still a great tool, btw). Purely calling switchboards and leaving messages is probably kaput, unless you're a glutton for 1 in 100 conversion rate punishment.

Inserting later comment here. Mark McInnes read this post and then tested Video-mail himself with positive results. Click here or on the image to the right to see his own case study post of his experience and results.

Thanks Mark for contributing to this post with action! Very impressive.

The human voice inflection creates feeling, inspires trust, triggers the prospect's primordial brain. A couple messages and a couple immediate follow-up emails [reverse lookup the address leveraging Rapportive (owned by LinkedIn) / or guess the convention with Data.com] will OPEN the meeting.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

We can look at the stats that 1-2% of calls set a meeting or reach a prospect. What all the stats neglect is the power of COMBINATIONS, which get you much more rapidly to the 6-8 touch mark.

I hope this is a world exclusive. And now for something completely different... that actually is working in the field. Behold the...

• TRIPLE: Call, VMail, Email (under 2 min)
• QUAD: Call, VMail, InMail, EMail (paste a screenshot of the InMail – shift command 4 on Mac) send it in the email
• QUINT aka Rope-a-dope: Call, VMail, eMail – internal referral (forward the email). Meeting SET.

Game. Set. Match. Triples and Quads should up your hit rates to 1 in 10. You'll be able to get some fast referrals, too as dream clients "route you within" their organization. Moving from 1 in 100 to 1 in 10 ain't too shabby. Make sure to multi-thread these from the top down, laterally and bottom up. If you sell tech, ensure to target the strategic folks as well as the product side of the house.

According to LinkedIn's own research, there is a 5X likelihood of landing a meeting if you get a warm introduction so that's even a meta layer above this post. But this is tactical ladies and gents. I'll be doing another post shortly on advanced referral strategy and advanced Sales Navigator networked intelligence tactics a la Reid Hoffman.

The phone [alone] is dead. There I said it... let the critics unleash.

Social media is pretty worthless, it's become anything but "social" in and of itself. They're all pretty spammy channels unless you nail a short and sweet message focused on what's in it for them with quantifiable proof of ROI for similar clients and put forth a combination.

I'd posit that a Grade C seller that leverages this simple weapon, outsells an A+ analysis paralysis rep sending only emails, InMails, or 'smiling and dialing'. Everything looks like a hammer when all you have is a nail.

Long live the COMBINATION!

I dare you to try this precisely in the field tomorrow and leave a comment with what worked. This is not for the faint of heart. You'll have to break out your Data.com or DiscoverOrg. You'll have to sweet talk the EA or call the switch board. But remember the sequence.

Your homework from Tony – write this down, yes manually track your progress with cross hatches... The 30:

30 combinations per day should put you at 1-3X pipeline driving 3-5 meetings per week within 1-2 fiscal quarters.

Call – VMail – Email (2 min...) - The clock is ticking... Please experiment with this verbatim and leave feedback below. They will know you by your results.

Caveat: I think the number one reason this is so lethal is camps have formed. Folks are either totally ToutApping away automatedly in Predictable Revenue blast land: 200 emails a day with personalized name only. Or they're hunting and pecking around social selling tactics. Or they're looking for referrals for a back door.

It's not just actually picking up the phone that no one is doing because that's a camp, too - isn't it? It's the combination of the hearing your voice - that wow factor - getting interrupted and going back to task, and then getting the email and then thinking - fine I'll respond. To mashup Weinberg, Konrath, and Jobs, Attorneys at Law:

Crazy busy prospects must be proactively interrupted with a strategic value message upstream before they ever knew what they always wanted. The seller must therefore lead with why the conversation matters.

If you just call, it's vanilla. If you just social sell, it's spam. If you switch it up, bob and weave, stick and move – you may just catch someone's attention. But of course, the Quint could also be a hand written note or a thoughtful piece of swag. Timing is critical because the ADD nature of the modern CXO gives you about 2 minutes for them to acquiesce to an appointment. Try it! Reach out and touch someone combinationatorily.

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