Cold Calls & Pauly Shore, Things That No Longer Work and Here’s Why.
Sam Matheny
Sales Leadership Consultant | Business Development Professional | Key Accounts, Channel Partner & Distribution Sales Manager | HIPAA Certified Professional, Certified Security Compliance Specialist, FISMA Certified
COLD CALLS? With the information available to you today, are you serious? If you still utilize “cold calls” as a realistic sales tools then it’s time to turn off your Walkman and step away from your word processor because unless you’re taking donations for the FOP then we need to have a serious talk about sales effectiveness.
For 99.99% of you this whole piece is ridiculous because you’ve evolved and I’ll be honest with you, making a cold in today’s world is almost inexcusably sacrileges. With the technology that every salesperson has access to there’s no excuse for anything other than a warm call.
I’m really surprised, with just under 10k connections I knew that a few people from time to time would still talk about cold calling strategies but I see comments about “effective cold calling” almost every day. After seeing half a dozen in my news feed just this morning I had to put my thoughts about cold calling in writing.
There’s a generation of salespeople coming up now and for them, the term “cold call” will be as foreign as cassette tapes and unfunny as, “Wheezing the Juice”. All bad references aside though, the thought of dialing for dollars and doing a blind, walk in “cold call” kind of makes me shudder. I don’t care how amazing you say your communication skills are and how long it’s been working for you, the success rate of a warm call vs. a cold call more than justifies the time you spend doing a little research and then utilizing that information to warm up your prospect.
Statistics prove that only about 2% of cold calls result in an appointment (Job Leap). You can’t tell me that you want a solid rep spending their day cold calling for a 2% rate of success. That’s the only figure that I’m going to throw out at you because we all know that you can spin statistics and figures to prove or disprove anything that you want – and I’m sure that someone will. My point is this, warming up your prospect list is worth the time you invest.
I’m all about good prospecting, fill that pipeline and keep the opportunities flowing but the days of just making calls from a list or walking in cold are long over. This, from a guy that started his career 25 years ago by dialing for dollars out of a Chicago yellow pages.
So, with those 25 years of selling and trying out just about every “new age” sales improvement strategy that has come along I can teach any salesperson the best skills which will massively increase their rate of success in identifying new prospects and the best, most cost-effective ways to warm them up. I’ve helped reps over the years triple+ their effectiveness for opening new opportunities and filling their funnels with rock-solid, closable prospects.
So, stop talking about cold calls as an effective sales tool and get a Pandora account because you only get one chance to make your first impression and just like your Walkman, cold calling is way out of style.
Talent Development Consultant at Ricoh Americas Corporation
7 年Amen Brother! Those were Good days in Livonia.
Talent Development Consultant at Ricoh Americas Corporation
7 年You make a good point, the days of opening up a phone book in the 80's and calling business from Z to A like I did when I started is not effective, but I think their might be a more moderate message here: Most good Sales Development coaches will help a rep build a client facing value statement and phone script based on vertical research they have done, current challenges and radar screen items facing the organization they are targeting. Its still technically a cold call if you have never communicated with the prospect, but you can learn about them and start to drip marketing messages, cast studies, valuable content in their direction so when you make that initial cold call its not so cold. We enable our students to hide behind social media and everything else they can blame for under-performance when we tell them that cold calling doesn't work. A balanced approach is always the best. In my 30+ years of sales and sales development the reps that had a consistent process and plan and made calls on a daily basis were almost always above plan, even now the phone and walk in prospecting works if done right and often.
Sales Leadership Consultant | Business Development Professional | Key Accounts, Channel Partner & Distribution Sales Manager | HIPAA Certified Professional, Certified Security Compliance Specialist, FISMA Certified
7 年I want to thank everyone for all of the "Likes" and the tremendous number of reshares that this article received. I truly appreciate your support!
I talk about commercial vehicle and truck transportation to business leaders and market intelligence analysts to help them navigate the markets with confidence.
7 年Cold calls work.
I think there is a piece (or two) of information missing here. Are you referring to Cold Calling as "someone you have never spoken with before" or "calling someone without doing any research on them and their needs first"? The former is still alive, kicking and successful. The latter seems to be a poor strategy.