The Psychology of Making and Receiving Sales Cold Calls

Hands up, who likes to GET a cold call from a salesperson? They might pronounce your name correctly. They might have some idea what you do. But it always boils down to one key thing: they are sure you are their target audience for whatever they are selling. You must have this problem, you must need this solution.

Do cold calls work?

If you made 1000 cold calls and sold one thing, would you say it worked? You might. You sold something. Whether or not "they work" for salespeople appears to be in the eye of the salesperson.

Do they work for the recipient? Non-salespeople know how they feel about getting a sales or telemarketing call. Yes, I don't really differentiate between them much since they both in essence mean, "Even though this person hasn't requested that I call, I want to sell someone something over the phone." The employers might be different, the workplaces might be different, but as the recipient, I don't differentiate between a salesperson calling and a telemarketer calling.

Cold calls don't work for me to receive, so I take lots of measures to avoid them. I'm on the Do Not Call list (USA). I don't answer a number I don't recognize. I don't call or email back salespeople who leave me voicemails. I also don't reply to salespeople who leave me LinkedIn InMails. I don't reply to spammers. I don't reply to salespeople at all. If I want something, I will find a provider I like. If I buy it, it won't be because your company forced me to talk to a salesperson before signing up. It will be because the product fit my needs, not because you talked me into it.

Can you solve my problem?

Someone tagged me on a video where a guy says that step 1 of cold calling is to establish credibility. OK, why don't you HAVE credibility? Is this because you know that people generally don't trust a salesperson calling them? That's a tough starting point. The video continues by saying that to do this, you must explain that what you are selling solves a certain problem, the problem you imagine the call recipient to have. I stopped watching the video at that point.

So many companies are wrong about what problems they think I have. I get endless emails and calls trying to sell me programmers and web designers. They see we do UX, they assume we need programmers. We don't! We rarely get programming jobs and when we do, we have partners in place. I get lots of calls wanting to help me with staffing. We have no open jobs and I haven't needed help finding workers in the last 24 years. Non-problems.

How sure are you, salesperson, that you really know what my problems are? You can't solve them without knowing them. UX best practices would say you can't know my problems without asking me what they are... but the yelling guy in the video said not to ask someone their problems since then you look weak for not knowing them. Catch 22. Perhaps this is why we don't trust you and you are scraping for some "credibility."

Logical fallacies abound

I'm in a bizarre LinkedIn "discussion" where I said that I believed cold calling was dead or would die soon. Between changing government regulations on privacy, people being pickier about what calls they answer, changing attitudes towards talking to these people to "be polite," and cell phone apps and systems that block certain types of numbers, cold calling is unlikely to be the future.

This set off some salespeople who are sure I'm wrong and it works. First, things got foggy. One reply told me that a good salesperson "hits the ball" 30-40% of the time while others hit the ball 15-20% of the time. What's "hit the ball?" I couldn't get away with using that as a metric anywhere I've consulted. Does that mean someone didn't hang up on you? Ended up a lead? Let you email them a white paper or proposal? Actually bought from you?

Those who read my articles know that to me, the only number that matters are conversions, the actual sale, money changing hands. If you had 10,000 leads, congrats. Did you make any sales? 10,000 great, hot leads leading to no sales means you didn't hit the ball. I once spoke to a woman who was trying to sell me on paying to speak at her conference (which I do not do). She said they guarantee that the audience fits my target audience and I'm guaranteed to get leads... how many leads do I need to get? I said I don't measure leads. I measure clients. If I leave a conference with 1,000 leads and nobody hires me, that's a failure. If I leave a conference with 2 leads and both hire me, that's great.

Metrics seem a bit slippery for some in salesland.

Someone else replied to the conversation saying that he Googled "Product Design" and couldn't find my company, so how will my customers ever find me? This thinking is quite narrow. I am not optimizing for "Product Design," and my UX customers generally don't find me in searches. However, it makes no sense to imagine that if people might not find you in Google, you have to cold call them. A and B aren't the only possibilities here.

And of course we ended up in ad hominem

What do you do when you can't win an argument? A guy whose LinkedIn title says, "Experienced Revenue Creator" said:

"You’re the one selling yourself and your short by not being open open to new ideas. Sounds like a salesman got the best of you a long time ago and you’re still too bitter to let it go ??"

At 5' 4" (162.5cm) I am short! He is RIGHT! But evidently I don't like cold calls because it's personal. A salesman "got the best of me a long time ago." Can anybody explain what that would even look like? Is this guy implying I dated a salesman and he overpowered me in some way? Or is he implying a salesman successfully sold me something I didn't want or like, I bought it anyway (?), and now I'm still bitter about that (?). How does he know this happened, how does he know it was a man, how does he know it was a long time ago? So many questions.

This guy completely made up a story about me to win his argument against himself, and was rather proud of that. That goes from bizarre to surreal. And they wonder why we don't want to speak to them or answer their emails. But then he held his own beer and added these gems:

"You obviously have had negative experiences with cold calling in the past given your highly emotive responses to this thread. People typically dont care this much about LI threads unless they have a deep rooted emotional reason to do so.

Again, it sucks you had to go through bad cold calling experiences in the past, but you’re still in the wrong for summarily dismissing those who ethically, competently bring value to their prospects through cold calling. It’s extremely effective and a noble way of doing business.

Anyways it’s all good. Keep on being the sad, bitter, angry little person you are. I’m sure your customers and prospects love how close minded and negative you are."

Just to sum up, I don't think cold calling works. That's it! In reaction to my conversation on that topic, this guy is sure I'm emotional, bitter, deeply wounded, sad, bitter, angry, closed-minded, and negative. Remember that when you have no argument, the best argument is to go for personal assessments of others and try to put them on the defensive. Try to make that other person look foolish, unstable, or minimized in front of others. This woman... she's just emotional. She's bitter. She was hurt long ago by someone else. We don't have to listen to her thoughts, opinions, or learn more about what might work better for people like her.

I think Robert has let us in to a little of his own world, his own past, his own current situation. His reaction seems a bit large, a bit emotional to a stranger who believes cold calling is dead or will die soon. This poor guy and those who have to live and work with him. Can't imagine getting a cold call from him! Yikes!!! Good luck, Robert L of St Petersburg, Florida, Experienced Revenue Creator. I truly hope things work out for you but I won't know since I blocked you. I don't suffer fools at all.

I've never made a cold call in my life.

The salespeople in this conversation didn't believe me when I said that. They tried to redefine cold calling, saying that yes, of course at some point I have called someone who was not expecting my call. Well, when I call the dentist to make my appointment, they were not expecting me to call, but who would define that as "cold calling" in a sales or marketing context?

No, I have never made a cold call in my life. I've never called anybody up and said, "Hey, your UX is pretty bad, we can fix that." I do not call people who have not requested to speak with me. It's a bizarre discussion when the people disagreeing with you want to redefine the thing until they might be right. This isn't helping my opinion of "salespeople," people!

One guy wanted to redefine a cold call to, and I quote, "Applies to any referral, web lead, networking event, your parents." If I call my parents to ask how they are today, that's a cold call and SEE? Debbie has made a cold call and she's wrong when she says she has NOT! This sounds like arguing with a 4th grader. This is a discussion about sales cold calls. I have not made a cold call and I'm not going to include, "I think I'll call Grandma today and see how she is," in my definition of a cold call.

But I'm (cold) calling a "lead" and that's different.

How did your company get that lead? There are so many ways I end up in someone's Salesforce or other system and they are sure I'm a lead. How do we define lead? Someone potentially hot to sell to? Someone genuinely interested in possibly buying this?

If you forced me to fill out a form to download a white paper or demo a system, I'm unwillingly a lead. I don't want to be contacted by sales. But you pushed me into a database, funnel, or drip to try to sell to me. If you had given me a choice, I would not have been entered as a lead, and I will click the first "unsubscribe" I see to get out of this system.

If your leads are from LinkedIn finding you people who fit a certain target, you can call those leads but I would say they are not qualified or hot leads. They are unsuspecting people who fell into search results and now you want to pitch or sell to them. They are not expecting to hear from a salesperson. They didn't contact your company asking if you can solve this problem they are having.

Sales and marketing teams often mistake "interest in a product, service, or white paper" as "a desire to hear from a sales person." Most of us do not want to hear from a sales person. This is increasingly an age of, "I'll research this, I'll compare it, I might demo some things, and I will decide what's best for our needs no matter what a salesperson says." I'm doing business in companies in spite of their sales people, not because of them.

When I want to be contacted by sales, I email or call the company. Otherwise, salespeople might want to consider that a number ranging between "some" and "many" of their "leads" were forced into the database, don't want to be there, and don't consider themselves leads.

So when does cold calling work?

It's about personality and psychology, which means it will be individual. There will be people who take that call and stay on that call. It might be because they want to be polite... this is someone's job and they don't want to just hang up on them. There's even a slim chance they were hoping to hear from that company because they were thinking of buying that thing. That's surely a great day for the salesperson.

I watch my boyfriend answer calls from numbers he doesn't know and talk to telemarketers until he's exhausted that he's really not interested in what they are selling. He's a very sweet guy and I can't figure out why he doesn't just say, "No thanks," and hang up. Either way, that's not a successful call for the salesperson. My fave calls are when they try to sell him something we've been waiting to get in our rural area and he's like yes, sign me up. Then he tells them where we live and they say oh, it's not available in your area. OK, why not call me back WHEN IT IS. Nope, he gets multiple calls each week from multiple companies trying to sell him this thing we want and can't even buy (yet). But as my boyfriend is a highly intelligent critical thinker and researcher type, a salesperson is unlikely to sell my boyfriend anything.

I'm not your average bear. I've never felt peer pressure. I am not easily talked into anything. I am a researcher, a critical thinker. I'm not an impulsive shopper or buyer. When I was a teen, a family member described me as, "Debbie is the kind of person who wants an item, researches it for 4 months, it costs $7, and she decides to not buy it." Accurate. Cold calling and "salespeople" are unlikely to sell me something I didn't want. They might not even be able to sell me something I do want.

This means that salespeople have to be good at reading people to figure out who they are talking to. Are they talking to a sheep, someone more easily convinced or talked into things? Are they talking to my boyfriend, someone who didn't hang up on you out of kindness but absolutely won't buy from you? Are they trying to call me? If so, they might never hear my voice since I won't answer the call or if I do, I hang up during the delay between the call connecting and the telemarketing machine putting an agent on the call.

If cold calling works for you, do it, but lose my number. :)

Some of the people in the bizarre LinkedIn discussion I was in were obviously bad at reading people. They are probably nervous that cold calling will work less often or go away (or what if it becomes illegal to call someone who didn't specifically request it)... so the best idea is to go after me, try to make me look inconsistent, try to make me look bad at selling my own services, etc.

Good salespeople would need empathy to really see things through my eyes. Of course, the first thing they'd need to see is, "Does Debbie want a call from me right now?" and the answer would be, "No," and the call would never happen. Someone once suggested that I pay LinkedIn to let me cold InMail piles of people about something I offer. Well, I hate GETTING cold InMails... and I have empathy... so why would I send one? The response was that we know that they could use my service. Well, yes, that's what everybody who cold InMails me also believes! But we have to have more empathy than that.

In the end, many tried but none were able (during the bizarre LinkedIn conversation) to sell me on the idea that cold calling works.