Should Your Sales Reps Cold Call?

Should sales teams still rely on blind cold calls like they did 25 years ago—‘dialing for dollars,’ making 40 calls a day, and hoping to meet quotas? Surprisingly, some companies still do. But if that's the strategy, the answer is simple: No. This outdated approach assumes scaling means hiring more salespeople, leading to diminishing returns. You can only call the same target so many times before the effort outweighs the benefit, and finding talent is increasingly challenging. For example, during my research, I found our team reached out to a contact nine times in eight weeks. By the eighth week, the contact opted out, signaling they never want to hear from us again. In today's world, blind cold calls are inexcusable. Most potential contacts have an online presence, so there's no reason not to make warm calls. Do your research. Use approaches like preparatory emails, as Shawn Kalin suggested, and focus on building relationships. Cold calling for commodity products is a wasted effort today. Online presence, digital marketing, and targeted outreach are far more cost-effective. Proactive sales should be reserved for high-cost, high-margin products, where a personal, one-on-one relationship is truly warranted.

Personally, I answer all calls. But I prefer if they've sent me an email, chat, comment prior, so I have some context. With intent signals so prevalent now, the rep should know enough to make a set of quality outreach touchpoints. My view anyway. ??

Cold calling has changed almost beyond recognition since Covid. It is very much necessary to reach out 'by Voice' to those who have not responded to any of your Demand Generation activities, but should be conducted AFTER you have saturated all other priorities. Expect hit rates to take longer to be achieved - so make allowances and build that into your KPI's. Before Covid, I could speak with 9 to 15 decision makers per working day (when the schools are in session). Today, it is more like 6 to 10 meaningful conversations. And that's flat out calling from start to end of day. It's important to cold call because - even if you get a 'no we are not in the market', you have the opportunity to speak with a decision maker who has the 'Authority' to answer other key questions that build up priceless market insight over time. If you don't adjust your KPI's to fit in more with 'market response', frontline callers could start to massage the numbers and the quality of their captured data, to satisfy the KPI's imposed and achieve their targets to gain their bonuses. There is no one quick answer to this question. There are a lot of 'depends' to contend with and those answers are also governed by different Sales territories.