Cold Calling: Dead or Alive?

There is no such thing as a cold call anymore. You can find out everything about your prospect except what they had for lunch. Use that information intelligently and you have a warm call.

I think what you really meant to ask is are people still doing outbound calling and the answer to that is YES. You can't sit and wait for buyers to self identify...although isn't it great when they do? If someone fits your Ideal Customer Profile and Buyer Persona and they have not raised their hand...go get them! Do your homework, have a conversation and start a relationship.

And, for all those nay-sayers who say outbound calling is dead. Good! Less poorly delivered voice mails and horribly written emails for the prospects to sift through. Now, gotta go close a deal that started as an outbound call....

Hi Craig,

Yes, I think people are still cold-calling. I think that anytime you have an outbound marketing campaign that there should be some sort of teleprospecting aspect to it (of course I'm a little biased, but hey, its what I do).

In any event, I think what's changed about cold-calling is the fact that, as Trish alluded to, you can find anything out about your prospect via the Web. The call, then, is cold only from the prospect's point of view, because the Internet has allowed us to learn a lot about who we're calling and, quite possibly, why they really need to hear from us.

I think if you pit cold-calling versus any other type of call, it's not going to perform as well. If you've got a list of folks that actually stopped by your booth at a trade show, and not just because you were giving away an iPod, I think, obviously, those lists are going to bear more fruit.

Cold-calling is not, dead, though, not by any stretch. It is certainly not easy, but it is absolutely necessary.

Jeff Ogden rightly points out that the environment now demands higher skills to ask the deep questions. Higher skills though force a new, maybe insurmountable, challenge: Maintain or improve your ROI with cost effective and scalable delivery of “new” cold calling.

There is another way to improve ROI while using cost-effective skills. This may be counter-intuitive at first glance... Our callers never talk directly to the target executives. They never enter into substantive conversations and only focus on facilitating message delivery thru Admins. Our messages are developed once by highly skilled sales and marketing resources and delivered repeatedly via emails or letters by our callers.

This works. Our last three appointment setting projects each converted over 25% of the targets to serious conversations.

The phone remains a critical tool, because it is the only way to have a 2 way conversation with prospects. However, it is critical that salespeople have the skills to ask deep questions to learn the change management issues and internal buying process of the customer. These questions go far beyond the standard Budget, Access to Power, Needs and Timeframe to seeing the big picture of the client's internal, off-line systems.

Jeff Ogden, President
Find New Customers
http://www.findnewcustomers.net

I would suggest that the factors you mentioned are not conspiring against cold calling, but fortifying the meaningful connection between buyer and seller. Trish is right, there is no need to call cold anymore - and all these great tools are no substitute for a phone call. They just make the phone call better. Unless you are in a business where you can close sales without human intervention, it still takes outbound!

To answer your question directly - Cold calling has been transformed.

I see Web 2.0 technologies as marketing tools. They fill a pipeline with increasingly interested prospects, but I have yet to close a deal through the Internet alone. The phone is still my #1 tool for sales.

In my earlier comment, I post the note below and failed to properly attribute the comment. These concepts came from Sharon Drew Morgen, author of Dirty Little Secrets - Why Sellers Can't Sell, Buyers can't buy and What You Can Do About It. To learn about the book, please visit http://www.dirtylittlesecretsbook.com. My deepest apologies to Sharon Drew.

The phone remains a critical tool, because it is the only way to have a 2 way conversation with prospects. However, it is critical that salespeople have the skills to ask deep questions to learn the change management issues and internal buying process of the customer. These questions go far beyond the standard Budget, Access to Power, Needs and Timeframe to seeing the big picture of the client's internal, off-line systems.
Jeff Ogden, President
Find New Customers
http://www.findnewcustomers.net

I agree with Sharon Drew Morgan. The customer's environment is vastly more complex than just the purchase of our offering. There's a complex set of factors that drive behavior. The good salesperson asks great questions about those off-line factors that govern decisions. She terms these Facilitative Questions.

For more information, I strongly urge you go to http://www.dirtysecretsbook.com and purchase both Dirty Little Secrets and Buying Facilitation. I also suggest you listen to my interview of Sharon Drew, which can be found at http://www.veotag.com/player/?u=rrlwnskpeu

Jeff Ogden, President
Find New Customers
http://www.findnewcustomers.net

Cold calling success can be achieved with a few simple steps: make it personal, preferably by referencing a personal connection or shared interest, but definitely by doing your research on that particular person before you call; offer to solve a problem that the prospect has right now and try to understand what that problem is before you make the dial; deliver some value adds such as research or data during the call or shortly thereafter via email.

That's a winning formula for long considered purchasing cycles. It won't work in the consumer space though.

When a pipeline is going dry, cold calling can be the quickest way to fill it. Networking and social media are highly effective as means to meeting the right people. The best salespeople know that calling the comapny to which they cannot get an introduction is still a workable technique.

We sometimes use an introductory email that does not get into any detail about our business; we provide solutions when there are the problems that need them. Mostly, we pick up the phone and call. Our best client last year was a cold call that I made when I read an interview of a CEO in the WSJ.

It seems to me that cold calling is still a widely practiced in business as well as successful, albeit depending on which inside sales expert is closing the deal. The only difference today from 10 years ago is that the caller has more starting off info. Semantics aside, the cold call is not dead and although not the most beneficial in terms of ROI can be extremely necessary in sheerly quantitative returns.

Jeff, Trish, et al are right.

Web 2.0 has changed everything, especially for B2B. There is NO reason for anyone to be calling anyone without knowing the contact's name, sphere of influence, what they had for lunch (some us Twitter that stuff), if they're in the office, interested in what we have...

Even so, I spent the last ten years trying to convince a large company (my employer) that a static website, paid web leads, and outbound cold calling were ineffective. They have in-house sales training that teaches how to cold call executives and business owners

That's one reason I left. I now work with businesses that understand the diminishing value of and need for 1990-style cold calling.

It's called Web 2.0