Is Cold Calling Dead?
Most marketing firms will tell you cold calling is dead. Or at least dying. That cold calling techniques have been replaced by demand generation technology and aggressive inbound marketing strategies. Not so fast my friends.
We think pronouncing the death of cold calling is pretty myopic. It’s like salespeople saying demand generation inbound marketing only produces bad leads and will never work. More of that sales-marketing gap stuff…but in reality, cold calling has a strong place in the business development function but maybe a better way to say it is, cold calling as you knew it…is dying. And that’s a good thing.
No one loves cold calling, but what if you could make the temperature of the phones warmer? What if you could take the leads that a strong demand generation and inbound marketing effort develop and provide tools back to the sales team. Imagine a world where a monthly “Sales Intelligence” report doesn’t just send the true responders of the inbound lead effort, but also provided the list of probable targets.
These are “probable targets” that fit data profiles of a customer that has a higher propensity to do business with you, have interacted with email, content on web landing pages, attended a webinar, etc, but have not yet reached out to inquire and become a true inbound lead. The sales team then “Cold Calls” this audience to accelerate the conversation. These are people that marketing knows have interacted with the company and its messaging, thereby making the phones “warmer”. Why wouldn’t that be more effective than the randomly generated CRM list of 250 names to call this week? Could this help salespeople find more deals, faster with less cold calling?
Might be worth a shot. BTW gang, the investment to have a comprehensive effort in this way is far cheaper than throwing high priced salespeople and the phonebook of contacts and the market and hoping for success. You’ll churn salespeople and find it hard to develop young ones.
Balance, like with everything, is the key
If all you are doing is cold calling, networking and the traditional grind of the sales job, you are missing a really big opportunity to leverage a digital revolution in business development that is passing you by. If you are all-in on the demand generation, inbound lead creation of the new marketing and not-so-much on the time honored activities of sales…that’s far less of you…but an equally big miss. Balance is key. Integration is critical and developing a real business development strategy is maybe long overdue.
Help your salespeople be more successful, faster and more consistently by developing a balanced strategy of sales and marketing. And if you ever wanna chat about it, give us a holler.