CHAPTER 24

To Cold Call or Not to Cold Call

To cold call, or not to cold call—that is the question:
Whether ‘tis wiser in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous rejection
Or to take aim against a sea of prospects
By e-mail and Linking with them. To call, to fail—
No more—and by a fail to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That sales is heir to.
(With deepest apologies to William Shakespeare!)

Few subjects in sales today generate as much controversy as cold calling. There is a seemingly never-ending debate in sales circles over the relative and absolute merits of cold calling as a method for lead generation and prospect development. With the growing number and increasing sophistication of sales resources available to the average seller, it would seem strange that opinions among sales leaders and sales professionals could be so polarized on this subject.

On one side of this argument are the traditionalists, who believe that cold calling, even in today’s information-rich economy, remains:

   An effective tactic for reaching new prospects.

   A productive use of a salesperson’s limited selling time.

   An essential skill that every salesperson needs to master.

On the other side of the debate are the progressives, who believe that:

   Cold calls are unnecessary because a variety of tools enable a seller to connect and engage with prospects before the first call is made.

   Cold calling is an inefficient use of a salesperson’s limited selling time.

   Contemporary sales skills, such as social selling, are more crucial to sales success than the elevator-pitch skills of cold calling.

Proponents on both sides of the debate tend to view this as an either/or proposition. It isn’t. In fact, I am going to end the debate once and for all.

First, cold calling is not selling. Although it’s often the responsibility of a salesperson, cold calling shouldn’t be confused with selling. As you have learned in this book, selling is about helping customers get the information they need to make purchase decisions with the least investment of their time possible. Is there any part of that definition that sounds like cold calling? Nope. Selling is about providing answers that result in orders. Cold calling is about building interest in your product or service. Wait a second. Isn’t building awareness and interest in your product the responsibility of marketing?

Hmm. Yes, it is.

If that’s the case, then why on earth are you cold calling?

Well, you are cold calling only because your marketing department isn’t doing a good enough job. Having a salesperson cold call a customer, someone who may never have heard of your company or product—whether over the phone, or in person out in the field—is an activity designed to create awareness and interest in your product. In other words, cold calling is just a form of advertising. The definition of advertising in Merriam-Webster is “the action of calling something to the attention of the public.” Cold calling is a very personal, up-close, and mostly expensive form of advertising. And advertising is not the responsibility of sales.

How is marketing failing? They aren’t generating enough quality sales leads to ensure that salespeople don’t have to make cold calls. In most companies, there is a gap between the number of leads supplied by marketing and the number of leads sales requires to fill out its pipeline with well-qualified prospects. The utopian view of this situation is that marketing, through its activities, would reliably generate enough appropriate leads that a salesperson would never need to spend a single minute cold calling. You’d have more good leads than you’d have the time to handle. Unfortunately, this utopian vision of marketing fully living up to its responsibilities doesn’t come to fruition in most companies. That leads to my final point, which resolves this argument once and for all.

Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. You have no choice. If marketing can’t generate enough leads to fill your funnel, then you need to do whatever it takes to make up that deficit. That means prospecting, cold calling, business development, whatever you feel comfortable calling it.

I have read the results of studies and listened to endless presentations about the changes taking place in how sellers and buyers are interacting. In general, the trends are reflected in the DemandGen and Genius.com study titled “Inside the Mind of the B2B Buyer.” One of its key findings was that more than 80 percent of B2B customers/buyers said that, on their purchase transactions, they had initiated contact with the seller. Less than 20 percent said that they were contacted cold by the seller. In other words, 80 percent of buyers, at least in the B2B space, were making themselves aware of the products and services that they needed and then reaching out to the seller. And they largely accomplished this using content that they found online and that was created by … marketing. So maybe marketing isn’t doing such a bad job after all.

Because if the study is correct, it means that all the arguing about cold calling boils down to finding the last 20 percent of the sales opportunities you need to meet your quota. Personally, I’m not convinced that 20 percent is an accurate reflection of the sales situation today. But even if the number is actually larger, it’s beside the point. The key takeaway is that while cold calling’s place in the sales world is changing, as long as the lead deficit exists, it’s still an essential task for most salespeople.

A lead deficit is the percentage of your total required sales leads that you need to develop on your own through some form of prospecting. Using my 20 percent figure from the previous study, for example, if you meet 80 percent of your sales goal today from prospects that originated as marketing-generated sales leads, then you have a lead deficit of 20 percent. The question then becomes what actions must you take to find the remaining 20 percent of the sales opportunities you need to make your quota? You will find them from proactive sales prospecting (i.e., cold calling).

Let’s face facts here: In sales, your job boils down to doing whatever hard work is required to meet your goals. Whenever there is a gap between the number of qualified prospects required to reliably meet your goal and the number of qualified prospects in your pipeline generated from marketing activities—and there will almost always be a gap—it has to be filled in by prospect activity generated by you. This means fulfilling your responsibility as a salesperson to do what it takes to meet and exceed your assigned goal. If this means spending a portion of every day following a disciplined prospecting process (e.g., doing some research to pick targets, making connections online, getting on the phone, or going out and making calls), then that is what has to be done.

In the grand scheme of selling, is it desirable for salespeople to devote a significant portion of their time to cold calling? Absolutely not. It is not the most productive use of a salesperson’s time.

On the other hand, when you have a lead deficit to make up, cold calling is absolutely necessary. And you’d better know how to do it and do it well.