If you have read any of our blogs we have never said that that cold calling is dead. In fact we have argued that for selling low value, transactional sales it probably works well.For example, I often get called about sports tickets. It’s a Wednesday, there are two seats on Saturday available you make a decision, yes or no, hand over your credit card. Job done.In the world I work, which is B2B Enterprise sales, cold calling hasn’t been applicable for a number of years. While doing work at SAP one of the sales people said to me “if I ring the switchboard of GlaxoSmithKline plc ( GSK ) and ask to be put through to the Finance Director, the switchboard will just laugh at me.” How very true!I recall recently a cold calling guru writing on social (oh the irony) that his secret sauce was to get the cold callers to believe that what they were selling was beneficial to the client.If switchboards won’t even put you through to the gatekeeper you can believe as much as you want. You ain’t going any further. Hope was never a strategy.
Let’s get back to the bake off!
OK cold caller makes a call and they will get one of five responses.
- You are blocked by technology such the Apple iOS13 cold calling blocking functionality.
- You are told to never call again.
- You are told to call back in 6 months.
- You are told you should have called me 6 months ago
- The person says this is amazing and can I buy one.
- So 5. will happen but the number of instances of it happening gets less and less.This is in fact the same for all forms of interrupt marketing. That is where I contact you and interrupt what you are doing.Advertising, cold calling, unsolicited emails. The same 5 responses.Another issue is that you are not in control of 5. Let’s take an example of a Facebook ad I received this week. Anybody who knows me know I like rock music and still collect physical music. There was a Facebook ad for a box set of 10 CDs for £39.95 and the ad said there was limited supply.I went onto Amazon and found the same box set for £19.99 a significant saving. I didn’t buy but placed a comment to the ad so that other fans wouldn’t be ripped off. As you see, you serve that ad but are not in control of the output anymore.Back to the bake off. So when cold calling, unless you hit 5. above there is no win. Yes? The same is more all forms of interrupt marketing. Yes?
Social selling is different, social selling is permission based.
Social selling is NOT when a spammer sends you a message over Social and says “buy my shit” this is not social selling, it’s cold calling on a social network. This is still interrupt marketing and you must block these people!Social selling means there is permission between you and the recipient, let’s re-look at those 5 items again. - You are blocked by technology such the Apple iOS13 cold calling blocking functionality.
- You are told to never call again.
- You are told to call back in 6 months.
- You are told you should have called me 6 months ago
- The person says this is amazing and can I buy one.
- You won’t get blocked as you have permission to be connected.
- As you have permission to connect and you won’t be told not to call again.
- As you would be visible on social media you will be able to nurture them over the next six months. In fact if you nurture them with insightful content, they will probably buy in less than 6 months. Thus social selling enabling to cut sales cycles.
- When clients have already made decisions, they would have gone onto social and looked for similar products and services before buying the competitive product. This really shows how cold calling leaves money on the table.
- You get the sale. But social selling enables you to remain in control.
- So there you have it, only 1 in 5 criteria gets you a sale with cold calling, which is great I’m sure. But when you get a bite at a sales with all 5 scenarios with social selling, you can see why people are making the switch.Not because something is or is not dead, they are doing purely from efficiency and effectiveness.As a sales team we only have a finite time (200 days) to make our number and we have to use the best processes available to us. If one prospecting method gets a sales team an additional meeting a week and you win 1 in 4. That means social selling will win you an additional 10 deals a year. (Let’s assume that August and December are quiet months.)For a company with 10 sales people and an average deal size of $100K that’s 10 salespeople x 10 additional wins x $100K. You do the maths!