There are dozens of articles — and LinkedIn sales influencer videos! — about cold-calling every month. People have a million different theories on it, all divided into two camps:
- “It doesn’t work. It’s dead.”
- “It’s alive and well and I make millions with it.”
I’ll keep it fairly simple for you: it works, but it only works one way, and it can’t be scaled.
The only way cold calling works
You have to have your most senior salespeople do it. They need to be working the phones. Why? Because they have experience and ability to:
- Build rapport with the C-Level
- Handle objections
- Tell a story
If you want cold-calling to work, get the senior-most farts burning up the phone lines.
What most companies do around cold calling
They hire SDRs. The math is there. You can usually get 4-5 SDRs for the salary of a senior sales executive. 4-5 has to be effective, right?
Wrong.
They don’t have the experience, industry knowledge, phone skills, sales tactics, etc. to make their cold-calling work. You cannot scale it even by hiring more people and slightly raising the salary. The base skill set just isn’t there in most SDRs.
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What you should do with cold calling
In short:
- Go omni-channel but do it carefully.
- Have your senior-most people follow up directly with leads and contacts.
- If you hire SDRs, use them for nurture emailing and LinkedIn InMail reach-outs. They can observe a senior salesperson on the phone, but don’t have them working cold calls.
- Minimize your strategy — while most wouldn’t embrace minimization of anything in business, be targeted about the events you attend, the webinars you help sponsor, and the cold reach-outs you do. A well-targeted contacting approach yields more higher ROI than a “we have our hands in every possible sales channel” approach.
What’s your hot take on cold calling? Ah, the contrast in terms was funny…
How we can help with all this? Bizxpand lead generation and sales services.
Our value prop: we help you do leads and B2B better, while also avoiding the premature scaling death trap. We’ve dealt with cold calling of all types. We know the game. Would love to talk more!
