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 – or even better your technical co-founder – 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 most senior people burning up the phone lines. Disadvantage: they have better things to do and can’t be cloned.
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. Yes, they know how to automate things. 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:
- Yes, go omni-channel but do it carefully.
- Have your most senior people follow up directly with leads and contacts.
- If you hire SDRs, use them for sourcing, nurture emailing and LinkedIn InMail reach-outs. They can observe a senior salesperson on the phone – to learn the sales message – but don’t have them working cold calls.
- Don’t outsource cold calling to an agency. How shall they build rapport and tell a story on C-level?
