I was on LinkedIn the other day and saw a “LinkedIn sales influencer” — you know, one of the keynote speaker/thought leader guys — post this. It’s a quote from his friend that reads:
“Cold calling is not only alive and well. It’s more important than ever before. Wanna know why? You can’t rely on your SDRs and marketing reps to hit your number anymore. No self-respecting sales person is going to trust someone else with their commission cheques. Real sales professionals take matters into their own hands and thrive with cold calling.”
This is one of the more bullshit statements I’ve ever seen on LinkedIn, and that covers a lot of ground.
First argument: cold calling isn’t dead, no, but it’s not alive and well. It’s been adjusted by better forms of prospecting and contact.
Second: SDR works very well today. By some measure, sales development teams represent 65% of B2B pipelines.
Third: so the logic of this quote seems to be that we must go back to old technologies (cold calling) because we can’t rely on new technologies. Here’s my reverse question, Mr. Thought Leader: should a sales principal to have support calls from clients because they can’t rely on the customer support division? That’s essentially the same logic as what you said.
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If lead generation is the one job, then why should the sales rep be doing it?
Business is about hitting targets. Sales is definitely about it. If your SDR team isn’t good, fix it. Fire them, train them, get new SDRs, etc. Definitely fix what is broken — but don’t build less effective workarounds. That’s just process for the sake of process, or unnecessary dialing for the sake of “taking matters into your own hands,” and that’s a waste of time.
I’m not a keynote speaker or best-selling author, but I am a revenue-carrying sales manager and small business owner. I do these things all day. I’m not just breathlessly posting thoughts on LinkedIn. If some of these guys were in real business, they would understand how real business works.
