If you ask any sales rep or business owner the definition of cold calling, the vast majority focus on the negative aspect. There is very little standardization the true definition of this sales practice. I found a quote, from Wikipedia that resonated with me, it states “solicitation of business from potential customers who have had no prior contact with the salesperson conducting the call, used to convince potential customers to purchase either the salespersons product or service in an over-the-phone process, as in telemarketing, or door-to-door salespeople”. Adventure to say that this quotation was written many years ago probably in the late fifties or early sixties when cold calling was just not on the phone but was predominately door to door.
Many people will tell you there is really nothing left for today or tomorrow for cold calling. They will tell you that there may have been a yesterday, when selling was simpler and in many cases more so than today. I tend not to subscribe to that belief. There was it yesterday, today and evolving tomorrow. I know this to be true because I have experienced all of it. Yesterday and not the figure of speech but more like 30 – 35 years ago I was selling door to door Electrolux and my friends where selling Kirby. Every day we would go out, and knock on 70-80 doors to try to win an unsuspecting housewife to let us in, to conduct a demo. This meant vacuuming her home and even the mattress. The mattress helped close the sale as it produced not so nice dirt. I was young and full of termination, and was very persistent to make the sale. But none the less, it was still cold calling, and the toughest meaning of the word, as compared to present day. I needed the money for college, and most of the folks selling needed to support a family of 5 or 6.
The lessons learned (free “gifts of Knowledge”) helped me many years later, when I was teaching sales people and business owners how to cold call and sell to drive up revenues. What they learned, the skills and techniques still work today. Looking forward to the future, one would say there’s no future in cold calling, and I disagree.
Many write about the viability of cold calling, and how the Internet has extinguished it. The skeptics tell you that there is no place for it in today’s business world with social media, as in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and a host of others. We do not always prescribe dismissing Social, as that would be frivolous. However, the one thing that has not changed over millenniums is our desire to communicate as humans, as we still live and congregate in groups. We remain social animals. With social media, there is great messaging and connectivity, but no direct communication. Whether direct or through voicemail, people will listen as they will watch. If you present it correctly, you can reach people, perhaps in a limited fashion but nonetheless, very effectively.
So picking up a phone, calling an executive with something of value, still has a place in today’s business world. Value never went out of vogue! On that note, we start to think of what worked in the past doeswork in the future. Our future blogs we’ll talk about that. Where there is multiple communications and what we call multiple touches, two individuals can reach an accord on value. Again, cold calling is a variable component of that mix.
What do you do next? Send us an email and we’ll arrange for you to speak with Ed to chat about how these learnings can help build more sales just for your business.