I feel your pain and frustration. When an organization isn’t firing on all cylinders, everyone can sense it, and the lack of traction becomes apparent. If a sales team doesn’t get the support they need, which rightfully management should be organizing, how can they do great work on the job required – driving revenue?

Too often, management just beats the sales force harder when times are tough or results aren’t satisfactory. But really, I believe management needs to make sure it’s part of the house is in order first.

It is too bad when bosses don’t get that, or can’t see the bigger picture, or can’t understand how all companies need to insure their sales and marketing ‘ducks’ are all lined up if meaningful results are to come.

To address such issues, and help companies make sure their sales staff are set up to work their magic in the best and most productive ways possible, is why we, Renbor Sales Solutions and Compass North Inc., put together our Sales Process Audit program. I invite you to check it out. To see how it can both (a) help your organization get great top-line results and (b) document that management has its part of the house is in order, go to:

   Sales Process Audit – Is this what your organization needs?

Notwithstanding that, I think each company’s situation is unique. And if they find, or decide, that it is best and right for their sales staff to do cold-calling lead-development work (something I see as principally a marketing activity regardless who does it), then Brad, I think it’s your responsibility to get on board and not resist.

Tony Johnston

Brad

I appreciate your interest and contribution to this debate on cold calling.

I agree with what I think is your underlying point – that sales people have to do what is right in the situation for the business, not that which would make them personally most or more comfortable.

For me, cold calling is a marketing activity, not a sales activity, no matter if sales staff or other people do it. And as I mentioned in my other comment reply above, I think the question about doing or not cold calling should come down to finding out what are the easiest, most productive and cheapest ways for an organization to get primed and ready leads that can feed their sales process. If cold calling is top of the list or near there, then certainly it has a real and vital role to play. If not, it should not because doing it would be a waste of resources in the particular situation in question.

Tony Johnston

Thanks for your posted comment and suggested readings:

Is It Time to Kill The Cold Call?

    and

Cold-Calling Beats Aggressively Waiting by the Phone…. EVERY TIME!

I enjoyed both articles and I join you in recommending them as sales related reading to others.

As to your comments, I agree with you that cold calling is a valid, useful, proactive approach that everyone should consider using for lead generation. And I agree that in some situations it can work well, while in others, not so well.

Importantly, I agree that companies need to see cold calling as a marketing activity that is but one method of how to generate sales leads. And as such, they should evaluate each alternative on the following four dimensions:

1) time (how long it takes to get to the ultimate result – an new sale);
2) effort (how many people and organizational resources are required to drive the ultimate result);
3) money (how much total investment is required to drive the ultimate result);
and
4) results (how much return is, can, and will be generated by driving the ultimate result).

The only point that I respectfully disagree with you on is that “cold calling certainly yields faster results than other tactics”. To me, that can only be true if (a) cold calling is the fastest and most direct way to get to truly qualified sales leads or (b) your other lead generation techniques are either non-existent or highly unproductive.

To give some dimension to my point here (maybe in a bit over the top way), just think how few sales undertakers would drive if all they did to generate sales leads was cold call phone numbers from the telephone book looking for people in need of funeral services now or within the coming month.

It is because of this last point that I recommended people look to find what is for them the most productive, quickest, and lowest cost means of generating reasonably qualified sales leads that are primed and ready for sales processing. If cold calling comes out as the best alternative for achieving such then great, do it. But if advertising or building a store or focusing on getting referrals would be better, then do that instead.

What do you think of this approach?

Cheers,

Tony Johnston

The people who don’t do this on a regular basis – or theorize about why they don’t need to do this – are typically scared to death. I know…I know…there are exceptions (rare) but for the most part you sales people out there know I’m right.

Pick up the phone and reach out to someone you don’t know…you can build a successful business with that alone. Throw in some social media, maybe a search marketing campaign or two – mix in some networking functions…

You get the picture.

The point of my comment (and a post I made about a similar subject) is that analyzing whether the cold call is an effective tactic and should remain, can only be done effectively if it is compared to other alternatives.

While cold calling certainly yields faster results than other tactics it does so at a significant cost as well. When other forms of outreach are considered, such as social media and pull-based content approaches, cold calling loses a lot of advantage. These other approaches, while taking longer to equal the impact of cold calling – also last significantly longer. Cold calling has no leverage as it only works when you are working it.

My recommendation has always been cold calling can be necessary at times, but the aim of any organization that wants to sustain growth in the future should be to build marketing assets that make cold calling unnecessary.