Business development cold calling works. We love to do what our clients hate doing and do it better than they ever imagined possible. We sometimes need to remind ourselves of how important what we do for our clients (cold calling) is to them.
Many people don’t like what we do and many others, whilst liking the outcome, think the mechanics involved are simply outdated.
To these people, we say “pah!”.
We LOVE Cold Calling!
There. I said it. Did it send a shiver through your spine?
We LOVE the thrill of the chase, the adrenaline rush we get when we hear that bite; that “Oh really? Tell me more …”. Closing to get a date in the diary of the CMO in charge of a budget of £10m or more a year for one of our clients is what we get out of bed in the morning for.
Picking up a lump of plastic (OK they’re a little bit more sophisticated than that but please allow me some artistic license!) and dialling a phone number and actually, physically, SPEAKING TO A HUMAN is so much more rewarding then tweeting them or exchanging emails. And much more effective too if you know how to do it properly, which is why so many people think it no longer works.
Social Has Its Place of Course
Over the last ten years or so one of the greatest skills known to business has been slowly being eroded through the advent of new technology. The ability to sell via voice-to-voice communication (also known as ‘talking to people’).
Don’t get me wrong, email, twitter, blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn et al are vitally important to the B2B marketing mix (you’re reading this which kind of proves the point that we take these tools very seriously) but they shouldn’t REPLACE cold calling and neither should cold calling replace them. And neither, to be 100% clear on this, should they only be used in parallel to each other.
In some situations email and inbound marketing is far more effective; typically when you are selling a lower price ticket service that can be bought by hundreds of thousands of businesses all for the same or similar price. But when you are selling a six figure and above priced service and you have a market of maybe less than 1,000 or so businesses (for many of our clients this number can be just in the dozens) then cold calling is the most effective way to initiate a conversation.
Some people though, just don’t get it. And that’s fine. In much the same way as listening to music through earphones via Spotify is absolutely fine.
But I prefer my 180g lumps of vinyl spinning round my Pro-Ject turntable blasting out music the old fashioned way through my Mission LX2 speakers.
And we LOVE cold calling because business development cold calling works
