Cold calling is hard. This is especially true for small businesses and small sales teams, but you can make it easier by using the right approach.Â
Ask any sales rep and there’s a good chance they’ll tell you it’s one of the hardest parts of their job. However, cold calling remains a key part of the sales process and it’s still a critical start to building and expanding the sales pipeline. The negative sentiments associated with cold calling are mirrored by prospects as well. Few things are more irritating than picking up a phone call only to have a total stranger on the other end of the line asking you to buy something.
It doesn’t help when sales methodologies are becoming increasingly complex, thanks to the tidal wave of mobility, in order to handle non-linear sales journeys; a journey that will inevitably come full circle and put you right back where you started. And what if you’re a small organization? An organization struggling to generate leads that convert into opportunities, all on a shoe-string budget and constrained human resources? All of this seems like a lose-lose scenario but what if cold calling wasn’t as bad as everyone perceives it to be? As a sales leader, establishing harmony between your sales strategy, your inside sales team (external, internal or a hybrid) and your unique spin on this selling dinosaur, lies in identifying what approach best fits your business.
Cold-calling requires a team of individuals that have a unique skill set: passionate, articulate, driven, and not-scared-to-pick-up-the-phone-and-dial! For large companies, it is typically integrated within the inside sales teams’ priorities: cold-calling to build individual pipelines. For small companies (like Mediafly), it’s a balancing act of a myriad of disparate tasks.
The ideal scenario is for a sales person to be handed an already vetted list of prospects that has been updated, cleaned up and contains contacts that have proactively expressed interest in your product. Unfortunately the ideal rarely happens. People are constantly shifting positions and companies, target sectors are always merging, expanding or consolidating and the prospecting process will always include catching someone off-guard leaving your sales rep striving to convert a prospect’s lack of awareness into immediate interest in your product. The sales team is responsible for all sorts of activities, such as leveraging mobile devices for increased productivity, and must keep their cold-calling regime as a core component to sustaining the type of activity necessary to bring in ongoing sales. Here are three ways to approach cold calling within a small organization that will get you closer to hot opportunities and closed deals:
1. Rely on Lead Gen from the Sales Team: One option is to require that your experienced sales team dedicate time to cold calling. Unfortunately, the activity of cold calling is time consuming. It is a task that can take up an inordinate amount of time, especially if you are selling a complicated product or service. Finding the right type of prospect, at the right level, in the right position, that is willing to take a meeting – it is a time intensive activity that can be difficult to integrate into an already full workflow.
2. Outsource the Lead Gen Function: There are many different organizations that offer a telesales lead gen service. The hardest part about outsourcing this function is finding the right partner. Again, if you have a complicated product, it can be very difficult to have the outsourced partner perfect the messaging necessary to schedule the right type of meeting with the right target contact. These providers typically provide services for companies that aren’t as complicated or that are more transactional in nature.
3. Build a Lead Gen Function Internally: The skills required for a successful lead gen function are really hard to come by, and the management of this function requires a lot of additional work. Most sales teams in small companies are already stretched thin, so adding the additional resources to provide necessary oversight can be daunting.
There are benefits and setbacks for each option. If the sales team is responsible for this task, you need to be confident in their ability to articulate the value of your product, but you will not have the activity level you are looking for. If you outsource the function you know your partner will be focused on activity related to lead generation, but it is often fairly expensive and it is hard to guarantee that the messaging is on target. Finally, if you build the lead gen function in-house you will have complete control of the team and will be able to direct activities as necessary, but it is very difficult to manage and can be extremely time consuming for an already stretched team.
It is an ongoing journey to identify which option is right and at what time. Also, this vital activity needs to evolve as quickly as your business does. What are some of the key findings from your journey with lead generation through cold-calling?
John Burns is the Director of Sales and Marketing at Mediafly, Inc.  His next post will be published sometime next month.  Please have a look at some of the products and solutions John has had a hand in selling: SalesKit and ProReview.
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