Should you stop Cold Calling?

My answer is, Cold calling will or should never die; whether it is for B2B or B2C business and here are the proofs.

Proof 1:

You go to an industrial belt for a meeting, find some neighbour businesses. You would for sure try to speak to someone and get some entry there and make the most of your field visit OR you will leave that place empty handed thinking, you go back to office, you do some research about the new business, build some connection on social networking platforms, and wait for the opportunity to call the company person?

Proof 2:

you sent connection requests to people on social platforms, some have not accepted your connection yet, but you have their email and phone number from a database or a data source. Now, would you wait until the prospect accepts your connection request or responds to your email or would you pick up the phone and call him and introduce yourself and the product or service you offer?

Social networking platform and connection with prospects –

• Some people visit social platforms once in a while. To quote the statistics, Linkedin has a DailyActiveUser (DAU) base of 24% which means 74% of members visit the platform once a while.
• Some people accept your connection request and it is true that they may not even refer to your profile thoroughly before accepting the connection request, forget about the message you send to them via Linkedin. Then, how much do they know about you or your company offering before you make a call to them.

Point is, Cold calling is never a lost art. With Cold calling you make an announcement and an introduction about you and the company. Even though there are other approaches available for organisations in their lead generation strategy such as digital marketing, social media networking, and targeted emails, one must still pick up the phone and call their target customers directly as required. I believe, sometimes even the CEO of an organisation should make a cold call. It sounds uncanny, but true to the fact that this offers learning and insights on how their offering is received by the target audience, whether the sales pitch is working good in the market or not and so on. With this, I hope you continue your cold calling efforts.

Warm Calling?

Now, let me throw some light on Warm calling, which is gaining attention with the increased adoption of technology followed by social selling.

Warm calling is getting in touch with a prospect with whom you or your company already has a contact. Warm calling is the opposite of cold calling and it is generally more efficient and effective. Warm calling brings your relationship with the customer first followed by the business details.

Warm calling in a social selling context goes like this – you sent a connection request to a prospect on social media platform, the prospect accepted your request and became a connection. Now, you would try to be in their attention circle either by liking their posts or commenting on their posts that address a problem they are trying to solve and sharing a post on how your company already solved a similar problem and maybe a couple of posts and messages happened. Now, you take the initiative of seeking a meeting to discuss how your product or offering could help the prospect or their company achieve their goals.

Warm calling is also possible after a targeted email campaign by you with a trackable open rate which is a sign that they know your brand and how it can help them.

Another example – Your target customer attended an event or a conference which is either hosted or sponsored by your company and they have some information about your offering. Now, you can call up the target customer and seek a meeting to have discussion on identifying the fit between your offering and their requirement.

Summary –

With the increased knowledge and awareness of ways you can reach out to them, more and more customers, especially the B2B customers started to prefer a warm calling approach. Remember, this is not recommending you to stop cold calling but guiding you to take warm calling as the preferred approach whenever possible.

Happy Selling!