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September 21, 2010 at 08:00 PM
Business-to-business sales coach, teacher and blogger Anthony Iannarino is possibly one of few out there advocating for cold calling.
He says, “There is a never-ending supply of charlatans that insist that cold calling is dead.”
As cold calling becomes outmoded, Iannarino stands by his assertion that it’s not dead; cold-calling is still required and is effective if you can create value and prove you are worth the time. Here is some advice from one of his latest blogs “Who are you warming it up for, really?”
Sales 1.0 still trumps Sales 2.0
Some say you should learn all the new technologies to generate interest and create value without ever asking for a commitment. You are told not to sound like a salesperson, let your marketing do the selling for you, and when your dream client is ready, he or she will come to you.
Iannarino says, “I am still anxiously awaiting some sales manager to show me the metric DWFCTCTU, or ‘days waiting for client to come to us.’”
Referrals
Iannarino says instead of calling prospects, now you are told to do a good enough job for your existing clients that you can ask them for referrals. But there are two problems with this strategy, he notes.
First, he says, “The same salespeople who don’t like cold calling are not typically any more comfortable asking their clients for referrals. They are even less comfortable asking their client to make the introduction calls for them.”
And second, “by making the referral, they are hoping that somebody validating their work means that they won’t have to differentiate themselves and create value on their own. This is no different than trying to warm up the call in any of the other methods I have written about; you are really warming it up for you.”
The myth of mutual exclusivity
“The truth is that prospecting methods are not, never were, and never will be mutually exclusive,” Iannarino says.
