I've been in sales all my career, dabbling in some pretty 'interesting' sales jobs at the start; selling cars, gym memberships and then houses before moving into B2B sales in the software industry. The one thing that was consistent in all of them was cold calling, every day.
Back then we didn't have social media, in fact we barely had technology. The gym membership sales role involved the Thomson Blue Pages and a bunch of pages ripped out for each rep. Proper old school selling, lots of choice language thrown at us, lots of phones slammed down on us (back then we all still relied on actual phones, not everyone had a mobile!).
Outreach as a function of sales has changed and morphed since then, LinkedIn and email automation play a big part, as does AI now (rightly or wrongly), but arguably it has just enabled salespeople and entire sales teams to hide away from having actual conversations with people.
I'll put my entire career on the line to say that there is no better way of building a (sales) relationship with a stranger than an actual conversation over the phone.
In fact, I'd argue it is more effective than face to face. On the phone you can 'act as-if' (for this and many other great quotes see the brilliant version of the Wolf of Wall Street called Boiler Room), it is far easier to add value to a senior decision maker when they haven't already been able to judge you based on your looks, age or experience.
It is for this reason that LinkedIn is such a double-edged sword. Unless you have absolutely nailed your profile and it is utterly aligned, authentically with what you're selling, you've failed before you've begun.
Cold calling is a core part of the reason why I've sold £250m+ of software and services in the last 20 years, it is why I could build and aggressively scale a software reseller in a crowded market, it is why the companies we work with across the world now are growing.
This brings me to the problem that has been bugging me for years, how to bring this back and make it work. Really work. Transforming businesses from the ground up to be inherently more sales-led. Matt and I have been musing on this for months. It is how we came together with James and Khristine to build something unique that genuinely delivers returns for businesses.
The problem is that cold outreach is difficult to do. We find most salespeople sadly don't have the tenacity and discipline to do this effectively or consistently. Further, most don't understand the science that underpins this, let alone master the art of being great at doing it.
Then you play the cost lottery - with reps costing £4-6k per month (plus commissions, plus all the tax trimmings), add to that sales cycles growing - how long do you know until they're truly effective - 6 months, 12 months? What'll that cost you if it fails? Matt has some great, if pretty terrifying stats on this - let me know if you'd like us to share them with you.
So, what do you do? There's lots of 'lead-gen' solutions out there to help with this, but they rarely work; their focus is on booking meetings - and thus validating their existence, so their activities are coin-operated, a transaction not a transformational partnership.
It is for these reasons that we launched our SDR-as-a-Service function. In partnering with Matt and James, we've combined over 100 years of expertise, over £500m in sales and over 250 personally coached/mentored.
Businesses deserve better; they deserve quicker time to value, hungrier, more dedicated people working hard to drive their growth, better support around this from true masters of the craft.
You might be thinking do we still do our own cold calling today? Yes we do (and we all still love it!). If you want to see how good we are at it, drop us a line.
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