It’s become trendy to say that cold calling is dead. Maybe it’s a way that some salespeople like to show they’ve “evolved” beyond more supposedly archaic sales practices. But that’s actually far from the truth. The most advanced B2B go-to-market teams consistently rely on cold calling as an integral part of their motion. That’s because nothing can substitute it.
B2B Cold Calling Culture
It’s important to note that while cold calling is alive and well in B2B sales, it’s a different story in B2C sales. Few consumers are making buying decisions on the phone, and the proliferation of scams and spam calls makes them suspicious even of legitimate businesses selling over the phone.
Many people come to B2B sales with a similar mindset. They don’t understand the mindset of executives that are used to getting cold calls from business leaders as a normal way of doing business.
Those executives know to expect cold calls because they know their teams are cold calling as a part of their sales motions as well. Generally speaking, it’s a reciprocal relationship: there’s an agreed-upon way of doing business, and both the prospect and the seller understand what to expect from each other.
B2B cold calls are also more targeted than the cold calls that consumers get. Best practices involve sellers researching the prospect before dialing their number, meaning that they should know they’re pitching something relevant to their audience.
Why Cold Calling Won’t Die
The most important reason why cold calling won’t die is that it works. Salespeople everywhere book meetings from cold calls daily. While naysayers cite statistics like “cold calling doesn’t work 90.9% of the time,” that’s actually a very optimistic view. If BDRs are booking a meeting with one in every ten cold calls, they’re hitting their monthly quotas quickly.
Even cold calls that don’t end in meetings have value. You can spread brand awareness with a positive conversation, and even voicemails are a great way to do personalized, outbound marketing.
Text messages are popular among organizations from businesses to political campaigns for the same reason: people pay attention to them, and even the awareness they spread is valuable.
Cold calling also works in more extended, complicated prospecting strategies. Some organizations have confusing ways of titling their employees, so it might be hard to find the right prospects just from the research you do online.
Instead, you need to get your hands dirty and start asking questions to the people that know the answers, the ones already working at the business you’re trying to sell to.
If businesses could replace cold calling with something else, they would. It takes serious amounts of time and money, and it’s not able to be automated the way scaleable email sequences are.
They haven’t replaced it because they know it’s the best option available. Cold calling has unique benefits that you can’t substitute with any other medium of communicating with customers. But cold calling is best done by experts. That’s why businesses everywhere outsource their B2B cold calling to experienced teams like Salaria’s cold calling professionals. If you’d like to speak about how cold calling could accelerate your business’s growth, feel free to book a meeting with us today.
