Cold Calling

There is a lot of talking and blogging going on about cold calling and whether it is a necessary or even desired part of the sales mix. I can’t resist putting in my two cents on this discussion.

I have recently seen a couple of studies and listened to some
presentations about the changes taking place in how sellers and buyers are
interacting that are worth considering as we leap into the fray. In general,
the trends discussed are reflected in the 2010 DemandGen
and Genius.com study titled “Inside the Mind of
the B2B Buyer.”One of their key findings was that more than 80% of B2B
customers/buyers said that on their transactions that they had initiated
contact with the seller. Only 10% said that they were contacted cold by the
seller.

Personally I’m not convinced that the 80%, is an accurate
reflection of the sales situation today. But that is really beside the point.
The key takeaway is that it is an indicator of how your customer’s perception
of the role of sellers has changed and how the actual role of sales is
continuing to evolve at a rapid pace. The Internet and social media have
irrevocably transformed how conversations with some significant fraction of
your prospects are initiated. And, even if you, as a seller, initiate contact
with a prospect, chances are high they are going to possess some level of
pre-education and pre-qualification on your product and service on that first
call (or they are going to acquire it by browsing your website while on the
phone with you.)

What does this mean for cold calling? In an ideal world, cold
calling wouldn’t be necessary. In our fantasy, marketing departments would
prove capable of generating well-targeted (or “sales worthy” to
borrow a term from my friend Nancy Nardin) in-bound sales leads in such
large quantities, week after week, month after month, that all available sales
time would be consumed with responsive follow-up. Wouldn’t it be great if the
world were handed to you on a silver platter like that?

Unfortunately, that dreamy ideal world doesn’t exist for most
companies. Using the figure from above as an example, even if you meet 80% of
your sales goal today from prospects that originated as sales worthy in-bound
sales leads, where will you find the remaining 20%? You will find them from
proactive prospecting (i.e., cold calling.)

If you’re in Sales your job boils down to this: doing the hard
work required to meet your goals. Whenever there is a gap between in your pipeline
between the number of qualified prospect your need to meet reliably meet your
goal and the number of qualified prospects in your pipeline generated from
in-bound sales lead conversions, and there will almost always be one, it has to
be filled in by prospect activity generated by you. This means fulfilling your
responsibility as a salesperson to do what you have to do in order to meet and
exceed your assigned goal. If this means spending a portion of every day
following a disciplined prospecting process (i.e., doing some research to pick
targets, making connections online, getting on the phone or going out and
making calls) then that is what has to be done.

In my first professional sales job out of college, in the
pre-Internet dark ages, I was selling big computers. Everyday involved getting
kicked out of the office at 8am and venturing out to make cold calls out in my
territory. I have to admit it didn’t come naturally to me. So I developed
another approach. I hit upon a system of hosting a seminar in our branch office
every Wednesday afternoon at 4pm during which I would demonstrate our system. I
used business directories to research names of potential prospects in my
territory and mailed out 10 postcards with a hand-written invitation every
Thursday. I’d follow up with everyone on the following Monday morning and again
on the morning of the seminar. Usually I’d end up with one or two attendees
each week. Within months I had a strong, constantly renewing pipeline and was
killing my numbers. After a couple years, I was getting two thirds of my
business from existing accounts and referrals. But every Thursday, I was still
sending out 10 postcards and every Wednesday I was playing host to new
prospects.

No matter how many leads you receive, cold calling, or proactive
prospecting, remains a necessity for most salespeople and most sales teams.
Clearly the amount of time a salesperson has to devote to cold calling could
shrink as increasing numbers of prospects pre-educate themselves online and
initiate connections with potential vendors. But the role sales prospecting
plays in building a strong pipeline of qualified prospects to ensure that you
make your numbers is will never go away completely.

Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

This is not a trick question.

Are you selling or is your customer buying? The answer is both.
There is both a sales cycle and buying cycle(s) occurring concurrently on every
deal. Understanding the balance between the two is essential for every seller.

Why is this important to you? Because the sole purpose of a
sales cycle is to support the buying cycle by helping the customer accomplish a
single task: making a fully informed decision to purchase the right product or
service for their needs. If you, as a seller can also, at the same time, enable
the customer to make that purchase decision in the shortest time possible then
you will have created value for the buyer, established credibility, built
trust, and put yourself at the head of the pack competing for their business.

The Balance of Power has Shifted

In the olden days, in the pre-Internet world, buyers of product,
your prospects, were completely dependent on sellers for information about the
products they wanted to buy. There were no websites to search and very few
reliable third-party sources of information about products that you could use
to guide your purchase decision. The result was a much more casually paced
buying cycle as the customer had few options to control the pace.

Then the Internet upended that whole cozy arrangement. Within a
matter of years the customer was no longer dependent on the seller for product
information. Brochures were replaced with websites that were usually full of
more information than even the salesperson knew. Online communities provided
users with a forum where they could voice their unvarnished opinions about
products and services to all who were interested. Buyers had access to a whole
spectrum of information that hadn’t existed before or that had been shielded
from them by the sellers. Suddenly, the buyer was in charge of his or her own
buying process.

Do Not Pass Go

There can be some debate about how many steps there are in a
customer’s buying cycle. Personally I believe that there are six steps in the
buying cycle. But no matter how many steps the prospect has to complete in
their buying cycle, one fact remains: a buyer won’t progress from the current
step in their buying cycle to next until their information requirements for the
current step are fully satisfied. This means that each step of a buying cycle
carries with it certain requirements for information that must be received by
the prospect before they will move forward to the next step.

Sellers Control the Pace of Deals

When sales cycles get stretched out salespeople always point
their fingers at the buyer. To them it is always the customer who’s the culprit
when the sales cycle stalls. In truth, the opposite is true. It is nearly
always the seller’s fault when the buyer stops making progress towards an
order. Why? Because the seller didn’t provide the prospect with the information
they needed to move on to the subsequent step in their buying process. If the
deal you are working on suddenly loses momentum, take a look in the mirror
before you begin pointing fingers at the customer. Then, you must quickly
determine what data the customer needs from you to satisfy their requirements
for the current step of their buying cycle and get back on track to an order.

We Are Not Alone

As a seller you must also understand that there is a good chance
that there will be more than one buying cycle occurring simultaneously. Your
prospect will have a separate buying process for every seller in a competitive
deal. This is extremely important for a seller to understand. If you can be
completely responsive to your prospect’s information requirements then you can
gain a competitive advantage over your competitors.

What the Successful Seller Does

The successful seller is the one that most closely aligns their
selling resources (i.e., their product knowledge and industry expertise) with
the buying needs (i.e., information requirements) of the customer to enable
them to make the optimum informed decision in the least time possible. This
means that you have to place your people with the deepest product knowledge and
industry expertise closest to the customer.

To help the prospect move through their buying cycle in the
shortest time you have to eliminate
the “get-backs”from your selling. Every
time a salesperson can’t answer a prospect’s question and says, “I’m sorry I’m
going to have to get back to you” he or she is slowing down the buying cycle.
Having the right salespeople on your team who can be completely responsive to
the prospect’s need for information and help them move through their buying
cycle in Zero-Time will definitely enable you to win more orders in less time.

The First Seller with the Answers Wins

A buying cycle is nothing more than a search for information in the form of answers to questions. How a seller conveys that information to the prospect will be the difference between getting an order and losing a customer.

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