Cold Calling By LeadJenProspecting is Dead…?

Cold calling doesn’t work. It’s dead.

The folks at Hubspot proved it several times over with their barrage of articles and stats on the cold calling. 

This idea going around that cold calling is dead is great. I love seeing it… It always makes me think “good, I’ll go take your leads while you wait for them. Thank you very much!”. Especially, when our firm gets 75%+ of our appointments over the phone. Granted, we’re supposed to be the experts.  


I believe people think prospecting is dead for a few reasons (not an exhaustive list):

    1. Wasted time – 50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting [Source: The B2B Lead]. When we have no clear direction or process it’s easy to prospecting to become one big waste of time. Most folks that I talk to prefer to go with the spray and pray or shit from the hip philosophy that is full of random acts of selling and leads to…

 

    1. Little to no results – Again, no direction or process means no results. Let me guess, people aren’t responding to my emails, picking up the phone, or taking a meeting with you? I’m not surprised  when you send a generic email to 25 people, make 5 calls, and have a technical pitch.Do you know what it takes to get one meeting?

      Let’s walk through some of the numbers that we use…. It we make 100 dials, then we’re most likely going to talk to 5-15 people. This can vary depending on industry, company size, function, and lead list. Lead list quality being the biggest factor. From those 5-15 conversations we will probably get 1 meeting. Possibly 2-3 if our value prop is strong. At 15 dials an hour that’s 6-7 hours of dial time (reason to separate your setters from your closers. Holy shit… that’s a lot of time to get 1 damn meeting! You’re absolutely right.

      But if you sell a big ticket item and need to get to the decision maker then it’s worth it. For example, I get 1-3 inbound leads per day. This keeps me busy. However, 25% are garbage, 25% aren’t a good fit, 25% are barely a fit, and 25% turn into opps. This is great! However, it can be a huge time waster. The other day I set up an outbound campaign and after the first day identified an opportunity that’s 3x the size of the average inbound deal size. This is because I was able to target exactly who I wanted to talk to with exactly what I wanted to say.

 

  1. It’s uncomfortable – I think at heart a lot of us want it to be dead because that would make things a whole lot more comfortable for everyone. It’s a lot easier when prospects come to us right? This type of thinking can be harmful for two reasons. First, not all prospects that come to us are a good fit or are qualified, which leaves us wasting time on bad opps. Secondly, we start to become order takers and therefore replaceable. Neither are good.

Here at LeadJen, we pick up the $%#& phone because it works. Forrester tells us that the first viable vendor to reach a decision maker has a 74% chance to win the deal if they manage to set the buying vision. At a certain point in our business, relying on inbounds, referrals, and our networks no longer cuts it. We need to be proactive about our business development.

If our goal is to build a larger, more predictable pipeline in order achieve organic growth as an individual sales rep, team, and organization then we need to pick up the phone and carpe diem the shit out of prospecting.

I’ll stop talking now. Here a few of the results we’ve seen…


First Data Bank Case StudyNotice anything interesting about that list? It’s industry agnostic. Manufacturing, healthcare, IT services, tech, etc… Which leads me to believe that it can work for almost every industry. Not every business, but certainly some businesses within nearly every industry.

Below is a Client Value Study with our good friends at First Data Bank. It’s a clear picture of the scope of the program, conversion rates, and revenue.

Over the course of 3-4 years, we called through leads at 9,295 accounts, scheduled 1,185 meetings, converted 466 of those meetings into qualified opportunities, which lead to 218 won deals valued at $2.9m.

This is a great example of an outbound prospecting funnel that works because we had the essential elements in place for a successful engagement and allowed the program the necessary time to ramp up properly and achieve a positive ROI.

You’ll notice that the impact from an outbound prospecting program was not immediate. Due to the length of the natural sales cycle and ramp up time to find exactly what works (approx. 3-6 months) it took some time to see the value.

First Data Bank Sales Revenue

Given the right process and time, prospecting works and can help you achieve organic growth. Interested a larger, more predictable pipeline? Contact us to talk about outsourcing your lead generation efforts.