Is The Cold Call Dead?

Is Cold Calling Still A Useful Sales Tool?

Cold calling, once a staple in the business world as a way of gaining new clients, has been the topic of many recent debates and discussions questioning its effectiveness in the new marketing climate. It's true, the business and marketing landscape of yesterday is not the same…but it's not dead either. Rather, business practices have undergone a sort of evolution in the presence of new technologies such as the internet, which then brought to light a new way of socializing—virtually.

When you consider that business development ultimately revolves around socializing on a broad scale (the same reason that more business deals are done in bars than board rooms), the importance of the way people socialize suddenly becomes much clearer. Where is this going? Well, if socializing is so important to the way a company operates, then when the way people socialize changes, the way companies do business must change too.

This brings me to my main point regarding the current status of the cold call. It's not dead, it just has evolved. Yes, there are some companies that still believe in the importance of the good ol' cold call. And it may work for them. But on the whole, companies are not picking up the phone and calling people at random. Instead, a new system has become prevalent. A system in which prospective clients can be researched at length, and rather than spending time calling 50 companies who may or may not even need a company's services, sales teams will spend their time researching 5 or 10 companies who have expressed needs that they can fulfill, and calling them with more confidence and awareness of how to make the sale.

Beyond just researching which companies will be open to their services, sales teams can also use online social networking tools to find connections between them and a company. For example, a financial company may know of a consumer product-based company who could use their services. Through online tools such as Facebook or LinkedIn, it would be very easy to see if a friend or a friend of a friend had any connection to this company, therefore making the introduction not so cold anymore.

In an instance such as the above example, the basic principles of "cold calling" were still in place. That company would still be calling another company in an unsolicited manner for the purpose of selling goods or services. However, due to the wealth of resources now available to the people using this technique, the salesperson who makes this call will have much more information, will not be using a long, general script, and might have even found a personal connection to use as a springboard for the conversation. So, is the cold call as in, have a list of 50 companies to call with the same sales pitch script and same lack of prior knowledge about the company you’re calling cold call, dead? Yes. But in the sense of calling companies who aren't expecting your call with a business proposition, this practice is still very much alive. It's an evolution. It's cold call 2.0.