In today’s world of marketing, social media, email, search (paid and natural), and lead generation of all types, many want to believe that Cold Calling is DEAD.  Cold Calling is NOT Dead.

There are many tools and resources for Passive Lead Generation:

• Trade Shows
• eMail blasts
• Buyers Guides
• Search (paid and natural)

Then there are tools such as Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, and many more that claim that they can drives leads to you…qualified leads. They even sell you on the notion that the lists that they build will get you closer to a qualified lead. Mix that with niche messaging and search, and you should get some awesome sales opportunities.

So…do a test. Go to Google and type in “Does Hubspot work?” See what comes up. Pages and pages of the drawbacks to the Hubspot-like solutions.

Passive Lead Generation refers to waiting for the buyer to take some action on their own.

Active Lead Generation refers to making intentional, outbound phone calls, by a human, by a professional sales person, by someone that knows the talking points of the topic, and can carry on a peer-to-peer discussion with the prospect.

This peer-to-peer discussion results in proper canvassing of an industry space to find out if a company is, or is not, a prospect. More importantly, outbound calling and prospecting, if done correctly, is focused on Identifying the Buyer(s).

Once the buyer(s) is identified, a professional can assess whether someone is truly qualified based on actual pain points, how long a current solution has been in place, and future potential need of a new offering.

Passive lead generation is hard to measure, takes a lot of time, and in most cases, does not have the sales team’s input. Outbound calling should be performed by true salespeople. Outbound prospecting, when your offering is over $50K, is really a sales function.

Cold Calling is NOT DEAD. People just do not have the desire anymore. They have been “sold” on the fact that passive marketing works and has a wider reach. While passive marketing may have a broader reach, few with high value solutions can comfortably state that it works better than using real people to connect with real people. Again this is referring to those that have a $50K solution and up.  The conversion rate of passive marketing activity with high value solutions is very low.

Cold Calling may seem to be dead because most sales prospecting efforts are run and managed by marketing not by sales.  Most use junior people to make calls for their $250K offering and have to rely on scripts. Cold Calling is NOT Dead if done by sales professionals that are not scripted that know the talking points, that know how to navigate a sales call.

Lead Generation and Sales Prospecting for high value solutions such as Supply Chain, Retail, Healthcare, Robotics and Automation is NOT dead if performed by sales professionals.

To learn more about how to have engage in a successful outbound sales prospecting campaign contact us.