Cold Calling Was Never “Alive!”

For years, the fashion has been to declare, “Cold calling is dead!” It always comes from people with a specific agenda. Those who believe inbound is the only thing that works. Or a newer fashion, espousing inbound generated outbound. Others promoting social engagement. Or any other engagement approach where “cold calling,” is the obvious foil.

It seems to strengthen whatever position they want to take, and some are valid, the primary argument is to declare “Cold Calling Is Dead.”

They go on to explain “cold calling.” Universality, cold calling is defined as untargeted, unfocused, massive outreach. The wider the reach, the better. According to them, it’s all about random outreach and random calls. It’s focuses on exploiting any list we get, including “Dear occupant or current resident….” And the act of cold calling is all about pitching a product, not understanding a customer. This outreach strategy has existed at least as long as I’ve been able to answer a phone or go out to the mailbox to empty the junk mail.

If this is the definition of “cold calling,” cold calling was never alive. While too many leverage this technique, it has never been a massive success. Just the fact that we’ve always called in junk mail and the phone companies invented call blocking years ago, is testament to the fact that “cold calling” as an engagement technique has never been anything but an annoyance.

But it’s a useful argument, if you want to sell something.

But I was taught about cold calling in my very first sales role. It’s been a cornerstone of my engagement strategies, both personally and in the organizations I’ve led.

Cold calling is reaching out and engaging someone you have never met. They may be a in a company you have never talked to. They may be working at a current customer, but a part of the organization you have never explored.

But the only people we target are people in the dead center of our ICP. It’s the people that are likely to have the problem we are the best in the world at solving.

Even with this sharp narrowing of the potential targets, cold calling involves much more. It involves research about their organizations and them to understand: How likely is it they have those problems now? How likely is the problem to be an issue for them? What do we need to know about the organizations they work for, their markets, and the potential impact of the issue on the individual and the organization they work for? What do we need to know about the individual and their company to engage them effectively?

And then, effective cold calling goes much further. Cold calling, as I was trained to execute, is all about the customer and their company. It seeks to understand if they are thinking about the issues that provoked us to target them. It seeks to understand how well they understand those issues. It seeks to explore how the issue is impacting them and whether it might be important for them to do something about it. It seeks to understand what these things mean to them, not just their companies. Finally, it’s goal is to see if they want to learn more and discuss why and how they might address these issues.

The cold call, as I was taught, never had anything to do with what I sold. Rather it was all about the customer. But because we are so focused on who we called and why we were calling, we knew we would find a high number of prospects that would be interested in talking about changing.

Cold calling, at least as I learned about cold calling, will always be a cornerstone of high impact customer engagement. It is alive and thriving.