# Fanatical Prospecting — Chapter-03: To Cold Call or Not to Cold Call? - **Source**: /library/Fanatical Prospecting/source-file.pdf - **PDF pages**: 31–37 - **Pages without text**: none --- 3 To Cold Call or Not to Cold Call? To be, or not to be, that is the question. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet It seems these days that everywhere you look there is some so-called expert pontificating that cold calling is dead. This is usually an inbound marketing, Sales 2.0, social-selling-obsessed nitwit with an agenda and a vested interest in telling you that everything you thought you knew about sales prospecting is “old school”—except their narrow version of “new school.” By vested interest, I mean they’ve got something they want to sell you that promises to fill your pipe with no fuss, no muss, no rejection, and little effort. These folks pander to the sales masses’ desire to stop cold calling. You’ve seen the ads and headlines plastered everywhere: “Never cold call again!” Buy their system and you’ll be set free of the burden of reaching out and touching prospective customers. 13 With their top-secret system, you’ll happily and painlessly blog and post on social media sites, and prospects who are already 70 percent (or 57 percent or 68 percent or whatever the latest statistic is these days) through the sales process—all by themselves—will miraculously call you at exactly the right time. You’ll answer the phone or check your e-mail or social inbox and boom—closed deal. It’s easy, they’ll tell you. Why work hard when, with their little magic pill, you can just kick back, relax, and wait for the phone to ring. Welcome to Fantasy Island. Likewise, there are experts who bill themselves as cold-calling queens and kings. They preach loudly that cold calling is the real key to prospecting success and offer top-secret formulas they say will eliminate rejection, cause your targeted prospects to swoon when you call, and guarantee your success. It feels like the sales profession’s twisted version of a Shake- spearian play: to cold call or not to cold call. Give me a break! The Fine Art of Interrupting So the gurus and thought leaders rage on over whether to cold call or not to cold call. But their bluster is really just an inane argument focused on semantics of degrees—cold, warm, smoldering, hot, smoking hot—and mostly centered on how to avoid ever having to make an outbound call to a prospect again. This is why I’m going to let you in on the truth—the real truth that all of these so-called experts continue to ignore, and it has nothing to do with cold calling. Here’s the deal. If you want sustained success in your sales career, if you want to maximize your income, then you’ve got to interrupt prospects. You’ll have to pick up the phone, walk in the door, send an e-mail or text message, or ping a prospect on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, 14 Fanatical Prospecting or Facebook and interrupt someone who is not expecting you to contact them (i.e., you don’t have an appointment or they are not waiting for you to call or write) and with whom you are not currently engaged in a sales discussion. You can argue the degrees, warm, hot, cold, whatever. It could be a prospect that filled out one of your web forms or downloaded your latest white paper. Maybe they just connected with you online. It could be an old customer you are trying to reactivate, or a prospect in your defined database, or a new business that you’ve stopped by to qualify, or a prospect you met at a trade show. No matter the circumstance, the simple fact remains that you are interrupting their day to talk about something you want them to hear, do, or buy, and you do not have a scheduled appointment with them to have that conversation. This is what gets missed in all of the useless noise about how cold calling is dead. All of the talking heads who promise an easy way out if you’ll just join their little cult ignore the real reason that prospecting is so hard, no matter how you choose to do it. It has never been about degree of the call; it is has always been about the willingness on the part of the salesperson to interrupt. Which, by the way, is why most sales reps protest so loudly and will do anything to avoid making an outbound call. It is so much easier to speak to someone who is calling you. The problem is, most companies can’t create enough qualified inbound leads to keep the pipeline full. And, by the way, the reps that work for companies that do generate enough inbound leads to keep the phones ringing are making far less than sales pros who are reaching out and interrupting prospects to create opportunities. Case in point, I have one client that spends $1.2 million a month to generate leads for their inbound sales team. It is still not enough. Those reps are idle more than half of the time. The only way they can achieve their number is to make targeted outbound calls. Another client has a robust inbound-marketing and social- selling process that generates a consistent stream of leads. However, To Cold Call or Not to Cold Call? 15 the biggest and most lucrative prospects in their marketplace, the ones they need to sell to achieve their goals, rarely respond to inbound-marketing or social-selling efforts. They have no reason to engage this way. Their accounts are so lucrative, there’s always a long line of salespeople knocking on the door. The only way to start a sales conversation with these high-value prospects is to interrupt them. Stop Seeking the Easy Way Out and Start Interrupting and Engaging It is difficult and awkward to interrupt someone’s day. You can’t control their response. That unknown leaves us vulnerable and causes fear. Your prospect’s initial reaction to being interrupted—usually a brush-off or reflex response in a not-so-friendly tone of voice—feels like rejection. As a human it is natural to abhor rejection; we are social creatures at heart who desire to be accepted. These are the core reasons mediocre salespeople spend an inordinate amount of time finding excuses not to prospect rather than just doing it. This past year one of my clients wanted to set up an outbound prospecting team to call and reactivate dormant customers. They hired a few young, inexperienced reps to make the calls. While training them, I observed the reps obsess over the unknowns, the “what ifs” of the highly qualified “warm” calls. They wanted to be sure they had all of their ducks in a row before they ever picked up the phone. They hesitated and agonized. Planning to plan to plan to call. But these were not calls to strangers. We were calling people who had done business with the company in the past. There was history here. In fact, the calls were warm lay-ups. Yet, the two reps 16 Fanatical Prospecting demonstrated the exact same anxiety I’ve observed in reps who were calling complete strangers—in degrees, very cold prospects. So I demonstrated by grabbing the list, picking up the phone, and dialing numbers. The customers who answered the phone were receptive, and other than being initially irritated at being inter- rupted, took time to talk to me about their next buying window. Over the course of 25 dials, three of these former customers indicated that they were ready to buy again. Once the reps learned how to interrupt those inactive customers and initiate sales conversations, they became phenomenally success- ful, going on to produce, as a team, $100,000 each week in sales. This, by the way, became my client’s most successful new sales initiative of the year, and they have expanded the outbound team and are now attacking the entire database. I observe salespeople demonstrate this same behavior pattern with hot prospects (prospects that have been generated via inbound marketing efforts, referrals, or trade shows and are extremely receptive). I even see the pattern when current customers are being called for cross-sell opportunities. These salespeople agonize, pro- crastinate, and stare at the phone—afraid to pick it up. A few months back I was working with a group of insurance agents from one of the most well-known companies in the industry. They were tasked with calling a list of clients that were already doing business with their agency. The objective was simple: Set an appoint- ment with the client to review their coverages and ensure there were no gaps. The goal of the appointment was to find opportunities to cross-sell additional financial products where it made sense. This was a low-impact call to a current client. The approach was simple: “Hi, Roger, this is Jeb from XYZ agency. The reason I’m calling is, in reviewing your current coverages, I noticed that you have your cars and home insured with us, but we don’t have an umbrella liability policy set up for you. I want to schedule a short To Cold Call or Not to Cold Call? 17 meeting with you to review your current situation and identify any coverage gaps that could create a risk for you and your family. How about Thursday morning at 11 AM?” Yet the agents had come up with every excuse in the book for not making the calls. One even complained to me that “he didn’t ‘sign up’ for cold calling.” I politely explained that calling a current client—someone who is already doing business with you, familiar with you, and most likely to take your call—was about as far from cold calling as Perth, Australia, is from New York City. Just Afraid to Make the Call—Not Cold Call Today most people, including the experts and the insurance agent I mentioned above, have no idea what a cold call really is. They think that any outbound call or visit is a cold call. They’ve turned the fear and anxiety they feel about inter- rupting prospects into a hobgoblin and relabeled it “cold calling.” This has provided the perfect excuse to sit and wait for prospects to interrupt them instead—and, of course, complain about not hav- ing enough leads. It is not the “cold” call that is hard; it is the interrupting. Reps are just afraid to make the call, not the cold call. Now, for sure, some prospects will be more receptive than others. A prospect who fills out your web form will be easier to speak to than a prospect you are contacting with no pretense. A prospect who is familiar with your name from social media may be more engaged than a prospect you found via a Google alert and contacted through their switch board. A prospect who has a contract expiring with your competitor will be more likely to engage in a conversation than a prospect who just signed a new contract. If you are calling a former customer, you’ll likely receive a better reception than from a prospect who has never purchased from you or your company. 18 Fanatical Prospecting Interrupting your prospect’s day is a fundamental building block of robust sales pipelines. No matter your prospecting approach, if you don’t interrupt relentlessly, your pipeline will be anemic. So the question is not, to cold call or not to cold call. Instead, the question is how to strategically balance prospecting across the various prospecting channels to give you a competitive advantage when interrupting prospects in the crowded, competitive marketplace. To Cold Call or Not to Cold Call? 19