Cold Calling - really?

Cold calling is a topic of great emotion. From the industrial age and the influence of the Quality movement, everything is described, managed, and reported as a process – a repeatable method, guided by measurements, managed to eliminate defects, until perfection is achieved. Why then wouldn’t a sales environment not be guided by the same influence.

We examine our sales pipeline evaluating it against the standard “bell curve”. We have historical experience of pipeline yields, productivity, and enough volume to be convincing. So, if you have a 5 step sales process, the distribution of opportunities should resemble 8.3% - 16.7% - 50% - 16.7% - 8.3% by step. Of course those numbers are yielded (factored) by the close probability of the step: 10% - 25% - 50% - 75% - 90%.

So this leads us to ask“Cold Calling, why do we do it?"

Applying the disciplines and math above, we have deduced that an effort must be joined to fill the early stage of the pipeline with the quantity of opportunities (potential deals) necessary to properly feed the process and achieved the desired objective. Oh, and that desired objective for a sales rep is their sales target or quota.

So, off we go implementing the traditional and understood tasks of identifying new opportunities. We haven’t escaped the influence of the Quality movement though. We constantly measure those tasks and the results, discovering a tremendous opportunity for improvement. We consider finer segmentation, better constructed calling lists, better trained people, alternative media, and other sorts of efforts. And by golly, those efforts produce improvement, more dramatically in certain unique environments.

As time advances technology gives us new alternatives to consider. We now are in the midst of the growing impact of Social Media and its impact on commerce. There are many cases where this new approach dramatically improves efforts to fill the sales pipeline. There remain skeptics as one expects. Just as we have seen over time, new techniques, segmentations, and alternatives certainly advance the science/art of “prospecting” and we should be conditioned to expect results to be more dramatic in certain unique environments.

With that background, we do find most organizations applying measurements normally found in process management efforts. They do afford some predictability and identify specific areas for improvement. Document and understand your process, measure everything possible, and apply the disciplines taught us by the Quality movement.