Cold Calling is a CEO agenda item. I have become convinced of this as I work with various companies in a broad variety of businesses. As leaders of our companies, if we don’t establish the culture of picking up the phone and calling people we don’t know, it just doesn’t happen.
And I’ve heard numerous excuses from the people tasked with this job… “Marketing needs to do a better job of generating leads”, “Our products need certain features/improvements/whiz bang functions and then we could make those calls”. I have also become convinced that this is rubbish. Sure, it will always be nice if those things happen, but it isn’t getting in the way of new business development… And it doesn’t replace picking up the phone and making calls.
Many salespeople really struggle with cold calling – and they often believe the task is beneath them. Many have had limited success, and they don’t know how to improve their success rate. They are stuck looking for that mythical perfect line, that hook that will validate them and launch the conversation. They have correlated past success with a good marketing campaign or a new product feature that has made their product suddenly compelling to prospects. While our need for validity is perfectly reasonable, delegating it to another department is not. This is a skill deficiency – not a marketing or product problem.
We began offering a crash course on cold calling / prospecting this year, and one thing that surprised me is how many CEOs showed up. They don’t intend to do the cold calling themselves, but across the board they need their company to do it – and they want to understand the task. They also want assurance that with a plan, and some fundamental training and support, a sales team should be able to generate new customers from a list of leads.
As business leaders, I am convinced that it is our responsibility to mandate “cold calling”, make sure people are held accountable for doing it, and then support the activity with training /coaching until this key competency is mastered. If we don’t drive this activity from the top, it doesn’t happen.
About the Author
