To understand cold calling you have to understand the very concept of prospecting. As everyone knows the general goal of prospecting is all about finding those prospects to uncover if or when they will be ready for conversion, or at what stage in the sales cycle or are they ready to make a decision. Knowing how to get these answers could be a tricky maneuver but it is something that can be accomplished.

In order to explore the why let me put some disclaimers here:

• If a sales person is just sitting around for a lead to come in and not actively looking for one they need to simply look for another job. It means they’re not hungry enough and do not value a good lead.
  
• Cold calling has to be done by the right people. Just like some people who can’t be doctors, or lawyers, engineers and sales people – the same can be said that not everyone can be good at cold calling. So they will not find any viable results if they are not ready for the task at hand or properly trained.
  
• Cold calling has evolved but it is not dead. It can be used in a push sales model when this model is needed for a certain opportunity to be won in this fashion. Also, cold calling can work in a pull model, in a consultative role and works in a simple lead nurture / follow up manner.

Now, let’s talk about the why is it effective and benefits of what makes cold calling, having a targeted approach so crucial for sales and overall business growth.

1. Prospecting through cold calling opens doors to opportunities which provide utmost real time data on a prospect.
2. A great data mining tool that has the ability of giving you more data than you asked for.
3. It creates a sense of urgency in the mind of the prospect which gives you the interaction you need.
4. Enables a sales conversation with the prospect instead of them sitting at the other end of a marketing message and no opportunity for engagement.
5. Let’s prospects know that they are being approached by the most valuable means of a marketing channel - the human to human connection.
6. Sales elites know deep down that at some point in the buying process within the sales cycle, the prospect does come to an emotional stage where they have to be engaged and the quickest way to do that is to be consultative in your approach, pick up the phone and press send.
7. Best way to stay informed of the prospect behavior. This will enable you to execute your sales action plan in a precise way even if the next engagement is an email rather than a call.
8. If done the right way, cold calling is one of the best, if the not the best, sales enablement tool that can deliver the ultimate sale or get you very close to a people connection through a face to face meeting which has the potential of leading to a closed sale. If this occurs, the only question will remain is if you can close or not.
   

Some have failed to understand that cold calling is always been a powerful resource to use. That it has brought valuable amounts of data to any campaign that helps generate revenue streams for the short and long term. Gartner estimated back in 2013 that a people connection was crucial in a B2B sales role which cold calling is able to accomplish. Throughout various industries, cold calling or a call approach does take away confusion in a complex sales cycle and for others it creates a real people connection.

Ultimately, the way I look at it is that the golden rule of measuring the real effectiveness of any resource or a tool is what kind of results, if any, are being generated from it. Ask any serious business manager and they will tell you that ultimately bottom line results really matter in the end. Because in the business of sales as long as you have your ethics in check, it doesn’t matter how you get more business, it matters how much business you bring in.

Jameel Saqib
Co-Founder, McCord Solutions - December 28, 2015