So I feel like there’s been a lot of blogs lately stating that cold calling is or is not dead, and today I read another one.  Matt Gethins, from B2B telemarketing firm Professional Prospecting Systems, wrote an article yesterday entitled Cold Calling Dead?  Not For B2B Appointment Setting.  Matt makes the common observation that all that is heard today is that all a company needs to do is focus on their inbound marketing and social media efforts, and they’ll be all set in regards to lead generation.  Matt’s response, “This is, in many cases, ridiculously bad advice and completely untrue.”  I totally agree with him.

Matt goes on to share seven reasons why cold calling is not dead, and I certainly think that you should read them.  Of particular interest to me, though, was number six on his list:

“6.  Outbound accelerates Inbound – That’s right, if you have your act together with outbound (cold calling, getting on the phone) you will make more money from your Inbound marketing. I’ve sold inbound lead generation products, the clients that had good outbound always made more money than those that did not, there was no variation in this. As we say in the South, Inbound Marketing is not going to cause the fried chicken to fly into your mouth, you have to get on the phone.”

I’m not from the South, so I really can’t speak to the fried chicken analogy, but I think he’s spot on in adding this point to his list.  I’m a big believer in Inbound Marketing – I love what folks like David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah and their whole HubSpot crew have done for Marketing as a whole.  In particular, Scott and his whole New Rules are all about bringing prospects TO you.  Halligan and Shah have founded a company whose entire mission is to offer software that helps other companies get found.  I still believe that at the end of the day, you still need to utilize teleprospecting to further qualify the folks that find you.  On top of that, I also believe that no matter how great the content is that you create, there are going to be some folks in your target market who you want as a client but must reach out to them through the phone to initiate a dialogue.

I like the phrase that Mike Damphousse has come up with for amalgamating your inbound and outbound efforts – “unified marketing.”  I think cold calling has its place in a unified marketing environment, right alongside blogging, viral videos, and eBooks.

What do you think?

*Photo credit: Liyin the Designer-in-Pajamas via Flickr

So as I was perusing my TweetDeck the other day, I saw that my buddy, appointment setting guru Mike Damphousse wrote a blog entry last week that I missed (sorry about that pal!)  However, I did want to use this opportunity to spring board into another Point – Counterpoint on The CRAP Report.  Mike’s article, entitled Appointment Setting: Was I Duped? really struck a chord with me.  Mike shared with readers that he “fell victim” to an appointment setting technique, and one that had his own organization, Green Leads, used, would give them a tainted reputation.  He had me hooked right away.  I wanted to know what happened to him that made him feel like someone pulled the wool over his eyes.  I was surprised to read what happened.

Mike went on to share what the dupe was: 

I got an unsolicited calendar invite in my inbox with a bridge number, date and time.

Mike had received a calendar invite from someone selling (completely unbeknownst to him prior to the call) a “SaaS telecom/VOIP solution” without really knowing who was inviting him to the call.  Mike had taken the call because he figured that he must’ve spoken with the guy, because who else would send him an invite like that?  Mike ends his post with, “How low can you go?  If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”  If I understand and read Mike correctly, he’s not too happy with this teleprospecting technique, using calendar invites to get on people’s schedules.  I can see where he’s coming from, however, I think it’s a great tactic.

I get Mike’s point – who the heck is this guy, who doesn’t know me from a whole in the wall, getting time on my calendar to talk to me about his product!?  This rep is being über forward and has really pushed the envelope here.  I get all of that…and I love it.  I love it because I’ve seen it work for my clients.  I’ve seen plenty of BDR’s send Outlook invites to their prospects prefaced with things like, “I hope you don’t mind me taking this initiative…,” or, “I know this may be a bit forward but…” and fully qualify those individuals because they wouldn’t have picked up their phone otherwise but for something that was on their calendar.  I don’t think it’s a sleaze ball strategy at all, because the person receiving the invite can always decline.

If you’ve got a teleprospecting team, or maybe you’ve partnered with one to supply with you sales qualified leads, you know that finding those sales ready opportunities is not easy.  Teleprospectors use everything at their disposal to uncover leads, and utilizing calendar invites is just one of those tools.  It’s a battle out there, it really is.  Sure, the economy is turning around (slowly), but that doesn’t mean it makes teleprospecting any easier.  BDR’s need to take every advantage they can to ensure that their reps are the first ones in the door, and sometimes those methods make people uneasy; those methods, however, are no less effective (especially if they work).  Prospects are harder and harder to get in touch with these days; people do not pick up their phones half as much as they did 10 years ago, and they didn’t do that much then either!

To me, using calendar invites for prospecting’s sake is akin to Jim Malone’s strategy to helping Eliot Ness capture Al Capone from The Untouchables.  Malone says to Ness, “You wanna know how to get Capone?  They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.”  It might not be pretty, but it works.

What do you think about using calendar invites for B2B lead generation purposes?

Did you ever have a Magic 8-Ball?  You remember that, right?  You ask it questions, shake it up, and then look at the bottom of the ball to see which side of the twenty-sided die inside floated to the top.  There were answers like, “It is certain,” “Ask again later,” and “Very doubtful.”  I had one as a kid and always thought they were pretty cool.  If the Magic 8Ball said that I was going to win a basketball game, then of course it was going to happen, right?  If only predicting the future was as easy as shaking one of those things.  Of course, with some of the answers you’d receive, I’m not so sure I want to leave the future up to fate.  So what does this all have to do with teleprospecting?  Well, it got me thinking about self-fulfilling prophecies and a conversation I had today. 

I had lunch with a friend of mine who’s a sales rep, and we were talking on the way back about the teleprospectors that provide him with sales qualified leads.  He said that his territory had recently changed, and that he was really excited to be working one-on-one with his BDR.  I asked him what was one of the more challenging aspects of working with BDR’s in general, and for him, he said that it’s helping BDR’s out of a rut.  He said that when they have a string of dry days (no leads), it’s really tough to help them stay positive.  That got me thinking about the whole self-fulfilling prophecy thing I mentioned above.  I remember being on the phones and trying to find sales ready opportunities, and if I had a run of a few bad days, it was hard to not think that I couldn’t get over it.  I kept expecting prospects to say, “not interested,” to me, and I was expecting them to hang up on me or never get back to me.  And what do you think happened?  They said “no” and hung up on me more often.  But was it because I was expecting them to?  I think so.  

You can’t think like that in sales, let alone teleprospecting.  The job requires momentum and you’ve got to keep it as positive as possible.  Here’s three ways I see that we can help teleprospectors to stay positive: 

1.  Remind them of the number of prospects they have to call:  If your teleprospectors have a large number of contacts that they can try to qualify, remind them that a “no” is just like dirt on their shoulder.  They need to dust it off like Jay-Z and move on to the next name.  There is no time to waste on people who aren’t interested. 

2.  Remind them to focus on their successes:  Here’s an easy way to keep things positive for your BDR’s.  You wouldn’t have kept them around if they weren’t successful in the past (gosh, I HOPE you wouldn’t), so go back to those past wins with them.  By helping your teleprospectors to revisit leads that they’ve passed before, you’re going to remind them that they can do the job, and have done it well in the past. 

3.  Remind them that every day brings a clean slate:  There is nothing as refreshing as that thought.  No matter how bad yesterday was, tomorrow is brand new.  Tomorrow we can make more calls, talk with more prospects, qualify more of them in OR out of our sales process, and close more business.  Focusing on what has already happened does no good. 

What about you?  What do you do to help your team out of a rut, or to keep them from falling into negativity?

*Photo Credit: misplaced in the city on Flickr

As I perused my TweetDeck this morning, I noticed Garth Moulton’s (the world’s biggest rolodex Jigsaw’s VP of Community and co-founder) blog entry from yesterday, “Cold Calling is not even on the Endangered List.”  Great blog entry where Garth concludes with the following:

“So the truly efficient organization (I’m talking B2B here) has to have at least a couple people (researching first!) braving the last matrix of hell known as cold calling to start the conversation that will eventually lead to a deal.”

I liked the article a lot, and loved the comments from Sales 2.0 big dog Nigel Edelshain, inside sales expert Trish Bertuzzi, and cold calling authority Steve Richard.  Do yourself a favor and go check it out.

What really got me though, was Garth’s use of a movie clip to illustrate his point.  He used a clip of Will Smith from The Pursuit of Happiness, but it wasn’t that clip that really spoke to me.  After watching Will Smith’s clip, YouTube shows a bunch of other “related” clips to watch.  I see one from the movie Boiler Room (an all time favorite of mine).  I watch it, and there’s something that Ben Affleck, who’s playing the sales trainer in the movie, says to his new recruits that just really moved me.  To set the scene, he’s mad because none of the rookies are passing enough leads.  They’re being blown off their calls with rebuttal after rebuttal, rejection after rejection.  He closes with this:

“A sale is made on every call you make.  Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you on a reason he can’t.  Either way, a sale is made.  The only question is who’s going to close, you or him?”

As cheesy as some may make this movie out to be, that line is true.  And as it relates to teleprospecting, we either sell a prospect a time to speak with a product specialist or they sell us on a reason they’re not interested.  Either way, someone’s closing, and it’s up to teleprospecting management to do all they can to give their reps the advantage. 

I don’t know, what do you think?  This line has been in my head all day long, and I’m wondering what other people think about it.

Okay, before you read ANY further, I’m going to spoil this season of LOST for you if you read the following paragraph.  I just want to make sure you understand that.  Skip the next paragraph and move on to the next one if you don’t want this season to be spoiled.

Great, now that that is out of the way, let’s say that you’re stuck on an island, and there is only one other person on that island with you.  And let’s say that the only way you can get off of that island and go home is that you have to kill the other person on the island, only, YOU can’t actually kill them.  You’d have to get pretty creative, right?  Such is the ageless Man in Black from LOST.  He’s been stuck on that island for God knows how long, but the only way off of the island is if he kills Jacob, the other ageless man and seemingly more authoritative man on the island, only, he can’t kill Jacob.  So what does the Man in Black do?  He takes the form of John Locke and convinces Ben Linus that he needs to kill Jacob.  THAT’S creative thinking.  You know what?  You need your teleprospecting reps to be creative, too.

You may not think that creativity is really needed to be a teleprospector, in fact, I think most folks think that the job is pretty mindless.  Don’t believe me?  Try telling someone that’s what you do when they ask, “so, what do you do for work?”  The look on their face when you say you’re in lead generation or teleprospecting is all you need to see to know that they think all you do is smile and dial.  I’m here to tell you differently, though.  If you’ve partnered with an organization to provide you with qualified B2B sales opportunities, or maybe you run one inside of your company, you want your BDR’s to be creative.  I see three reasons why they need to be: 

1. Your BDR’s need to be creative because they ARE making, for the majority of their day, phone calls.
2. Your BDR’s need to be creative because they are going to need to know how to handle problems that come up spontaneously, and
3. Your BDR’s need to be creative because sometimes the gatekeeper just won’t let you through.

Your BDR’s need to be creative because they ARE making, for the majority of their day, phone calls.  Let’s be honest with each other here, although their jobs are very important, qualifying sales opportunities for your sales team, their job is not glamorous.  Your teleprospectors need to be creative because they need to be able what can be non-flashy job and make it interesting.  If they don’t, or if they can’t, they’re going to burn out quickly.  They do need some help from their managers on this one, because it should be up to them to make their reps feel important and/or understand the significance of what they do, but for the most part, if you’re going to be a great BDR, you should be a creative thinker.  It doesn’t have to be anything monumental, but a BDR should be imaginative to keep themselves from burning out. When I was making calls, another BDR and I had a bet, every day, as to who would end up with more dials by 5:30pm.  The winner got to tack the prize (just a dollar bill) to their cube.  Yeah, it was only a buck, but to me, it was what that dollar represented – that I had won for that day.  It was just something extra to keep me involved.

Your BDR’s need to be creative because they are going to need to know how to handle problems that come up spontaneously.  Inevitably, no matter how much I studied my client’s product or service offering, some prospect wound up asking me a question that I didn’t know how to answer.  That question often rolled into several, and after a while, saying, “I’ll get back to you on that,” got really old.  The thing about teleprospecting calls is that when anyone picks up the other end of that phone, ANYTHING can happen.  Questions will be asked and situations will arise that you can never train for because of the human element.  Talk to ten prospects and chances are you’ll have ten different sets of questions from them, because everyone is different.  What matters to one may not matter to the other nine, and what matters to the nine may not to the one.  The point here is that your BDR’s need to think creatively when a problem arises during their calls.

Lastly, your BDR’s need to be creative because sometimes the gatekeeper just won’t let them through.  They need to be creative not only in terms of working their verbal mojo, but for using their Sales 2.0 tools, too.  If an administrative assistant won’t let them talk with a decision maker, your teleprospectors need to be able to find a way in past that admin.  Now, if they can talk their way through, great.  If they can use the tools around them like Jigsaw, LinkedIn, or whatever, that’s great, too.  They need to be creative here because there will come that time when none of these tools works for them, and the account their calling on is a must have for you or for your client’s organization.  Again, this is another reason why your teleprospecting manager should be creative, too.  Creative thinking BDR’s find a way into an organization when no one else can.

Well, there you go – do you agree or disagree?  What do you think?

HubSpot’s blog featured a guest entry yesterday from Sales 2.0 CEO Nigel Edelshain, entitled “What the Heck is Sales 2.0 (& Why Should I Care)?”  Nigel, as I found out in the article, is the man who coined the term “Sales 2.0:”

Sales 2.0 is about sales people using Web 2.0 tools and social media to sell more effectively

In the entry, Nigel goes on to make the analogy that inbound marketing and Sales 2.0 are like children who size each other up before playing together; slow to get along at first, but when playtime is over, nobody wants to leave one another.  The article is great, but of particular interest to me was this, when talking about businesses that sell something very expensive and have a small prospecting pool from which to generate leads from:

“I always imagine a sales rep in this scenario whose boss comes to him and says ‘how are we getting on penetrating GE’ and the rep who loves inbound marketing too much says ‘we’re waiting for them to hit our website and download a white paper.’”

Inbound marketing certainly makes it easier for an organization to be found, but I believe there is still a need for teleprospecting teams to find qualified sales opportunities.  As marketing and sales teams become more synchronous, I think that teleprospecting can play a great part in helping to bridge the current gap, and then be a part of the grease that makes the unified team run smoother.  Go and check it out, then let me know what you think!

*Photo Credit:  ralphbijker via Flickr

Steve Richard, co-founder for sales training organization Vorsight, wrote a guest blog article yesterday for sales strategist Chad Levitt’s New Sales Economy Blog.  The article, entitled “11 Sales Tips for Cold Calling and Prospecting,” offered some good insight into making the most out of each and every attempt to get in touch with your potential buyers.  One of the questions that Steve suggests asking yourself is this:

“Do you revisit your talking points periodically to more effectively tell your story and stand out from the vendor noise and static?”

This is a great question!  It makes me wonder how many times prospects hang up on teleprospectors because they do nothing to make themselves unique in terms of their messaging.  There is some interesting discussion going on over at that post, and I think you should take a look at it and join in the conversation.

*Picture credit:  Linda Cronin via Flickr

I read a great blog article today from Ardath Albee, B2B marketer and strategist.  The post, entitled What’s the Cost When Sales Tries to Do it All?, was found on the Customer Collective website, and in it, Ardath shared some of her thoughts on CSO Insights’ new 2010 Sales Effectiveness Study.  There were a few facts from the research study that Ardath had some issues with, and I think she makes some great points:

“Relationships are the name of the game. For marketing, for sales and for customer retention. How is it possible that so many companies still fail to “get” this? How is it possible that companies still haven’t woken up to the fact that selling is really all about BUYERS and providing whatever they need to make the purchase decision in your favor?”

You should check it out, too.  Seriously.  Go.  Go read it.

If you’re like me and my friends, you were pretty hyped up for last night’s season premiere of LOST.  I came to the game late on this one, having to watch three seasons on DVD (which by the way, is actually more fun because you can just keep watching episode after episode).  If you don’t know what LOST is, it’s a show about survivors of a plane crash and their adventures on the island that they crashed on.  To tell you anymore within the confines of this blog would break the space-time continuum.  I’d say it’s probably one of the most well developed shows in TV history; that’s just my limited opinion though.  As I was discussing last night’s two-hour opening with some of the BDR’s at work today, it got me thinking – how can you keep your teleprospectors from becoming “lost” on their sales prospecting calls?

If you’ve got an in-house team of B2B lead generators or maybe you’re partnering with a vendor to provide you with sales qualified leads, naturally you want to make sure that the folks representing you and your organization over the phone are as effective as possible.  Teleprospectors, for the most part, make a ton of dials every day, and depending on who they talk to, there are times when conversations can be very dizzying.  I think there are three ways we can help BDR’s from becoming “lost” on their teleprospecting calls: 

1. Ensure they know who they’re calling.
2. Know when to call your prospects.
3. Help them to control the conversation.

The first way we can help teleprospectors from becoming “lost” on their calls is to ensure they know who they’re calling.  I’ve had many clients who’ve told me that they’re not sure who they want my BDR’s to speak with.  Okay – big red flag here!  Help your BDR’s by nailing down the top two or three titles in an organization who would want to buy your product or service.  If you’re doing your due-diligence, you should already be creating buyer personas, as marketing strategist David Meerman Scott points out in The New Rules of Marketing and PR (which by the way just came out with a second edition).  By understanding exactly who is going to buy your solution or service, you can help your BDR’s to target those titles on their teleprospecting calls.  They’ll keep from becoming lost because you will have given them a mark with which they can align their lead-gen compass by.

The second way we can help teleprospectors from becoming “lost” on their calls is to know when to call your prospects.  Appointment setting guru Mike Damphousse blogged about the best time to make lead gen calls after reading sales management expert Gerhard Gschwandther’s highlights on an MIT/InsideSales.com study of outbound prospecting lead conversion.  Mike points out himself the most effective time to make teleprospecting calls, and you can read that here.  The take-away from this is that if we can help our BDR’s figure out the most likely time that they’re prospects are going to be in their office, we can increase the possibility of those prospects becoming sales qualified leads.

Lastly, we can help our teleprospectors from becoming “lost” on their calls by helping them to control the conversation.  There have been plenty of times when I’ve sat in with rookie BDR’s who have had prospects run them ragged on a call.  They get off the phone, head spinning, saying, “What the hell just happened!?”  We can help our BDR’s take control of the conversation just by giving them better qualification questions to ask.  I think we can agree that most folks like to talk about themselves, and by helping our BDR’s to ask more poignant, pain-eliciting questions, we keep the ball in their court by keeping the prospect talking.  It’s not always going to work, because we’re dealing with another human on the end of the line, but for the most part, if we can help our BDR’s to control conversations with better questions, and then couple that with a better understanding of the technology or service their calling on, they’re certainly going to get “lost” less.

What do you think?  What can you add to the list?

I read a blog today from the inside sales consulting firm The Bridge Group’s Patrice Murray.  Patrice highlighted a post from Dave Kurlan’s blog, where basically Dave shared a story of a time where he was giving a presentation on a Sales Hiring Webinar.  Dave was asked why, if his process worked so well, were more people not using it.  Dave’s answer was broken down into three points – ego, money, and fear.  Patrice did a great job breaking down the post, and you should read it here.

Additionally, my colleague, Craig Ferrara, hosted a webcast about best practices for hiring teleprospectors.  In it, Craig shares his thoughts on setting up a teleprospecting profile, implementing an interview process that focuses on the phone role play, and his evaluation process.  Check out the Perspectives on Teleprospecting – Best Practices for Hiring Teleprospectors webcast here.

*Photo courtesy of LisaDeeRN via Flickr