Customized Multi-channel Marketing - hosted by L2

I am responsible for sales at L2.  My team and I typically have a pretty good supply of leads coming from our marketing campaigns which allows us to open up more opportunities than the typical sales force, but we’re always looking for an edge, and there are never enough opportunities.

My entire sales career I’ve wondered about the effectiveness of "The Cold Call".  I don’t like cold calling.  I don’t like getting cold calls either.  As our PR efforts grow and our marketing penetrates deeper into the general population I’ve been getting more than my fair share of cold-calls it seems.

To me a ‘cold call’ is a phone based piece of junk mail.  Neither the sender nor the recipient wants it.  Like Junk Mail, neither the sender nor the recipient wants to be in that game.  Only the printer and post office or telephone company wins with this ‘junk’ communication. 

It’s junk because it hasn’t taken into consideration my needs, preferences or condition.  A typical cold call is not particularly concerned about delivering any value in itself and really the cold caller just wants to cast a wide net, snag me, throw me against a wall and see if I stick as an opportunity.  Yeah, who would want to interrupt their day to be treated like a dead codfish?  

Spam, Junk Mail and Cold Calling continue to annoy us because every now and then they deliver a positive result either because of the target giving in, or some slim odds of convergence of need, opportunity and offer.  It’s just enough to keep these practices on the edge of oblivion, but they persist.

Despite this I’m bringing back the cold call!  I’ll start with the action plan and work backward to how I came up with this approach (it’s not revolutionary) and why I’m going to spend the time and money to do it.  So here’s my plan:

• I’m ‘burning’ the phone list. Why?  It’s better to build up a list of people you really want to contact rather than filter out a list of people who you don’t have a reason to talk to anyway.

• We’re going to build a targeted list, from the same list we use and track for our marketing campaigns and we’re going to do a little research first (We like Hoovers.com and good old Google News).
• We’re going to call lower in the organization, not higher, at least initially. Why?  For a new relationship, you need a scout.  Someone who is feeling the ogranizational pain that your solution solves and can give you guidance.  From there you can go back up several levels and talk to the bosses.
• We’re going to make less calls per day.  Why?  10 calls per day is enough for now.  One per hour or so.  Staying fresh and prepping for a cold-call or voicemail for a few minutes won’t make it stale and that will show through on the call.
• We are going to leave voicemails. Why? Because we have something to say or we wouldn’t be calling in the first place.
• We’re going to track our results and measure our success.  Why? We do it with every other thing we do, I don’t know why we haven’t done it with our phone calls as well.
• We’re going to test A/B offers and angles on our calls to see what works but we will not use canned scripts. (More on this later)

I think this is a good start to breaking the mold on the ‘phone list’.  What else should I consider? 

 There’s a reason why I think cold calling is important and why I’m going to dust it off and give it a fresh coat of paint in our lead generation process but that’s a topic for another time.