Cold Calls or Hot Process?

By Mike Hancock, ViaMetric Partner

I want to talk about bologna, but before we get to that I must briefly mention that last week’s story about Staples’s bad customer service still doesn’t have a happy ending. The whiteboard didn’t arrive yet, and associates with Staples seem completely uninterested in helping their customer.

What really hits home to me is the company’s lack of any reputation management effort. When somebody writes about you in a blog, it’s pretty easy for you to find out about it, if you’re monitoring these things. As Edelman and Nielson BuzzMetrics pointed out in their wonderful 1.0 Guide to the Blogosphere for Marketers and Company Stakeholders blogs can be an “early warning radar.” Many companies would have noticed this post the same day, and moved into damage control mode.

I’d like to think, if this had been one of our clients, we would have been all over this story. This after all is part of the sales process: you could think of it as being far beyond the initial closed-sale portion of the cycle, and deep into the Customer Success effort.

What I wanted to say about bologna was to mention Jill Konrath’s post about the oft-repeated advice that, when business is slow, make 100 cold calls. Jill disagrees with this, as you can read in Making 100 Calls is Pure Bologna and she is right.

Cold calling in the way Jill refers to it, and as most people take it to mean, usually indicates random, untargeted calling; and in today’s selling environment it is a complete waste of time. Mac McIntosh has a lot to say about this in his article, Dialing for dollars or wasting your money?

What I notice in these discussions on the trials and tribulations of the sales process is that salespeople tend to break the process down into two parts, namely, getting their foot in the door, and the close. Certainly these are important, but that’s not where good sales people make their money. They make their money by artfully making the buyer aware of the pain they may, or may not, recognize they are experiencing, the reasons causing these pains, and ultimately into agreement on the negative business impacts that result. We will talk more about these key steps in future posts.

For now, what I hope one day I will see are salespeople in a discussion about, not cold calling, but “targeted outreach” (calling or email), the percentages thereof, and how to do it right and wrong, and so forth. But what has to be included in that discussion is the marketing that precedes the lead, the adjustments that occur during the marketing and the metrics and analysis that occurs from first marketing step, through the sale and fulfillment, and into the up-sell, cross-sell, which should never stop happening.

In other words, sales is a process, end to end, in a constant, expandable, repeatable, cycle. This is my ongoing theme of the continual Sales and Marketing Joint Process of demand generation and sales execution.

On that fine day, when organizations and salespeople are accustomed to thinking of success as a predictable, repeatable process, that will be a ViaMetric day.

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