Cold Calling Is Dead. Oh, really?

You see it in email blasts and web sites all the time: 

Cold calling is dead.  

Marketing "experts" say it over and over.  Here’s a typical recent post-mortem:

"Cold calling used to be a salesperson's most effective lead generation tool, but today it is futile."

And… 

"Despite this hard truth, most salespeople today continue to waste valuable time and effort cold calling, usually because they don't know what else to do."

Yet another site, quoting a marketing guru, declares, “Cold calling is an act of frivolity.”

To these experts we say: “Let them come to our call center.”  

Every day, appointment setting specialists in our outbound call center services department schedule high volumes of sales calls, webinars and product demonstrations for our clients.  Every day, our B2B lead generation professionals unearth and transfer warm and hot leads to our clients’ sales teams.

Here are three quick examples:

• For a litigation insurance client, we pitch law firms and corporations for sales appointments.  On average, we make one appointment per hour per agent – between 30 and 40 appointments a day.

• For a company that develops appointment reminder solutions for healthcare providers, hair salons, spas and other organizations that have a steady stream of customer appointments, our outbound call center representatives arrange between one and two sales appointments per hour, or between 20 and 30 per day.

• For a promotional products company, we conduct a customer win-back campaign, getting inactive customers to take a fresh look at our client’s product line.  Averaging one appointment per agent per hour, we deliver roughly 50 new sales leads per day.

The result: each week these companies get hundreds of closeable sales leads funneled to their sales staffs that, without cold calling, would not have them.

To be sure, cold calling done the wrong way doesn’t work.  It’s true that in these days of caller ID, social marketing and cell phones it’s become increasingly difficult to cold call effectively.  This has led many sales managers and their staff to give up on cold calling.  But we’ve worked hard at figuring out how to do cold calling the right way that delivers a strong ROI for our clients’ outbound B2B lead generation campaigns.

The key is for the call center outsourcing service to match the product with the right target audience.  This is where the Internet, generally regarded as the cold call killer, is a major asset.  The call center services provider can develop target lists of people and businesses that are natural customers.  This leads to higher success rates and less wasted effort.

Marketing managers need to leverage every business development tactic available.  Many companies have become over-reliant on the web – they put their efforts into email marketing, SEO and social media.  This can lead to complacency and missed opportunities.  Cold calling B2B lead generation and appointment setting still fills a vital role.

In short, cold calling done the right way isn’t dead.  It’s alive and kicking.

Mark Fichera, CEO
OnBrand24
Call Center Services
Beverly, MA