For years, cold calling has been your go-to method for garnering new leads — but now, your sales team spends most of their time cold calling with little success. And outside of cold calling, your team doesn’t have other means to pull in new prospects. Perhaps you’ve even tried outsourcing to a cold calling service, but you’re still not getting the high-quality results you want. This may be because these days 92% of consumers think unidentified calls may be fraud — so your cold calls are going widely unanswered.
If you focus on cold calling as a lead generation strategy, you may have noticed a decline in its effectiveness. With all the new channels available to reach leads (email, social media, etc.), cold calling just isn’t as effective as it used to be — and can even be harmful to your sales strategy.
In the age of digital selling, cold calling just isn’t going to cut it. Your buyers won’t answer calls they suspect are fraud, and even if your reps get customers on the phone, it’s difficult to keep their attention long enough to schedule a meeting. So… should you give up on cold calling entirely? Read on to see why we think you should.
3 Reasons to Give Up on Cold Calling
In the aftermath of the pandemic and with cybersecurity threats on the rise, cold calling hasn’t just become ineffective, it’s become outdated. Consumers want to be met where they are online, rather than over the phone. Still unconvinced?
Here are the reasons you want to give up on cold calling.
1. It Can Actually Push Potential Leads Away
You’ve likely heard that millennials — who now make up the majority of B2B buyers — prefer texting to calling. This holds true in the workplace as well with 87.5% of millennials choosing instant messaging as their preferred method of workplace communication (think Slack). When your reps cold call leads, those leads could easily be viewing these calls as more of an annoyance than an opportunity.
2. The Process is Inefficient and Time-Consuming
If cold calling is your main form of pulling in leads, your reps could be wasting time. When 79% of unidentified calls go unanswered, it’s highly likely that the contacts your reps reach out to ignore those calls. Think of how much time your reps would get back if they weren’t sitting at their desks, calling over and over again, and listening to the phone ring for hours on end. That time could go to more productive, revenue-generating activities — like emailing those leads who’ve indicated interest in a product through inbound marketing tactics.
3. A Lack of Success is Often Discouraging to Sales Reps
Sitting on the phone cold calling for the majority of the workday can become extremely discouraging for your sales reps. In fact, 63% of sellers say cold calling is the worst part of their job. Often, when cold calls are answered, angry leads can berate the sales rep, yelling at them and demanding to know how the rep got their number. Over time, this takes a toll on the rep’s mental health. And when only 1% of cold calls convert to appointments, all that time calling can seem entirely pointless to reps who want to meet (and exceed) their quarterly targets.
Work with a Sales Consulting Firm to Refine Your Sales Processes with Inbound Marketing Methodologies
If you’re getting rid of cold calling within your sales strategy, you need to replace it with a new tactic to pull in and capture new leads. If you need a replacement, look no further than inbound marketing. Through creative, impactful, SEO-friendly content across your website and social media, inbound marketing attracts potential buyers. For instance, let’s say you sell a SaaS platform that streamlines sales enablement content organization. Through inbound marketing methodologies, you’re able to reach out to leads consistently through lead nurturing campaigns, your business shows up higher in search results on Google, and the experiences on your website are tailored to your customers.
With the right industry-leading sales experts working alongside your sales and marketing teams, you can create and leverage high-impact inbound marketing strategies based on buyer intent data and in-depth market research. A sales consulting firm can use their expertise to help your marketing team garner best-fit leads that are much more likely to make a purchase than someone you’ve reached out to via cold calling. The right sales consulting firm can help you:
- Develop sophisticated tech stacks to enable your sales team to win
- Cultivate buyer intent data and in-depth market research to help you step into new markets and scale
- Create lead scoring models to understand which leads are most likely to make a purchase
A sales consulting agency can help you make the transition from cold calling to inbound marketing smoothly. Sales consultants know how to harness the power of data to help you create the powerful, data-driven sales and marketing tactics you need to bring in best-fit leads.
Final Thoughts
Cold calling has kind of worked for decades, but with all the new ways you can capture a buyer’s attention, cold calling is now archaic. Turning to more modern, digitally focused, inbound marketing methodologies can bring in better fit leads for your business.
Stop cold calling. Start using data-driven inbound marketing tactics with a sales consulting firm and contact SFE Partners.
