The Expert Podcast

So when is cold calling really sales, and when is it something else? And should you be doing it at all? And if you do cold calling in your company, who should be doing it? Should it be a salesperson, marketing, or somebody else? Let's take a look at really what cold calling is, what sales is, and what's the difference between sales and marketing. Marketing is typically getting people to know about your company and be interested in your company. It's putting your name out there; it's getting visibility in the first place.

Sales is responding to inquiries and closing deals. It's getting people to buy something, not people to know about something. It's getting people to buy something. Typically, a salesperson will respond to a client. Think about a car dealership: somebody comes in, talks to a salesperson. Maybe it's a tech company: somebody calls in or puts a message on their website, and a salesperson responds or takes that call. Marketing is when you do advertising: you do radio, TV, maybe Facebook ads, maybe you're doing Google ads, you're putting your information out there for people to know about you. That's marketing.

So based on those two definitions, which one does cold calling fall under? Well, if you're just calling up people out of the blue, random people from the phone book, people didn't contact you, that's really marketing. Because these are people that are not inquiring about your product that you're trying to sell or close. These are people you're trying to make aware of your product in the first place. That's more marketing, and that's fine. There's no problem with doing cold calling as long as you look at it as a marketing process, not a sales process. It will make both your sales and your marketing better if you make cold calling part of your marketing efforts, not part of your sales efforts. In fact, you've heard many times the phrase "sales and marketing department." We recommend flipping the order of those: marketing and sales. Because marketing really has to happen before sales. You have to market the people to contact you before you can try to sell them. Otherwise, it's cold calling.

So if that's the case, should your salespeople be doing cold calling? Should they be doing marketing? Well, there's pros and cons. But before you take an opinion and kind of conflict against the idea, let's look at how it might help you. If you have great salespeople who are excellent closers, they know how to do product presentation, overcoming objections, customer empathy, and closing the deal, you've spent a lot of time and money and effort training these expert salespeople to be great at sales, to be sales professionals, to be closers. And how hard of a job was that? How hard is it to train, recruit, retain, and motivate salespeople? That's probably the hardest job in your company as an executive, as a manager: to build up a sales staff. Part of the reason it's hard is because sales is a tough business. There's a lot of rejection. If you have a closing ratio of 10% on your inquiries, that means 90% of the time the customer says no. And the hardest part of keeping salespeople motivated is getting them past all the no's. Look, we're all humans. We love validation; we hate rejection. So if we hear rejection all day, it's demoralizing. It wears away at your soul. It wears away at your vibe and your motivation. Your positive attitude, which you need for that next sales call, is eroded every time you hear a no. So 10% success, 90% failure, is borderline: is that going to just ruin a salesperson? Some salespeople can't keep going with that kind of failure rate if they don't realize that's just a numbers game. It's part of the game.

So you want your great salespeople to be sharp and expert. Now, what happens if you throw on them a bunch of cold calls? Make 100 calls a day, make 200 calls a day. Well, now instead of a 90% failure rate, they're going to have a 99% failure rate, which means every time they pick up the phone, they're going to expect failure. The hope of a sale, even at 10%, isn't even there. It's like, "I'm just going to fail every time; I'm just hoping maybe, you know, magic will happen, and I'll get one sale." At the same time, your salespeople are trained at overcoming objections, presenting the product, and closing deals. Is that really what you're trying to do on a cold call to a non-buyer, to somebody who didn't inquire to your company? They're not yet ready for overcoming objections; they don't even have any objections yet. They don't even know if you need the product. They're certainly not ready for closing deals. So all of the great skills you've instilled on your professional salespeople are going to waste. Even if they're good at it, they're trying to pitch those things to a cold call, and it's falling on deaf ears.

What about if you had a marketing person who is good at demonstrating or informing the customer about the existence of your product? Don't even try to sell them. "Hey, by the way, just like a commercial would, here's our product in case you weren't aware of it. We're just telling you about it. We want you to know." End of story. Obviously, you can embellish more than that, but if you're not trying to sell, if you're just saying, "We want to let you know we have this product," it's just like a normal marketing message: a commercial, a newspaper ad, Facebook ad, Google AdWords, website marketing. If you have that as a marketing message to a non-buyer cold call, first of all, the marketing person is not going to be offended by making those calls. It's not going to be a failure. They succeeded in communicating your product; it was a win. It was a success. There's not a lot of rejection. Yeah, some people might hang up; they don't want the call. It's like an intrusion. But then again, that's not going to be a big deal because your marketing people aren't trying to close deals. They're not keeping ratios on closing deals.

Now, if by any chance one of those people says, "Hey, how do I buy it?" then you can switch it over to sales.

How would that work in your company? Well, you might be thinking a third option is: what about your new salespeople? Have your new salespeople do cold calls to sharpen their skills, to learn the ropes, to toughen them up a little bit. Well, it's throwing them in the grinding gears of failure for 99% failure. Kind of make them any better as a salesperson? It's just going to prove maybe that they suck at being a salesperson. It might prove that they hate being a salesperson. It's never going to give them the closing skills through success. Right? Just like if you're training somebody to be a professional golfer, you don't train them to hit the balls in the sand trap all the time. You're trying to get them to be successful. So putting new salespeople on cold calls is probably the worst thing you could do because they may never become good salespeople. A few might slip through the cracks, but those are going to be the ones that are kind of the criminal salespeople you don't want anyways: the ones that can just fight through. They have no empathy; they're almost socially past. They can just handle rejection all the time. If you want to develop good quality salespeople with empathy, who understand talking to people, you don't want to throw them to the wolves for two months of training doing cold calls because you're just going to ruin them. The only ones that make it through that gauntlet are probably people you don't want on your sales staff anyways.

Again, it's an alternate point of view. Let us know what you think in the comments. If you think about cold calls as marketing, not sales, you might be better at marketing and at sales than if you try to scrunch those two things together on a process that really might not work for anybody. It's lose-lose-lose. It's lose for you, it's lose for the salesperson, and it's lose for the customer because they never really got a good exposure to your product. They just got to try a slam-dunk sales pitch rather than a product information or product awareness, like marketing would be.

Let us know what you think.