Despite all of the moves to sales and marketing automation, automated emails, social feeds, social selling, and AI this and machine learning that, today, the B2B cold call is still relevant. This is because in B2B sales, people still buy from people. All of those things are tools to help you engage and ultimately speak to a prospect, they are not replacements for a human to human interaction…at least in my opinion.
Every month we dedicate some time to selling for ourselves and recently one of our team members was undertaking a round of outbounds to prospects we felt might have a need for our part-time sales services. We typically go through a sales cadence of emails, a B2B cold call, and Inmailing to one or more selected leaders that we are prospecting. In this situation, we had emailed twice with no response and then he did a B2B cold call referencing the earlier emails in his introduction. The prospect mentioned that he did not receive them and they must have gone to his spam. During the B2B cold call, our team member provided him an overview of why he was reaching out, the services we provide, how we work and then was able to line up a second call for us to discuss his needs further and provide more detail on our services. This prospect became a client. That result reinforces the fact that a B2B cold call to selected targets that you have researched and believe could benefit from your services, can be effective.
Again, I am not saying leveraging social platforms to sell isn’t effective. In one example, I remember we were working for a client and another one of our team members DM’d a prospect on Twitter after reading an announcement they posted. This prospect, based on their announcement, could benefit from the solution our client provided. As it turns out, the prospect DM’d back and we then proceeded to set up a call for them and our client to speak to each other.
In another example, we were targeting large retailers for a client and we used Linkedin to identify the correct target contacts and then as part of an outreach program used Inmail to introduce our clients services to them. One of the largest retailer contacts we targeted responded and we were able to set up meetings for them and our prospect to speak and explore the opportunity.
In the end, I think to do sales prospecting effectively you need to make use of a multitude of vehicles to engage with prospects and not forget the old stalwart, the B2B cold call. Be sure to include a variety of touch mechanisms in your sales cadence and rotate them around and change up the timing. Also remember that if you really believe it is a worthwhile prospect, you will most likely have to reach out many, many times to one or more target contacts before you will get a response – keep that 8 to 13 touches at the back of your head.
Good luck with your B2B sales prospecting and if we can provide any assistance or if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. Please check out more of our blogs if you are looking for additional information on sales techniques or strategy. For great insight into startup sales and marketing, feel free to sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Twitter.
