There have been many blog articles recently on the Cold Call. Mark Evans wrote an article about his recent efforts. Many people have trumpeted that cold calling is dead with effective social media and inbound marketing efforts. For many companies a cold calling is a necessity. You have been through all of your promising LinkedIn connections, inbound marketing is not yielding enough leads, and your referrals have dried up. If the alternative is to have your business fail due to lack of sales, then maybe you should look at cold calling.

One thing that has changed about cold calling is the research, preparation, and information that is available. Gone are the days that you open the yellow pages and start calling down the list. Researching your target and understanding how your solution could help them is key. Venture Accelerator Partners has a process that we use when making cold calls.

• Understand how your solution could specifically help the target company using the web and social media
• Research the target contact using the LinkedIn, Jigsaw, and the web
• Create several email templates based on factors like verticals, geography, and type of contact
• Customize each email using the research to reflect insight into their situation and the words or phrases they use
• Send the initial email, record into your CRM, and schedule the next task
• In a few days follow-up with a cold call, or two, or three referring to the email that was sent
• If you are unable to reach them forward your previous email and add a brief paragraph with some additional information
• Follow-up a few days later with more calls

VA Partners uses this methodology for most of our accounts and we have been successful at it. The key to the cold call is not to sell them something on the phone but move the opportunity along by setting up the following:

• Time for a meeting/scheduled call to understand the customer
• Getting a referral internally to talk to the right person
• Gaining some insight into the company to help determine if they may be a good fit>

The cold call is not dead, maybe it has changed to more of a warm call. For more tips to help with cold calling download our cold calling white paper.

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