Morning all,
Back at it again and today I’m reflective of the challenges my team is facing with cold calling.
It’s clearly an incredibly difficult skill to find in people.
For the last several months I’ve been on the hunt to find people who are effective on the phone and can basically call anyone, anywhere – and strike up a conversation.
But in combination with this – actually have a willingness to do it!
This is often the time the challenge – that in theory, you do meet people who would be able to do well on the phone – but the desire isn’t there anymore.
It’s evidently a real problem in the UK judging by the number of people I’ve interviewed and hired and have let go or otherwise.
I’m just trying to reel off a list of names in my mind….
There has been Matthew, Gary, Adrian, Amie, Adam, Kristel, EJ, Amy, Omnia….several others also.
The team has entirely rotated a couple of times.
We’ve put adverts out in 20+ places in our search for amazing sales folk and still are searching for people to continue to bring up the caliber of salespeople we have as well as expand the team to meet the demand.
When I look at the caliber of companies who approach us (inbound) in need of leads/appointments it’s incredible.
SSE, Fujitsu, Bosch, Google Cloud…to name a few (as there are many more than this).
It seems like companies everywhere are struggling to identify those who could be amazing on the phone but also have the appetite to do it.
It’s obviously an incredibly difficult problem to solve and one I’m enjoying working away hard to try and fix.
We’ve now got a system for hiring salespeople in a semi-automated fashion which I’m hopeful we will really speed up the process of finding excellent people.
Let me walk you through some of the issues with finding people who are amazing on the phone:
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Table of Contents
Cold Calling is a dying art
With the advent of social media and alternative forms of lead generation – there are now ‘easier’, ‘more effective’, and ‘less direct’ ways of generating leads. Whether it’s Instagram, Facebook DMs, groups, or otherwise.
This means that graduates and young people, in general, aren’t picking up cold calling as a skill anymore. Or practicing the art of talking to people they don’t know. It definitely exists in some professions such as drama, law, and theatre….
But generally speaking, far fewer people do this now than they did before.
Cold Calling requires mental toughness
This is the other great challenge of it – my inbound sales team doesn’t want to do cold calling. Because calling people and getting a ‘no thanks’ most of the time is generally just tough!
It’s not the easiest thing to do in the world day in and day out – which means that hiring someone to do this long-term can definitely be challenging.
And again – this kind of mental toughness is not so readily available in young people.
Yet Cold Calling is SOOOO effective
One of our team – Vasco – has been working diligently to build up his call confidence on a daily basis to call decision-makers every day to grow the Pearl Lemon pipeline.
You can literally call decision-makers at big companies and with enough calls strike up interest with a view to discussing working together.
It’s the fastest way to generate new business effectively.
Vasco is now getting on the phone every day to talk to decision-makers to see if they’re interested in Pearl Lemon’s marketing services – and within an hour he’s coming back with success.
Having that skill – of being able to call anyone, anywhere and convince them to potentially do business with you is an incredibly valuable skill to have.
Correspondingly – learning digital marketing skills alongside this is far easier – and I run a digital marketing agency.
So what do you do if you need cold callers?
Well, you can hire Pearl Lemon Leads because we make it our business to find the diamonds in the rough and develop them.
Good luck finding someone to cold call by yourself (I truly mean that) – as it’s an incredibly challenging task.
The older generation who still DO cold call – from when I’ve seen – still aren’t massively tech-enabled – i.e use power dialers, can get on Zoom calls, know how to use databases to build lists, and do all of the ‘other bits’ that our clients expect.
Notwithstanding knowing how to cold call a procurement director one minute, an IT director another minute, and so on and so forth!
Regardless – I’m out of time (20 minutes in!) – catch you tomorrow!
