Why Cold Calling Is Dead
Our world of selling is closed off from other areas of business
that continue to adopt and embrace new, efficient ideas. I was
reminded of this recently while re- reading Seth Godin's
"Permission Marketing." Here's a book that was intended for
business owners and marketing executives, yet it provides a
much-needed dose of common sense that would be of great benefit
to sales organizations, especially sales managers, who continue
to cling to very old, and, in their minds, very right, ideas.
Unfortunately, our brave new world has made these old ideas very
wrong.
Seth Godin talks about Interruption Marketing versus Permission
Marketing. Interruption Marketing is traditional advertising
that interrupts your day in an attempt to get your attention and
sell you something. In other words, it is the marketing
equivalent of Cold Calling. Permission Marketing is
systematically getting prospects to give you permission to
present to them. In other words, it is marketing's equivalent of
what I teach salespeople to do. In the book, Seth uses the
metaphor of someone trying to get married to describe the flaw
in Interruption Marketing, or Cold Calling. The bachelor goes
into a singles bar and asks every woman in the place to marry
him. When they all say no, he blames his clothes, buys a new
suit, and tries again at another bar, only to fail again and
again, just like a cold caller.
Are you getting the point he tries to make in that story? Think
about it. A salesperson spends weeks cold calling with dismal
results. The salesperson goes to the sales manager for advice on
what to do differently to start getting results. A conversation
ensues about what the salesperson is doing. A lot of old ideas
begin to surface. Ideas such as "Initial Benefit Statement,"
"Elevator Speech," and other concepts that once upon a time were
the right answers, but have since become very wrong answers.
Working on these things is the equivalent of the man in the
story blaming his failure on the suit, changing into a new suit,
then going to a different singles bar to do it all over again.
With the business world in its present state, I really don't see
how salespeople can afford to keep fooling away their time on
old ideas that were once right but are now fatally wrong. It is
this very feature of capitalism that is causing salespeople,
managers and organizations to fail in record numbers. Capitalism
is essentially "creative destruction." In other words,
capitalism is a perpetual cycle of destroying old,
less-efficient businesses and ideas and replacing them with new,
more efficient ones. People and companies are clinging to old,
obsolete ideas and are being dragged down to failure by them.
Yet they still won't let go. I think the reason they can't let
go is simply because it wasn't all that long ago that they
really did have the right answers. It reminds me of a story I
once heard about Albert Einstein when he was a professor. One of
his student assistants who was preparing for an incoming class
said, "Professor Einstein, what test are we giving them?" To
which Einstein replied, "The same test we gave them last week."
Bewildered, the student assistant replied, "But Professor
Einstein, we already gave that test." Einstein simply said,
"Yes, but the answers are different this week."
The bottom line is that the answers are different. The rules
have changed. Time is running out for those who do not adapt to
the new rules. As Napoleon Hill put it so well, "Whenever a
nation, a business institution, or an individual ceases to
change and settles into a rut of routine habits, some mysterious
power enters and smashes the setup, breaks up the old habits,
and lays the foundation for new and better habits."
If you're not achieving the sales success you desire, perhaps it
is time for you to lay the foundation for new and better habits.