As someone who's had to do cold calls as part of a sales pipeline,
it's spam,
I wouldn't say it's spam on LinkedIn, that's where I tell lies to get better jobs,
if it's B2B, I do not feel any shame, every business is a fuck
Edit: I'll also add that B2B cold calls do work. If you have a good product or service and approach it the right way, you can generate plenty of business this way. That said, it's wholly a numbers game. When I was training sales agents, they'd ask me "how do I get sales like you do?" and I'd tell em simply "Make more calls." As I said elsewhere, I'm good at this. I had a roughly 2-3% conversation rate. Understand that means if I made a hundred calls, I made two to three sales. And that's pretty damn good. Before we were more established and could drop that model, we found that cold calling generally had around a 1.4% conversion rate. It relies on you being chipper and persistent to the point of annoyance. Some people literally do break at one point and say stuff like "Well, I need to get something, and if I sign with you, will you stop calling me?"
It was always far more enjoyable to call established leads, people who already expressed and interest and just needed help making up their mind. Better on the customer, better on the agent, a better process overall.
Regarding your number three, a lot of the time you're cold calling some wage slave who has neither the interest nor authority to buy anything from you.
"Every business is a fuck" gets my vote, but the people you're cold calling are not necessarily a fuck.
Oh, one hundred percent. The way I treat people who have zero decision making ability differed greatly from purchasing agents or decision makers. They were largely in the same spot as me. It's important to understand that the sales agents are also wage slaves, the tasks are just different.
Dealing with people like me was one of the stupid things they gotta do at work to make their pay and go home, just like me making 80+ calls an hour at some points was one of my stupid things. I wanted to get them off the phone as soon as possible, be that either by ending the call or getting passed onto someone who could buy. You can use that to build rapport and speed up the process. You can even make it jovial. The goal is to make the sales process as painless as possible while recognizing that being a pest is effective.
Sales agents who put the big pitch on the second they get someone to talk to em are not thinking straight and hindering themselves. Though, sometimes there's parts of a service that simplifies their lives, which I'd mention while waiting for a decision maker or during another break.
I'll also add that B2B cold calls do work. If you have a good product or service and approach it the right way, you can generate plenty of business this way. That said, it’s wholly a numbers game.
You don't even need a good product or service when you play the numbers game, you just need higher numbers!
Number 2 is a great point. That's what I hate about LinkedIn and why I only use it to look/apply for jobs and occasionally scroll through if I'm super bored.
My experience in my current job are endless cold emails from salespeople who don't even understand that I have no use for their product. I work in a field where I have to research a lot of different equipment/parts for my client, but that I don't use myself. I had to request a catalog from one of these places which involved giving my work email address. Now I get endless emails about how they'll 'be in my area' (LOL no you won't because I work remotely across the country from both my company and my client) and they want to demonstrate their new product...which I don't use because I don't work in that field. Makes me laugh every time and yes it is very spammy.
I made that kind of mistake often early on in my sales career. The product I sold had a specific use in a specific field by specific disciplines, and was required by law in certain regions.
I always felt like such a dick when I'd get to the purchasing agent, make my hurried nervous pitch because I'm so excited to get through to someone and they'd (often kindly) explain that they literally never have any use case for my product.
After a few of those, I became more aware of how to prune my "leads" (read: list of phone numbers) to make sure I was only reaching out to people who could even use the dang thing and inserted a few exploratory questions into the opening salvo to double check.
I'm glad I don't have to do this via email, though. At least with the phone, I can hear tone and get quick, definite answers instead of just waiting on a reply.
It’s hard to get there on the phone now, though, if you don’t already have a name and phone number. You can probably get a name off LinkedIn, but a main phone number for a company probably won’t get you anywhere now since a lot of companies don’t have receptionists anymore. You’re lucky if the phone tree has a dial by name option. I’m glad I’m not in that kind of business anymore.
I don't think that B2B cold calls are "spam", per se, and I wouldn't even say that most of them are truly "cold" calls. Worst case scenario, they should be warm calls. Or room temperature calls. Like, if you sell printing presses, you probably shouldn't be calling a hair salon. But calling a local newspaper--somewhere that you know uses the product category that you sell--is reasonable.
I do take cold calls from salespeople in my current position, and my response is usually that, if they can provide a product that meets the needs of the company I work for, I'm more than happy to try it.
Yup, in the sales world it's accepted truth that you have to cold call. That said, in my sales position I've just switched to personalized email outreach for first contact and if anyone asks, oh of course I'm making calls. That probably only works in certain applications, but I'm making the numbers I need to.
Anyone who is so outgoing/extroverted to think it's normal to just go up to anyone and interrupt their day with whatever they feel like, probably sees this as just another topic about which to converse.
Everyone else doesn't particularly like strangers interrupting their day, and especially when it's just to take their money.
I'm in the former group. Not just that, but I'm good at sales. Like, nicknamed The Closer and that sorta corporate motivational bullshit at one point good.
I will strike up conversations with people in a bar and make new friends waiting in lines. It's a talent, but its also a skill that can be taught and learned. It's a hat you wear to help you at work.
All that said, cold calls suck ass and they're a nuisance on most any individual. I'd refuse to do them on non-business customers.
It's almost like how local news networks in the USA are reading the same copy of stories by their handlers to spread propaganda. Gosh, do you think this could be the same?
Fortunately my acknowledgement that the world has changed since COVID was not tied to this woman's toilet paper stockpile situation, but I appreciate the heads up.
I bet she wrote really shitty poetry in middle school about the darkness under the bed being defeted by the light from under her door and being really adamant that everyone would love it if they'd just read it.
Unique space tbh. She was tossing the big pack on top of a y pipe in the laundry room. They stacked so perfectly and it wasn’t an actual storage space. Just a convenient high up place.
Paper towel packages didn’t quite fit as well but they work there too.
I had bought a backup pack of tp like three years before because I used to have the start of prepper brain. My spouse complained every time we moved we brought it along and I insisted it could come in handy one day. Guess who got the last laugh when everywhere ran out and we had an emergency supply that lasted just long enough for a bidet to show up
LinkedinLunatics
Hot