Is Cold Calling Dead?

The other day I was speaking at a conference and was inviting delegates to ask me anything they wanted to know about marketing. One of the audience asked an interesting question – “Is Cold Calling dead?”

They’d been along to a social networking seminar on the same day and the presenter had made this bold statement so the delegate naturally wanted to know what my response to this question would be.

So, I’ll tell you what I told him – no, I don’t think cold calling is dead, but like any marketing method, cold calling cannot be taken in isolation and expected to do all the work.

Let me explain what I mean.

Too many business owners choose one marketing method out of the hundreds of different ideas out there and expect it to bring in miraculous results. If it doesn’t, they’re disappointed and tell everyone that that marketing method didn’t work.

Rubbish!

What you should be doing is using a marketing method as part of a strategy. Let’s take cold calling for instance. If you make say 100 calls and get nothing back, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s not working for you.

But instead, let’s say you make 100 calls, follow-up with some information by email and then call back to see if that information is of interest, then that is more of a strategy and you’ve combined both email marketing with cold calling as marketing methods.

Even better, would be to run an email campaign first; get people to express interest and then call these interested parties to turn them into prospective customers.

It’s all in the strategy.

Likewise, with social networking, if you do Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook on their own, don’t expect it to bring in much.

But if you post on Linkedin and build relationships with people in an effort to bring them back to your website and encourage them to sign up for something useful so that you can continue to build a relationship with them offline, then that’s a strategy!

So, next time you think about employing any marketing method, think it all the way through to the end – how are you going to get contacts; how are you going to measure their interest and how are you going to follow-up and keep in touch with them in order to build that relationship that eventually turns into clients?

And back to the original question – is cold calling dead? Absolutely not! But if you don’t employ the strategy, don’t expect miraculous results!