The End of Cold Calling: Turn Your Reps into Sales Magnets

Bestselling author and lead generation expert Kendra Lee shares a sneak peek into the strategies offered in her new book The Sales Magnet: How to Get More Customers Without Cold Calling.

If you were to poll every salesperson or lead generator you know and ask them how they feel about cold calling, you’re likely to get a fairly predictable response: It sucks.
The rejection, the monotony, the lack of response — it all feels so, well, cold. Aside from the sheer misery of the practice, however, sales expert and consultant Kendra Lee, founder and president of sales consultancy KLA Group, says cold calling is also a horribly inefficient and ineffective sales strategy.
In fact, by some estimates, cold calling requires 10 hours of work to schedule just one appointment. Yet, many expansion-stage technology companies continue to think that cold calling is an absolute must when it comes to driving a higher volume of new business opportunities.
“Honestly, that’s just not the case,” says Lee, who sat down with OpenView recently to share some insight from her new book The Sales Magnet: How to Get More Customers Without Cold Calling, and explain why cold calling isn’t the only way to drum up high-quality new business opportunities and drive revenue growth.
“If you could do some other things that would take less time than cold calling a prospect list,” Lee asks, “and those activities would make your reps feel more confident, efficient, and effective, why wouldn’t you?”
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Sales Magnetism: Laying the Groundwork for Prospect Attraction

Of course, Lee is not suggesting that B2B technology companies abandon phone prospecting entirely. She’s simply recommending that before they have their reps tear through a nameless database of phone numbers, they should be executing some relatively simple prospect attraction strategies.
In a marketing department, those strategies might be called “awareness campaigns.” In sales, they’re likely known as warming techniques. Either way, Lee says they allow companies to cultivate a stronger relationship with their prospects and increase their connection ratio.
“All of a sudden, reps have a reason to call,” Lee explains. “You’re not shooting into the dark and hoping you hit a target. When you call, you’re calling from a whole different perspective in terms of knowledge and confidence level. And all of a sudden the success ratio will go up.”

The Prospect Attraction Trifecta

In her book, Lee offers 14 different prospect attraction strategies, some of which date back to her time as one of IBM’s highest performing salespeople. Those strategies are organized in what she calls “The Prospect Attraction Trifecta,” which is categorized by:

1. Personal attraction strategies: In other words, lead generation approaches that make a prospect feel like you’ve reached out to them one-to-one. This might include leveraging tactics like e-mail, personal letters, postcards, etc., but the idea is to make your first contact with a prospect much more personal.
2. Digital attraction strategies: As you might expect, Lee says these strategies include channels through which you’d use the Internet to reach prospects. For instance, companies could use social networking, e-newsletters, a corporate blog, and content marketing as their first point of contact with prospects.
3. Collaborative attraction strategies: This component of the trifecta includes collaborative tactics like online or local events, offline PR, and alliance partnering, but it could also include using of any of the tactics listed above in tandem with key vendors, partners, or industry influencers.

The best part about those prospect attraction strategies, Lee says, is that it doesn’t matter whether your sales or marketing team executes them. “Both departments can use the same types of campaigns,” Lee explains. “The only thing that will vary is the length and scale of them.”
Regardless of which department is responsible for those campaigns, Lee says companies of all shapes and sizes can also benefit from supplementing their prospecting efforts with marketing automation software.
“When a sales or lead gen rep knows more about their prospects’ behaviors, stages, and needs, that not only makes the conversation more genuine, it gives the rep much more confidence on the phone,” Lee says. “That might sound simple, but it can have a very significant impact on the output of their inside sales team.”

Do you agree cold calling on its own is no longer effective? What other strategies should sales and marketing teams be adopting?