The Death of Cold Calling The Advent of Marketing-Assisted Selling

The Death of Cold Calling

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Hypothesis for today’s session

• Changes in buyer lifecycles and the advent of the social web have rendered cold calling much less effective in today’s “self-service” buy cycle

• Calling into lists of suspects based on one-dimensional criteria (demongraphics) wastes valuable selling time and causes leads to fall through the cracks

Lead Management

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• Cold Calling – Death versus evolution• Lead generation in 2013 –hijacking the digital

conversation• The statistical failure of cold calling• Where do leads originate in 2013 and beyond?• Adapting sales and marketing to optimize the digital

conversation• The journey to lead to sales revenue management• The changing view of telesales/inside sales

Why is cold calling ineffective

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The buyer journey has changed

Why is cold calling ineffective

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The buyer journey has become self-paced

Why is cold calling ineffective

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The buyer journey has become self-paced

• Logic dictates that if buyers are self-evaluating, then Sales must make more calls to find those who are active

• The opposite may be true due to lack of efficiencies in cold calling

• Cold calling to find active, self-paced buyers is non-scientific and wastes time

• Inefficiencies in cold calling adds to the CAC (Cost to Acquire Customers)

Why is cold calling ineffective?

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Buyers are in complete control of information

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Why is cold calling ineffective?Buyers are in complete control of information

Why is cold calling icky?It fosters a culture of “taking”• Cold calling is a practice of starting a B2B relationship by taking

something from a prospect without asking them first like their time or info.

• Most people feel uncomfortable “taking” something from someone

• Consider the following stats on sales rep retention:• 44% of sales reps quit after one no• 22% quit after two• 14% quit after three• 12% quit after four (total is 92%)• 60% of customers say no at least four times

Why is cold calling ineffective

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Statistical failure rates

• The Keller research center at Baylor University Texas research on cold calling – summary Over 6,000 calls were made by experienced and seasoned sales-telemarketers and monitored closely

• 72% off all calls were and ended swiftly, with no further contact!28% Were labeled as Useful, as they did not hang up immediately,

• Follows ups on this 28% who were useful and 19 appointments were made19 appointments from 6264 calls which then became 4 sales around 0.6%The time spent and the costs accounted for it equated to a full working day to get one appointment!!

Why is cold calling ineffective

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Statistical failure rates

- 2% of sales are made on the first contact- 3% of sales are made on the second contact- 5% of sales are made on the third contact- 10% of sales are made on the fourth contact- 80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact

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Why is cold calling ineffectiveMore sobering statistics

• It takes 8.4 dials to reach a person and only 2% of all calls result in a meeting

• If 30% of these first meetings convert into opportunities and a sales person closes 25% of these opportunities, they will have to make 1000 calls to get one sale

• If they are pounding the phones making 50 cold calls per day, they can get one winnable sale every 20 days

• At this rate, they can acquire 12.5 new customers per year.

Why must we change?

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• How people buy has changed• Competitive landscape has

changed• Selling dynamics have changed• Information dissemination has

changed• Business communication has

changed

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How are leading B2B Sales/Marketing teams adapting?

Marketing’s ever-increasing role

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Inbound Demand Flow

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Inbound Leads

MA System – Lead Scoring/Nurture

Mkt

SQL – Sales Accepts

SQL – Sales Advanced

Closed / Won

MQL – Nurture

SQL – Stalled

Lead management

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What does a lead management process look like?

Historical flaws in marketing & sales alignment

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How marketing automation fixes this

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Multitude of tools for lead gen

Lead Analysis

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What metrics matter to lead flow?

• Strength of engagement• Buying signals• Lead score history

Lead Analysis

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Analyzing lead behavior post-capture

Lead Management

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Taking action against leads

• Sales engagement • Nurture enrollment• Feedback loop from sales• Scoring actions • CRM connectivity – Opportunity

and Lead card

Lead Routing

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Getting the leads to the right people

• Lead alerts triggered from forms, scoring or general web activity/campaign activity

• Send sales synopsis and relevant details

• Tied to scoring to keep volume within reason

Lead Management

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Establishing a feedback loop

• Capturing proper lead source codes• Visibility into key fields (Lead Status)

returned from CRM• Ensuring lead source codes are

mapped/protected in CRM

Sales Alignment

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Steps to achieve a successful process• Ownership of lead gen

(marketing)• Hand-off process• Hand-back process• Regular meetings• Marketing participation in pipeline

reviews

Integrating Marketing Data w/ CRM

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The new b2b funnel

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Performance is high with aligned orgs

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Final Thoughts

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• Human interaction (via the telephone) is increasingly valuable because fewer people engage in it

• The social web cannot sell for you and you must learn how to put sales personnel in the mix

• Technology-assisted selling through marketing automation can have dramatic revenue implications

• Sales & Marketing alignment has quickly become a de facto state of success…not a nice to have

Thank You