In Part-1 of this post, we’d seen why you can’t do without cold calling if you’re in the B2B technology business with relatively large ticket sizes (>$100K per deal) and narrowly defined target markets (enterprises and small businesses only, no individuals). In this Part-2, we’ll describe ways to do cold calling better and achieve manifold increase in opportunity pipelines.
In our experience, cold calling can be ineffective – if not thankless – for products and technology service lines using brochures, feature lists and capability documents. There’s a big gap between what a technology can do and what a prospective customer wants. In a crowded market, the vendor has to take the trouble to bridge this gap. That’s why we’ve seen manifold increase in opportunity pipelines when cold calling is done after creating razor-sharp marketable items supported by marketing collateral that is developed with the clear mandate that it should be suitable for an unreceptive audience. Since it’s impossible to make much headway with commoditized technology service offerings like application development maintenance, implementation, upgrade and the like, it’s important to identify business pain areas and create marketable items that specifically address them. A marketable item should immediately convey how your product or service ‘creates gain’ or ‘solves pain’. You can throw a 20 page capability document at a qualified prospect with some hope that they’d read it, but when you try that on someone who doesn’t know you or your company (and possibly has a flourishing relationship for several years with your competitors), your marketing collateral has the chance of a snowball in hell of being read. To generate leads using cold calling, you need concise items like flyers, datasheets and offering detail notes – none of them exceeding 1-2 pages – that pack a lot of punch.
At this stage, companies you reach out to are not likely to spend time with you to discuss their specific requirements, so you’ve to carry out research into business pain areas and hot industry topics as they apply to an industry on a whole, map them with respect to your company’s internal strengths, and derive a shortlist of marketable items that are signed off by your marketing, sales and delivery organizations. For example, if you pitch a shrinkage reduction offering, retailers in most parts of the world are likely to be far more interested in talking to you further than if you tried offering application development and maintenance services to a WalMart, TARGET, Tesco or a Marks & Spencers, to name a few leading retailers, and expected them to tell you that they’re looking for a shrinkage reduction solution. Once your first pitch is successful and your prospective customer asks for more information, you won’t have the luxury of then starting to prepare custom collateral and getting back after 2-3 weeks, so you have to ensure that you’ve some boilerplate material before you begin your cold calling campaign. Agreed that skills and bandwidth required to create such marketable items and develop the associated marketing collateral might not be available within your company, so you might need to seek external assistance.
Apart from cold calling, inbound marketing presents a “next generation” practice to generate leads. Blogs, search engine marketing, landing pages, abandonment tracking and abandonment remarketing are some useful inbound marketing tools that can be used to create a “pull effect” in order to supplement the traditional “push” based methods of outbound marketing like email marketing and cold calling. Since customers are increasingly tiring of the growing barrage of cold calls from high-tech inside sales teams, inbound marketing is not only likely to gain further traction going forward but might even prove indispensable for many categories of high-tech products and services. Having said that, if you’re in the B2B technology business, outbound marketing will not slip out of your marketing mix anytime soon. Inbound marketing can at best supplement your email marketing and cold calling efforts.
If we get down to the brass tack, success in cold calling depends upon the ability of its practitioners to empathize with prospective customers, understand local market nuances, think on their feet to capitalize upon subtle cues, spot unstated requirements, communicate effectively to a largely-unreceptive audience and, above all, overcome the fear of rejection that comes abundantly with the territory. If you belong to the majority of humankind that lacks these skills, cold calling is not for you. However, for those of you that belong to the minority, accept cold calling as a major contributor to your firm’s success. And, if your field sales people tell you that 50% of leads generated by inside sales are of no use, don’t hesitate to point out that, in their own admission, the other 50% is useful, so they have enough leads to run with and close orders!
For more details of our experience and insight with creation of marketable offerings, development of related marketing collateral, designing and executing lead generation campaigns via outbound and inbound marketing, please look up the following articles:
http://www.gtm360.com/Marketable_Offerings.htm
http://sketharaman.com/blog/2009/06/18/why-inside-sales-guys-dont-stick-around-for-long/
http://www.gtm360.com/Boost_Inside_Sales_Effectiveness.htm
Happy Selling!