Garth's World

Cold Calling is not even on the Endangered List

Al Gore inventing the Internet by SOCIALisBETTER via Flickr

As part of my furious promotion of the Jigsaw Sales Jam event, I had a recent conversation with Steve Richard, co-founder of a sales training and outsourcing group called Vorsight.  Because I had never spoken with him, I did a little research beforehand (OK- I clicked a link in his email signature that led me to an article he had written) in order to see what kind of cat he was. What I found was Cold Calling Lives, which is the best commentary I have read on a question that has been bandied about ad nauseam since Al Gore invented the internet: Is the Cold Call Dead?

The New Dalai Garth

Bill Cosby via last.fm

Is it just me, or is 2010 so far all about lousy health? It’s true that I have just spent the last 2 hours wading through a mountain of “Explanation of Benefits” (which is a gross perversion of both words) documents while I attempt to recover from Bill Cosby’s Mushmouth syndrome after a particularly lengthy trip to the dentist. And I have two kids in pre-school and we’re all surviving a “real” east coast winter for the first time, which makes for almost daily visits to the doctor to treat the green plague. So maybe I am not a scientific survey sample. But it seems like everyone I come in contact with (and that’s a ton of people) is stifling coughs, has a raspy voice, or is just completing their third round of antibiotics. The H1N1 didn’t kill everyone all at once; we’re just going to all slowly retreat into self imposed quarantine.  Good thing our fearless leaders can agree on a course of action for remedying the situation…OK, enough of that. I assume you don’t come here to listen to me gripe about personal maladies -that’s what Twitter is for. What I really wanted to report on is a topic that is a daily fact of life for the busy salesperson (redundant, I know) and is closely related to poor health: stress.

It’s 2010. Make a Decision Already!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

People that have never been in sales (particularly finance guys and lawyers, for some reason) always simplify the entire sales process down to the final stages of deal negotiation. They glorify your job as one money call after the other where all you have to do is hold tight on price, fend off the competition jackals and watch the money roll in. Oh to be so lucky. In my experience, the true enemy of the salesperson (besides self doubt, time, the IRS, head-in-the-clouds management, faulty products, traffic cops and the airline industry) is corporate inertia: where the customer just decides to do nothing.

When you are in a dogfight with the competition (assuming you both are reasonably well informed), it means that the customer is going to make a choice and actually buy something. Someone is going home with the PO. After the initial sting of receiving the call that is the customer’s equivalent of the “Dear John” letter wears off, I would rather have lost a deal to another company than to realize that I had wasted my time chasing butterflies. Sales Managers take note: if the “Lack of DM Decision” tab is your team’s favorite reason for deals exiting the pipeline, you’re in trouble. This ain’t hockey: a tie gets no points.

So how do you avoid this situation?