When I first left B School my only ambition was to do hardcore marketing. But my first job was as a key accounts manager in a software company. The role was to create your own leads, call them and close the deal. To do something I did not really want to was a big de-motivator. And to do it by cold calling was the worst thing I thought could have happened to me. But today, four years later, I have clearly understood why that wasn’t so bad a thing after all.
Cold calling as Wikipedia describes it is as below:
“Cold calling is the process of approaching prospective customers or clients, typically via telephone, who were not expecting such an interaction. The word "cold" is used because the person receiving the call is not expecting a call or has not specifically asked to be contacted by a sales person.”
This is more or less describes what most of think it is. Every Cold Calling agent is given with a list of leads and then is given a target to finish. So we assume that the cold caller picks up the sheet and dials one number after the other pitching what the company offers. This may have been true until some time ago. But recently cold calling has out-grown its definition. It has become an intelligent process. A cold call can no longer be successfully completed by an “Audiobot”. Pre-recorded messages may have already become a thing of the past. Marketers worldwide have understood that to annoy your customer is not the best way to sell your product. So what is actually happening now?
A typical cold caller in a B2B market today, does not pick up the sheet and start calling. The first task is preliminary research. They research a company on the internet. If the target has a website, then half the work is done. The caller collects as much information as possible and designs his/her pitch. Now once the pitch is designed, they try to locate the right person to talk to. In