How You Can Reduce B2B Cold Calls Using Social Media

Posted by Colm Hannon on 07, November 2011 with No Comments

I don’t know a single person who likes cold calling. I do know lots of sales leaders who believe in it as an important part of the sales process and let’s be honest the stats don’t lie; for many businesses cold calling has and does produce sales results that can’t be ignored. I’ve received plenty of training on how to cold call over the years – ‘sell the meeting, not the product’ and all that jazz. I’ve arranged literally hundreds of meetings via cold calling that in turn led to sales and although I saw it as a chore at the time, I did benefit from the resulting sales. So cold calling can work and can and does turn into sales and revenue but the downside of cold calling is that not everyone is on the end of the phone when you call them and can waste a lot of staff time. It is also much harder to add value to a stranger down the phone when you are borrowing their time without their prior consent and interrupting their busy day. Cold calling must be the least favourite task most sales people have to do followed closely by filing travel expenses!

In B2B, the purpose of cold calling is usually to secure a meeting that leads to a sale, and unless you speak to someone on the phone, it is unlikely that they will meet you without being convinced by you to do so. Wouldn’t it be great to secure meetings without wasting time phoning people that don’t answer?

I can honestly say that since launching eSocialMedia over two years ago we haven’t made a single cold call in all that time and we work with many of the biggest brands in the World, and if I wanted to attend 20 new business meetings next week I could, let me explain how…

We sell to business leaders and our services require people to trust us enough to tell us their business challenges and let us into their corporate secrets regarding what is going wrong. Based on them telling us their challenges we can give them advice that fixes their problems by using online social interaction. These meetings where people tell us their challenges are critical to our sales and they come from word of mouth recommendations (online and offline) or from requests to meet online following a blog post like this one. Let me give you a couple of examples of how it can work:

Example 1

We run an invite only face to face roundtable think tank with our partners Oasis Search called the Direct Resourcing Think Tank. Attendees are recruitment leaders from FTSE 250 companies and we discuss their challenges of working with their business leaders and attracting, convincing, hiring and on-boarding talent. The attendees from the face to face meetings then join a members-only Linkedin group where the discussion continues online. In the meetings we try to add value and offer advice and they mostly solve each others’ problems and thank us for facilitating the conversation. As a result of adding value in the meetings and online people remember us, like us, and recommend us to people in their company or people they know at other companies, they often meet us themselves.

Example 2

Here is a list of things you could do when communicating with people online that you didn’t previously know (kind of like online cold calling without the engaged tone):

· Use social media monitoring tools to listen to what your target customers are talking about online and find out where they are interacting online.

· Create content on your blog or on your social channels related to what they are talking about that also adds value to the conversation

· If relevant to the conversation share content with the target audience.

· After adding value engage them in further online conversation about what they are interested in.

· Doing this means that you are engaging with hundreds of even thousands of people online instead of listening to an engaged tone on the phone.

· Adding good content and having these conversations will lead people to ask what you do and if they are interested they will recommend a meeting with them or someone they know. There is a knack to this that we teach people in our training sessions.

· Within two hours you will have sourced more meetings than if you had been cold calling for meetings over the same time period.

The two examples are different in that in Example 1 we built it and they came. We brought the people to us by providing a conversational space and they came to us via word of mouth. We added value online and offline and when we did they asked to meet us or recommend that we meet people that they know.

In Example 2 we found them and went after them to add value to them. We found the people online first and then listened to them and then engaged them in relevant conversations through sharing relevant information with them and they found it interesting enough to ask us to meet up or to recommend us to their friends.

Today we currently have more people who want to meet than we have time in the week and ironically our challenge is now that we are over networked and we have almost too many people to meet and we need to spend more time closing live opportunities (time to hire more people). It shows that by spending time online adding value in either your own conversational space or in someone else’s you can generate more meetings than if you spent the same amount of time cold calling and it is way more fun and a lot less soul destroying.

What do you think of the impact of the emergence of social media on cold calling? Do you have a similar viewpoint? Or does your company still prefer to use cold calling over social media? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Have your say below in the comments section or let me know your thoughts on the subject @ColmHannon or Colm.Hannon@esocialmedia.co.uk.

Please feel free to look at my other articles on:

3 ways to use social media to source quality candidates

The Enterprise Social Media Bar Analogy

How Social Media Can Help Insurance Underwriters and Brokers