Cold Calling vs Warm Calling

Friday, November 27 2009

Social Media, Sales 2.0, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn; you’ve heard all about them, but have you thought about seeing what they could do for your product and/or services? I recently put them to the test and surprised myself on two counts:

1. I quickly attracted like minded decision makers, which in turn drove up the number of visitors to our website

2. People were open and honest (for the most part)

Yes there are a number of people participating with hidden agendas (some groups more than others), but you also have a lot of people wanting to contribute in a meaningful way. By meaningful, these are people who contribute or instigate posts in forums and are either experts in their field, or people wanting to know more about a particular subject; a very enjoyable and rewarding way of contributing to your market niche.

If you want to know more about social media, or Sales 2.0 as it’s also known, I can highly recommend this (I would also urge you to sign up to this valuable free resource):
Sales 2.0: Too early to be useful? for more information.

I have been particularly impressed by LinkedIn, which to me, appears to be leading the field in the Business-to-Business space with a growing number of highly focussed discussion Groups (there are some excellent sales & marketing Groups here).

Here’s an example of an excellent post on LinkedIn’s ‘Linking Sales Leaders’ Group titled:
Do you think it is better to cold-call in person or by phone? And WHY? Do not say "it depends." You must pick ONE answer only please. From Laura Gross at no, no, no, Yes Inc.

This is a great example of how to write a post that makes people want to respond (it attracted 47 responses in the first two weeks, mainly from senior sales professionals). You can see Laura said you must pick ONE answer, no ifs, no buts; which created a very lively debate that everyone enjoyed participating in.

So, as you can see, huge marketing budgets are no longer necessary to be effective, you can achieve impressive results through investing some time and effort in an intelligent way.

Speaking of cold calling, social media and LinkedIn in particular are a great way to network and develop relationships. A growing number of people are saying it could be the beginning of the end for cold calling (and the birth of warm calling)!

virtualCONTACT’s social media tools allows you to significantly improve your lead generation and prospecting results; and remember all this is currently free; all you have to do is spend 20 minutes a day contributing in a meaningful way and I’m sure that you will have convinced yourself in your first week that you’re well on the way to becoming an eSales Executive and waving goodbye to cold calling!

Call us today and we’ll show you step-by-step how to replace cold calling with Social Media’s warm lead generation.