I saw this and thought, well yeah that VP is right, cold calls are annoying spam. However, based on the insane comments by all the salespeople, you’d be wrong. Like, are salespeople that out of touch with normal people?
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My hot take is… It depends. If I produce a product and call a specific business with proper preparations, like calling someone who is the correct contact point while a specific business idea in mind for the business, that isn’t really spam, as spam is about sending many unsolicited messages or call a bunch of more or less random people, but that one prepared call might be a cold call.
So for me, spam is about amount and not about how annoying it is.
As someone who’s had to do cold calls as part of a sales pipeline,
- it’s spam,
- I wouldn’t say it’s spam on LinkedIn, that’s where I tell lies to get better jobs,
- if it’s B2B, I do not feel any shame, every business is a fuck
Edit: I’ll also add that B2B cold calls do work. If you have a good product or service and approach it the right way, you can generate plenty of business this way. That said, it’s wholly a numbers game. When I was training sales agents, they’d ask me “how do I get sales like you do?” and I’d tell em simply “Make more calls.” As I said elsewhere, I’m good at this. I had a roughly 2-3% conversation rate. Understand that means if I made a hundred calls, I made two to three sales. And that’s pretty damn good. Before we were more established and could drop that model, we found that cold calling generally had around a 1.4% conversion rate. It relies on you being chipper and persistent to the point of annoyance. Some people literally do break at one point and say stuff like “Well, I need to get something, and if I sign with you, will you stop calling me?”
It was always far more enjoyable to call established leads, people who already expressed and interest and just needed help making up their mind. Better on the customer, better on the agent, a better process overall.
I don’t think that B2B cold calls are “spam”, per se, and I wouldn’t even say that most of them are truly “cold” calls. Worst case scenario, they should be warm calls. Or room temperature calls. Like, if you sell printing presses, you probably shouldn’t be calling a hair salon. But calling a local newspaper–somewhere that you know uses the product category that you sell–is reasonable.
I do take cold calls from salespeople in my current position, and my response is usually that, if they can provide a product that meets the needs of the company I work for, I’m more than happy to try it.
Regarding your number three, a lot of the time you’re cold calling some wage slave who has neither the interest nor authority to buy anything from you.
“Every business is a fuck” gets my vote, but the people you’re cold calling are not necessarily a fuck.
This is illegal in Germany by the way.
B2B cold lead generation is illegal in Germany?
Nope. Op probably referred to consumers.
