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Cold Calling or Using the Telephone for Success: Is Prospecting that Scary? By Philippe Lavie, President, KeyRoad Enterprises In this article, you will discover complaints sales people and their organizations have in identifying and securing qualified leads.

• I am always amazed to hear sales people complain about how difficult it is to build their pipeline and therefore meet or exceed their revenue target. I often hear gripes like:
• Marketing is sending me poor leads and I am wasting my time going after them.
• Prospects don’t call me even though we have a terrific product feature set advertised all over the place.
• I call new prospects but they never return my calls
• I can’t get anyone on the phone to present what I offer with players that can buy from me.

Upon review of these pipelines, I find that few have qualified leads. I am therefore astonished when sales people act surprised when they are not meeting or exceeding their quarterly and yearly revenue target.

Achieving sales goals and meeting revenue target are a sales person’s responsibility. It is part of the job definition. We, as sales people, have no excuses at the end of year if we have not reached our goals and made the money we want to make. Whatever lead marketing or any other part of the organization comes up with is simply icing on the cake. Therefore, it is our responsibility to prospect and create the opportunities we will need to meet our objectives.

Even though cold calling appears to be the least effective method of prospecting, the use of the telephone is paramount to all these methods.

What is the common denominator? The Telephone

Whether you cold call, warm call, or hot call, there is one tool you will use: the telephone. Unfortunately, here is what a telephone looks like in the mind of a sales person when cold or warm calling:

And if you are a sales person, then you know what I am talking about. Fear of rejection, being a bother to the prospect, or forcing a solution they may not need, are some of the psychological reasons people resent using the phone. Is it any wonder then why sales people dread picking up this tool to build their pipeline?

So what the sales person does is to rely on marketing to create leads and engage in any and all activities aside from the using telephone in attempt to create opportunities. Unfortunately, to be successful, a sales person has to create leads.

What are leads?

For under-performing sales people with below quota performance, every prospect, that calls in or with whom they have a beginning of a conversation, becomes a hot prospect in their pipeline. For companies that participate in trade shows, every person that scans their business card is also a strong qualified lead, right? The challenge is, at times, the prospect looks like this.

My question is: Does this look like a professional with the ability to buy what you have to sell? Does he have power to move the buying process forward? Can he, more probably than not, access unbudgeted and unallocated funds to pay for what you have to sell? Unlikely, I would say.

Never the less, pipelines are full of such leads. As soon as a prospect calls or expresses any interest in your product features, (s)he becomes a qualified one, with a smiling face and great potential, right!?