Another nail in the cold calling coffin! -- Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch to ban trainee brokers from making cold calls, Tim Hughes

Have you seen the film Boiler Room?

You have a bunch of stockbrokers selling people stock they don't need and using cold calling and manipulation to do it. The stockbrokers make obscene amounts of money, while leaving a wake of misery as marriages break up, etc.

I'm not saying that your typical cold calling / telemarketing team are doing the same, but I do know that cold calling

1. Pisses people off

2. Destroys brand equity

3. Does not build relationships

4. Does not scale

If I went to the board and said

"We are going to use a prospecting method, that will piss our customers off, probably destroy the little brand equity we have out there in the market, it won't build any form of relationship and it's time consuming and inefficient when compared to modern methods"

The Board would kick me out.

And finally, Merrill Lynch Wealth Management unit is banning it.

“We are leaning much more heavily on leads and referrals from the broader company,” Merrill President Andy Sieg said in April. “There is also an opportunity to be much more modern in terms of the way we are reaching out to prospective clients.”

The revamped program is intended to bring the firm’s prospecting techniques into the digital era and boost completion rates.

"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling." Said Mr. Sieg

And there you have it, using social gets you a better response than cold calling.

What results could we get with social selling?

In order to be effective on social and indeed in the world of business (particularly B2B) being social is increasingly a prerequisite.

Some clients that we have worked with have seen some truly staggering results which might make you raise an eyebrow, but they are true.

one client generated over 100x as many qualified meetings from their social activity as they did from their marketing department

a sales team generated over $520,000 in revenue and and additional $520,000 in open pipeline per person in just 6 months

activated sales teams create great content and huge visibility - we have an instance where each salesperson in a team was generating over 350 engagements per month and over 100,000 views on their content

sales and technical teams creating content provide the opportunity to produce a groundswell of micro-niched tactical documents specifically to target particular organisations & industries facing particular challenges. No marketing department is capable of competing with this mechanism.

more than 40 quality candidates applying for a role as a direct result of a single post on social media

The results of doing this can be outstanding but this is not a tactical change. This is not a “training programme for some of the team” this is a significant transformation (in the truest sense of the world) in the organisation which not only makes it more competitive today…but every day from now forwards.

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In shift for program that dates back to 1945, recruits will now be directed to use internal referrals and LinkedIn messages to prospect for new clients

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bank-of-americas-merrill-lynch-to-ban-trainee-brokers-from-making-cold-calls-11621850400?st=93morydfm9vzflh&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink