We were on a team call yesterday and ended-up getting on to the subject of cold calling and I was reminded that the other day I had a cold call from a telco telling me “I am paying too much for my mobile phone contract” (obviously).

Usually, I would deal with such a call head on by saying “I’m not interested” etc, but two things came to mind.

1. Cold callers have been trained how to deal with being closed-down by their “victim” - sorry, I mean “target” - so this is always difficult to overcome as they are much better at this than I am
2. I hate being cold called. I’m not alone in this, in fact in my experience there are only two types of people who think cold calling is okay i) cold callers, and ii) people selling cold calling training.

So I decided to do my own individual version of this ( https://lnkd.in/ecgw7iGU ) and the conversation went like this:

Caller: hello
Me: hello
Caller: Hello, this is xxxxx calling from xxxxx mobile
Me: hello
Caller: can you hear me
Me: yes, sorry, please continue
Caller: as I was saying, this is xxxxx calling fro
Me: hello
Caller: hello, I think there’s a problem with the line 
Me: no, I can hear you perfectly, please start again
Caller: okay, my name is xxxxx and I’m calling from
Me: silence
Caller: hello, are you there?
Me: yes
Caller: can you hear me?
Me: yes
Caller: silence
Me: silence
Caller: hello
Me: hello, I thought you’d gone, the line went quiet
Caller:…

You get the idea.

My point is that if you are still relying on cold calling to deliver meaningful relationships and revenue you are probably 20 years too late.

It’s dead. It’s over. We should all try and have some fun to finally put a stop to all this nonsense.

#socialselling #pipeline #digitaltransformation #digitalselling #socialorg #socialmediastrategy