Is Cold Calling Right for You?

3 Questions to Ask Before Cold Calling

Cold calling is an age-old form of gaining traction, and it’s often treated as a go-to method for lead generation. Although it’s high and engagement and is an easier way to up-sell, is it right your particular organization?

There’s no simple answer for this one. At the end of the day, cold calling is just another tool to get people to the top of the sales funnel and can either be an exceptional method or near-useless. Just like any tool, it’s often only useful if the situation calls for it. Before trying to use cold calling for lead generation, there are a few questions that need to be answered.

Is cold calling the best lead generation tool right now at my disposal?

It wouldn’t make any sense to drive a nail into a wall using a screwdriver. It also wouldn’t make sense for a B2C Sass company to focus on cold calling potential users for their product. But on the other hand, a B2B SaaS company intending to sell to large enterprises would almost have to do cold calling to get any traction.

Survey of all the tools at your organization’s disposal before automatically turning to cold calling.

Do I have any idea how to cold call?

Cold calling isn’t an easy gig. For many people who aren’t used to being put on the spot, cold calling could pose a challenge. In many ways, cold calling is akin to public speaking- one of the most common fears among Americans (about 25%).

Just like public speaking, cold calling is something anybody can get really good at with plenty of practice. A big part of practicing is simply doing it. It can be really tempting to just sit around and read 10 “Cold Calling 101” ebooks and blog posts online, but at the end of the day, nothing beats experiencing it for yourself. Preparation is key, but action is king.

Do I have the bandwidth to cold call?

Unlike other lead generation methods like cold emailing with mail merge, cold calling isn’t something you could spend 20 minutes doing every day and expect results from. If you’re spending enough time on it to see big results, it’s very time-consuming. Sourcing the contact list alone takes time. The duration of each phone call can easily last over 10 minutes. It’s a lot less scalable than cold emailing.

Just like cold emailing, cold calling can end up becoming a numbers game. If you planned to call 100 contacts in one day, and 50 of them picked up the phone to chat with you for 10 minutes, that’s already 500 minutes spent on the phone (not accounting for dialing time and everything in between).

With that said, it’s vital that anybody considering taking on cold calling keep in mind that with cold calling, you’re either all in or all out. Cold calling eventually becomes a numbers game, and you need to commit to it if you want to be successful.

When running any business, a startup especially, resources are scarce and time is your most important one. After answering these vital questions, you’ll have a better idea of whether or not cold calling is your best lead generation method.

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