Depends what you mean by cold calling.
Some sales managers set a quota for cold calling because they think this is what grows the business.
Let's confine this to the sales of engineered products, pumps, valves, instruments, mixers etc. engineering services and so on.
In this area we have the "sales engineer".
There are two types of "sales engineers":
1) the "I can sell anything to anybody" sales man who is trying to sell one of the above. These are the professional sales people who just need a car, an expense account and a catalogue and will use the same methods to sell the above as they would to sell biscuits or time share. (except, most engineering sales are to engineers and most sales techniques are based on emotion.
2) the engineer who is thoroughly versed in the product or service and who has been sent on a sales training course to help him sell.
These are the least suitable for monkey see monkey do read from the catalogue and flip the desk top flip charts and "use the product selector" that are increasingly a part of the Global single source strategic alliance business models (that are, in my opinion, responsible for the "70% of flowmeters are the wrong size or the wrong technology" sales of flowmeters or any other product, if it comes to that).
The latter is very very uncomfortable with cold calling. Especially as most such calls are to engineers.
But with either type, it isn't just about how comfortable either is with cold calling it's about how effective it is.
Usually cold calling is picking on some company and calling at reception unannounced and with no appointment. Most times all you'll get is a compliments slip to prove you've been there. Sometimes you'll get a name of a contact and then you can try and make an appointment. In some cases you'll manage to talk your way into having somebody, usually the wrong somebody because the receptionist will usually pick on someone that is a known soft touch, not someone relevant (of which there may be no-one anyway because its the wrong company to call on).
In this case it means some engineer is dragged away from whatever he is doing to talk with someone he doesn't know about something he doesn't have a use for.
What's the point?
Management want to grow the business. This comes from growing the market or from the competition. many think cold calling is generating new business. Rot.
80% of the sales come from 10-20% of the clients. Growth comes from more sales. The logical place to look is within the 20% that already provide 80% of your business and you want to keep the competition from getting a look in.
The majority of the rest comes from occasional sales to the remaining 10-20% and then there are new clients.
New clients come from marketing initiatives or sales campaigns designed to generate new interest; requests for literature questions asked and even requests for quotes.
Now factor in:
Most salesmen on commission (and especially distributors) will sell the easiest thing to sell and are worried about their end of the month figures.
The easiest sales are of the same product in the same application to the same client.
Next easiest is where you change any one of the above excepting that new products, new applications and new clients will none of them generate short term results.
The very worst thing to waste time on is cold calling.
Now the salesman should have a responsibility to find new business. But cold calling isn't the way, especially not in the era of the internet. He is most comfortable selling existing products for proven applications to new clients. The easiest way to do this is called buffer selling. You take a proven application with one client and then head for the competition. This is the easiest because the competition thinks the only way to stay ahead is to not be left behind so if they learn their competitors (not necessary to name them) are now using product A then they will be more inclined to want to see what product A is all about and maybe buy.
So against all this you have management and commission based salesmen aligned in wanting to hit the end of the month targets. Management may also want to see growth. They have to see an ROI on R&D which means they have to take a proportion of the salesmen's efforts to sell new products. That is a long term return on the salesmen's efforts and must be managed.
So all in all I can think of lots of much better things to do with the sales effort than set quota's for unqualified cold calls (i.e. just call at any convenient business on route for a comps slip and tick the box). Calls by appointment are far to be preferred and structured calls better still.
Since most salesmen spend 1 in 5 writing reports, for the remaining 4, 3 will be spent with existing clients.There isn't room in the remaining 1 for cold calls. Except it isn't 1 because we also have to take out for sales meetings holidays sickies etc.
And what is left is too valuable to waste cold calling.
Most engineers would recognise this as a waste of time and resist doing it. Most fo the rest also recognise it as a waste of time but are happy to waste time if they meet quotas.
JMW
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