I came across a webinar from a sales consultancy in the US which announced that Cold Calling was dead and went on to explain what had replaced it.

It looked interesting; I have cold called many times in my career and it’s an activity that I have always regarded as absolutely necessary in the sales process unless you work for a company that is in the happy position of attracting large volumes of (inbound) enquiries.

Cold calling is not what most people would regard as an enjoyable activity unless (again) you work for a company that offers products and services which result in a high ratio of sales to calls.

So the assertion in the title intrigued me. Is there really another way? I decided to invest 60 minutes of my time on a Saturday night to view the webinar and learn.

What I found was in fact that cold calling was not dead, but it was replaced by “intelligent” cold calling. There are a number of tools available which help salespeople identify prospects which fit the profile of prospect you are looking for, identify the buyers in the prospect organisation, help you generate edocuments which you send to the buyer, and alert you when the buyer has looked at your edocument; the idea being you call the buyer when his or her level of interest is at their highest. And if they are not interested, you don’t waste valuable time calling, but move on.

Apparently this process and use of these tools has helped companies which adopt this method significantly increase their sales, so said the company selling this methodology.

This type of intelligent cold calling in my opinion is not new, but the tools available, and the availability and combination of Linkedin profiles, RSS feeds, and access to databases such as Hoovers and Dunn & Bradstreet has made the process much more efficient.

I think intuitively this process is more suited to big-ticket sales because of the investment in time required per call. Can it be applied to high volume businesses such as Nuage? If anyone has an opinion I would be very interested to learn about it.