Finding New Business Today

By Dave Kurlan

I’ve been selling for 50 years.  When I began in sales, I had to knock on doors for 8 hours per day to schedule 3 evening sales calls.  I hated it.  It was such a waste of time.  It was demotivating.  It was dangerous.  It sucked.  It was a necessary evil.  50 years ago, I decided that the only way to make it work for me, was to get so good at prospecting, that I would only need to spend an hour per day instead of 8 hours per day doing it.  I worked like hell for 30 days to perfect my prospecting and got it down to 1 hour per day.  I then translated that to the phone and later to B2B sales.  I’ve been training salespeople to sell by phone for 38 years and I have news for you.  The phone still works – better than anything else – but you must be good enough at it to get your prospect’s attention and get them engaged in ten seconds.

By now, you have lots of experience either using or being on the receiving end of the available tools for starting conversations with potential prospects:

• Cold Calling by Phone
• Cold Calling by Walking In
• Sending personalized Emails
• Sending automated emails as part of a workflow
• Sending personalized InMail messages in LinkedIn
• Sending automated InMail messages as part of a workflow in LinkedIn
• Outsourcing your outbound to companies that specialize in one or more of the above
• Hiring a BDR team to perform a combination of the above
• Using a 3^rd-Party service to automate the dialing and salespeople talk to prospects who answer the call
• Following up on Inbound Lead Gen efforts from advertising, blogging, videos, etc.

Let’s categorize the above tools into the following categories:

Phone-Based

Web-Based

When poorly executed, and most of it is indeed, very bad, these methods simply demonstrate that the law of diminishing returns is at play.  If you use any of the above methods, you know that your rate of conversion is decreasing.  For example, at Kurlan & Associates, my Blog, Understanding the Sales Force, is the primary source of inbound leads. Yet, even with something as helpful, educational, and non-salesy as the 2,000 sales articles I have written over the last 16 years, it too has seen a diminishing rate of return.  Subscriber engagement is down by more than 50% and leads are down by an even larger rate.

Pete Caputa, CEO of Databox, has data on the performance of lead-gen campaigns by the top Hubspot partners and his data shows that engagement and responsiveness from those campaigns are down considerably compared with prior years.

If you’re on the receiving end of such efforts, you spend as much time deleting these messages from your Inboxes as you do responding to important messages.

Over the past several years, outbound has moved from the phone to everything but the phone and while it is certainly more difficult to reach decision makers by phone than it used to be, the phone pays off for diligent, talented salespeople.  Skilled hunters do very well when prospecting by phone.  Sure, it’s easier to automate a campaign and take the lousy inbound leads that are generated, but you’re in control when you use the phone and if you’re good at it, you can quickly get a prospect’s attention, get them engaged, and if you identify an issue you can help with, schedule a meeting.  You have no such control over your web-based efforts.

My advice is to return to the basics and get retrained, or for those new to sales in the past 10 years, trained, on skillfully using the phone.