Book More Meetings by Hunting Like a Hawk

Inbound is only for the birds.

I’ll tell you why I said that, share the history of Inbound, explain Hawks, Cuckoos, culture and approach, the new problem that must be addressed, and what you should do next.

It all started with this 2-minute video rant that I posted on LinkedIn. Please take 2 minutes to watch so I don’t have to repeat myself.

Be a Hawk.

Make your own noise.

Squawk to your heart’s content.

Control the number of quality meetings you book.

Nelson Fernandes, a licensed Baseline Selling practitioner in India, made the following point in his comment:

A hawk never squawks at random. Before it makes a move, it circles the field, studies the terrain, picks its target, and only then commits. That is why the dive works.

Compare that to what most salespeople call cold calling. No research, no relevance, no clue who they are talking to. That is not a hawk. That is a pigeon flying into a glass window at full speed, then wondering why the prospect hung up. (But maybe thats a Dave rant for another day)

So yes, get on the phones. But do the hawk’s homework first. Know their industry, their likely problem, and have a point of view ready. The goal is for the person who picks up to think “finally, someone who gets my world,” not “oh no, someone is selling to me.”

One is a predator with precision. The other is just noise from the backyard.

Anthony Gilliam expanded on the analogy with his comment:

Maybe this is not happening because there are cuckoos pretending to be hawks.

The cuckoo lays its eggs in other birds’ nests so that other birds will incubate and feed their young.

This seems to be the issue with sales today, as sales reps have been raised by another department feeding them leads.

Can they still be called hawks and expected to switch into a hunter role when they have been treated like cuckoos their whole experience?

On some level, this is more than just a training problem, especially when you consider the additional challenges created by digital preference and upbringing.

Brad Ferguson pointed out that:

Now sales leaders have to deal with Call Reluctance and coach their people on that weakness. If they don’t, calls will be ineffective because salespeople don’t believe in making those kinds of calls.

Call reluctance used to be an enormous problem and derailed many salespeople from making cold calls. As they say in movies and TV shows, “it’s baaack…”

I’d like to address another issue associated with hunting like a Hawk.

Inbound came to be in the years prior to the financial crisis of 2009-2010. The recovery was slow and it was the perfect low cost solution for a sluggish economy. Hubspot was the first major inbound company and over a period of several years, they and others like them proclaimed that:

• Cold-Calling was dead
• Consultative Selling was dead
• Solution Selling was dead
• Sales Process was dead
• Selling was dead

All of this was to be replaced by Inbound. Until Hubspot proceeded to hire hundreds of salespeople. So much for that narrative. Inbound leads were just leads. Salespeople were still needed to convert them and way too many of those leads were simply awful.

Fast forward several more years and most companies were utilizing inbound in one or more of the following ways in order to stand out:

• LinkedIn content (like my video above)
• Email Newsletters and other content
• Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok for Business
• Content (like what you’re reading right now)
• The original promise – SEO to make it easier to get found

But when everyone is doing the same thing, and enough are doing it poorly with spammy messaging and content, nobody stands out.

That brings us to now. And a major challenge that companies will face.

With the exception of outbound BDRs, most of your salespeople, regardless of their title or role, have not had to make cold-calls for a decade or more. Veteran salespeople who have been selling for at least fifteen years have forgotten how to make effective cold calls. And their calls might not have been effective when they were actually doing it! Think that’s a stupid comment by me? Think it’s like riding a bike? OK, head to a driving range or a batting cage after not swinging a club or a bat for 15 years and see how it goes haha!

And then there are the salespeople who entered sales in the past 10-15 years via some other role than outbound BDR. They never had to make cold calls.

Pick all that apply from of the following 6 possibilities:

1. Lazy
2. Entitled
3. Comfortable
4. Shy
5. Passive
6. Lucky

All of this points to a critical need for training and coaching on:

• Proper introduction
• Resistance lowering
• Messaging
• Pace
• Tonality and volume
• Discussion points
• Call objectives
• Objection handling
• Getting meetings booked

Make noise. But do it the way Nelson described — circle first, study the terrain, pick the right target, then dive. Anything less is just backyard squawking.

If your culture is full of cuckoos who have been fed leads for years, stop pretending they will magically become hunters. Change the culture or change the people. There is no third option that works.

And if your team has spent the last decade-plus hiding behind monitors, accept the hard truth: most of them either never learned how to cold-call or have forgotten. Call reluctance is real. Skill atrophy is real. Hoping they “just start dialing” is not a strategy.

Train them. Coach them. Hold them accountable for hunting.

Or keep waiting for inbound to magically produce the meetings you need while your competitors start circling.

Hawks don’t wait for the field to come to them.

We would be happy to discuss the many ways we can be of help here.