I saw this and thought, well yeah that VP is right, cold calls are annoying spam. However, based on the insane comments by all the salespeople, you’d be wrong. Like, are salespeople that out of touch with normal people?
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Regarding your number three, a lot of the time you’re cold calling some wage slave who has neither the interest nor authority to buy anything from you.
“Every business is a fuck” gets my vote, but the people you’re cold calling are not necessarily a fuck.
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I don’t think that B2B cold calls are “spam”, per se, and I wouldn’t even say that most of them are truly “cold” calls. Worst case scenario, they should be warm calls. Or room temperature calls. Like, if you sell printing presses, you probably shouldn’t be calling a hair salon. But calling a local newspaper–somewhere that you know uses the product category that you sell–is reasonable.
I do take cold calls from salespeople in my current position, and my response is usually that, if they can provide a product that meets the needs of the company I work for, I’m more than happy to try it.
Number 2 is a great point. That’s what I hate about LinkedIn and why I only use it to look/apply for jobs and occasionally scroll through if I’m super bored.
My experience in my current job are endless cold emails from salespeople who don’t even understand that I have no use for their product. I work in a field where I have to research a lot of different equipment/parts for my client, but that I don’t use myself. I had to request a catalog from one of these places which involved giving my work email address. Now I get endless emails about how they’ll ‘be in my area’ (LOL no you won’t because I work remotely across the country from both my company and my client) and they want to demonstrate their new product…which I don’t use because I don’t work in that field. Makes me laugh every time and yes it is very spammy.
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It’s hard to get there on the phone now, though, if you don’t already have a name and phone number. You can probably get a name off LinkedIn, but a main phone number for a company probably won’t get you anywhere now since a lot of companies don’t have receptionists anymore. You’re lucky if the phone tree has a dial by name option. I’m glad I’m not in that kind of business anymore.
I’ll also add that B2B cold calls do work. If you have a good product or service and approach it the right way, you can generate plenty of business this way. That said, it’s wholly a numbers game.
You don’t even need a good product or service when you play the numbers game, you just need higher numbers!
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Yup, in the sales world it’s accepted truth that you have to cold call. That said, in my sales position I’ve just switched to personalized email outreach for first contact and if anyone asks, oh of course I’m making calls. That probably only works in certain applications, but I’m making the numbers I need to.
B2B contact is generally fine, unless you’re going to be a stalker about it. Had one the other day who messaged me on linkedin with her pitch and included the standard ‘If you have time and this is interesting feel free to reach out’ I saw the e-mail pop up just as I was stepping away to have lunch, as it was the standard lunch time. Before I even got downstairs (work from home) my company’s calling me out of the blue to tell me they have a call for me from this person. I declined the call, as we both agreed it was just business spam and after lunch responded and let them know we’d never be interested in their services. ‘Feel free to get in touch if you’re interested’ and ‘I’m going to track down your company’s phone number and call you 30 seconds after I send this’ just don’t vibe for me.
more enjoyable to call established leads, people who already expressed and interest and just needed help making up their mind
Those calls aren’t cold.
Anyone who is so outgoing/extroverted to think it’s normal to just go up to anyone and interrupt their day with whatever they feel like, probably sees this as just another topic about which to converse.
Everyone else doesn’t particularly like strangers interrupting their day, and especially when it’s just to take their money.
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Anyone calling me I don’t know is spam, and I never answer. Text, email, or snail mail if you need to contact me so I can decide if interaction will develop further.
This is illegal in Germany by the way.
B2B cold lead generation is illegal in Germany?
Nope. Op probably referred to consumers.
I hate how this person writes. Are they practicing freeform poetry or something?
You need to make your slop
accessible to the 70 year old CEOs
in the audience by double-spacing
In reality it’s just a tactic to make your short paragraph grab 10 times as much screen real estate
Sales people are just one step above rapists in my book.
I started keeping a list of companies that cold call me, it will take a lot for me to ever do business with any of them.
The worse are the lead gen companies. Those assholes call me multiple times a day even after I tell them not to call and report them.
My hot take is… It depends. If I produce a product and call a specific business with proper preparations, like calling someone who is the correct contact point while a specific business idea in mind for the business, that isn’t really spam, as spam is about sending many unsolicited messages or call a bunch of more or less random people, but that one prepared call might be a cold call.
So for me, spam is about amount and not about how annoying it is.