Phone rings
- HER: Hello. Widgets R Us. How may I direct your call?
- ME: May I speak to your IT Director please?
- HER: (suspicious tone) Which one? We have a department full of them.
- ME: Uh…the one who does the troubleshooting
- HER: (annoyed tone) They all do the troubleshooting. Hang on. I’ll see who’s back there.
- ME: Thank you.
37 seconds go by. The music from final Jeopardy plays in my head.
- HIM: Widgets R Us, this is Him. How can I help you?
- ME: (gives elevator speech in pleasant tone)…Do you have any IT issues we can help you with?
- HIM: (heavy sigh) We already have someone who does our IT. (Hangs up)
Well, THAT went well.
My cold call game stinks. Even if I make it past the gate keeper, more often than not, I have to leave a voicemail. We all know it’s a numbers game. In May, I made 22 calls, talked to 7 people, got 2 appointments and 0 jobs. Also in May, I sent 61 emails, got 24 replies, made 6 appointments, and got 3 jobs. Given that data sample I’m wondering, has the cold call been replaced by the cold email?
Pros to cold email:
- The message gets right to the decision maker
- They can be written and sent anytime 24/7/365
- If you are a better writer than speaker, email is more comfortable
- If you get a reply, you have time to stop, think, and gather intelligence on the prospect through any number of sources: LinkedIn, Google, the prospect’s website, etc.
There is one big con to cold email: it’s easily ignored. You don’t even know if it was received, much less read; unless you put a read receipt on it and that can annoy your recipient.
When cold emailing, here are some things I do:
- Use as few words in the subject line as possible
- Open with something or someone in common to start the conversation pleasantly
- Write a sentence about a project I’m working on and how it occurred to me that his company might have the same challenge; then ask if he’d like to hear more
- Carefully proofread; especially when sending more than six at a time. I look for mismatched information (e.g., Does the email address match the decision maker’s name?)
- I incorporate the company’s name in the body of the message so the email is easily found in my sent folder
When I Googled, “What is better cold calling or cold emailing?” I got back a page full of blog posts and most of them suggested doing both; which makes sense to me. Sending a prospect an email gives me an excuse to call her and ask, “Did you have an opportunity to read it? Do you have any questions?”
Is this one-two punch the best option? No. Face to face is. Relationships are best built looking someone in the eye, asking her what her company does, thinking about how what my company does can help her, and brainstorming what we can accomplish together.
Do you have to make cold calls? Do you prefer cold emailing? Have you tracked data on which activity gets you better results? Please share your experience in the comments section.