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Fallacy of the 30 Second B2B Cold Call
B2B Cold-Calls Don't Work
Too often SDR Leadership sells the fantasy that a 30-second phone call with the right hook will get a prospect to a meeting with the sales team. What most don’t realize is that they are mainly getting prospects who are the outliers or exceptions.
A simple stat, cold-call connect rates between 1% and 3%, confirms that these are outliers. Viewed another way, 97% of the prospects that met your target ICP criteria are not reachable. Is this any way to run a critical business function, where we ignore 97% of the addressable market?
The reason most organizations fall in love with a cold-call approach is that soon after the outreach starts, these outliers surface at a fairly quick rate - these are prospects eager to take a call, the prospects open to just hearing about a new product/solution pitch even though they have no buying intent, etc. We then forward project these early successes, aka outliers, and just assume that the trend will continue for the foreseeable future at the same pace or even accelerate with the addition of more resources.
However, there is this stark reality that no matter the amount of effort or investment, in a cold-call approach, the addressable market taps out at 5% of the total addressable market. This is why a call-heavy strategy always ends with us hitting a brick wall. I say us here because I’ve personally experienced this with several vendors that operate in this model and a poll of many CMO/CRO peers confirms this pattern. Initial success, followed by hitting a brick wall.
The second major problem with a cold-call approach is that quality of prospect engagement is very superficial, which is the polar opposite of what a serious B2B buyer/user wants. This results in many of these so-called opportunities not proceeding further in the sales funnel. Lots of effort and promise, but little outcomes.
What a Cold-Calling Company's Pitch Sounds Like
- Caller: “Hi I’m so and so. Can I take 29 seconds of your time to tell you about (INSERT MOST UNBELIEVABLE OUTCOME HERE).
- Prospect - “uhhh… I guess”.. (Prospect’s actually thinking - “Why did I pick up the phone this time, I never do. Grrr…”)
- Caller - Reads out generic 30 second pre-written spiel about product and company.
- Caller - “How about we book a call next week, I have my calendar right here” (The presumptive close. Nice!)
- Prospect - “Ok, next Tuesday at 2pm”. (Prospect is actually thinking - ‘what’s the quickest way to end this call’)
- Caller: “Great I’ll send you an invite with our sales rep, is your email abc@xyz.com”
- Come Next Tuesday - The Prospect No-Shows
- Cold Calling firm - “Don’t know why he didn't show, he did accept. We’ll keep trying to get him to a meeting.........”
We’ve all experienced cold calls for credit cards we don’t need, so-called ‘Free Vacations’, and ‘You’ve been chosen for ….’ B2C calls. Those calls sound exactly like the B2B example shown above. These companies are projecting a B2C approach onto the B2B domain. Cold-call tactics might work in the vast B2C ocean of consumers - many millions or even billions. Here it is much easier to play the percentage game and still come out ok. In a B2B scenario, the number of ICP Accounts is more or less fixed, and number in the thousands or tens of thousands depending on the segment and geo constraints. Your success in the market depends on maximizing yield within this fixed set of accounts. No amount of multiplication by 3% will get us to the pipeline goals.
This B2B yield-maximization is only possible with a much smarter approach
This approach consists of 4 key pillars.
Multi-modal - Engage with the customer in the media of their choosing or prefence - whether it is email, social media, phone, or ads.
Marketing & Messaging DNA - In any channel the message you craft is supremely important. Message that isn’t so generic that goes right over the prospect’s head. Messaging must be smartly tailored - mass-customized with a from Product Marketing lens. You need SDR leadership that has this skill - it comes from a Product Marketing or Demand Gen DNA.
Strong Feedback Loop - In any B2B GTM model, the signals are not always strong. Due to small numbers, you need the ability to not only read weak signals and but also separate signal from noise.
Transparent
- Any outreach is successful when there’s full transparency and visibility so everyone knows what is happening and can provide input/feedback. Too often appointment setting providers use a black box approach. Beyond a vague definition based on company size and industry, the is customer in the dark on which accounts are being prospected, the lead quality etc. Any vendor must volunteer radical transparency without being asked.
The above strategy has several advantages. First, this strategy gives us the best opportunity to increase the addressable market manifold. Second, it brings more aware and engaged prospects to the meeting with sales. As a result, the chances of progression of the opportunity increase significantly. Finally, this approach also acts as a filter for those who’ve essentially been ambushed in a phone call, i.e. these prospects under the normal course of business would not have taken the meeting but felt somewhat compelled or pressured to do so.
