Cold Calling 2.0

I’m working on some content and materials around “Cold Calling 2.0″…which should never include a cold call! [Update: see www.ColdCalling2.com]

Cold Call: “A telephone call to someone who is not expecting contact”

Synonyms: flailing, wasting time, phone-spam, frustration, money-down-the-drain…

If anyone on my team at salesforce.com ever made a cold call …my process had failed. Just to be clear, “Cold Calling 2.0” is still about salespeople proactively developing cold accounts to increase incremental revenue with calls and emails…but with different strategies and processes than ‘cold calling’.

The sales prospecting mentalities and methods of 5-10 years ago are practically, or really, a waste of time. We discovered this at salesforce.com in 2002, after another ‘cold calling’ effort failed. We then spent an entire year testing and designing new methodologies, and proving the ROI on the investment, before we began building a team focused on targeting cold accounts to generate truly incremental revenue. (This team generated the new qualified opportunities and passed them off to the field salesforce to close).

Here is a sample of the growth of the revenue closed from the pipeline sourced by this ‘cold calling 2.0’ / outbound prospecting team. I’ve left the revenue amounts off for now, but we ended up growing new business enterprise bookings by 37%:

Closed Bookings By Month (Apr ’04 – Jan ’05)

(Why January ’05 instead of December ’04? Salesforce.com has a January fiscal year end)

If you’re interested in learning more / collaborating / contributing to whatever happens here, email me at aaron at alloyventures dot com.

I’ll probably post the next chunk of real content and slides here around mid-October.
[UPDATE]: Link to Cold Calling 2.0 presentation:
http://salesmachine.blogspot.com/2007/11/cold-calling-20-presentation.html