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?

  • ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    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.

  • TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 months ago

    As someone who’s had to do cold calls as part of a sales pipeline,

    1. it’s spam,
    2. I wouldn’t say it’s spam on LinkedIn, that’s where I tell lies to get better jobs,
    3. if it’s B2B, I do not feel any shame, every business is a fuck

    Edit: 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. When I was training sales agents, they’d ask me “how do I get sales like you do?” and I’d tell em simply “Make more calls.” As I said elsewhere, I’m good at this. I had a roughly 2-3% conversation rate. Understand that means if I made a hundred calls, I made two to three sales. And that’s pretty damn good. Before we were more established and could drop that model, we found that cold calling generally had around a 1.4% conversion rate. It relies on you being chipper and persistent to the point of annoyance. Some people literally do break at one point and say stuff like “Well, I need to get something, and if I sign with you, will you stop calling me?”

    It was always far more enjoyable to call established leads, people who already expressed and interest and just needed help making up their mind. Better on the customer, better on the agent, a better process overall.

    • Nougat@fedia.io
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        5 months ago

        Oh, one hundred percent. The way I treat people who have zero decision making ability differed greatly from purchasing agents or decision makers. They were largely in the same spot as me. It’s important to understand that the sales agents are also wage slaves, the tasks are just different.

        Dealing with people like me was one of the stupid things they gotta do at work to make their pay and go home, just like me making 80+ calls an hour at some points was one of my stupid things. I wanted to get them off the phone as soon as possible, be that either by ending the call or getting passed onto someone who could buy. You can use that to build rapport and speed up the process. You can even make it jovial. The goal is to make the sales process as painless as possible while recognizing that being a pest is effective.

        Sales agents who put the big pitch on the second they get someone to talk to em are not thinking straight and hindering themselves. Though, sometimes there’s parts of a service that simplifies their lives, which I’d mention while waiting for a decision maker or during another break.

    • TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
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      5 months ago

      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