Don't feel guilty about not cold calling

I started my career in “sales” as a volunteer in politics, cold calling people. Whether it was Chuck Schumer’s first senate campaign in 1998 (I happened to be living in NY) or Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, I got hung up on a lot. Some say it builds character. I’m not sure I agree.

I talked to a founder recently who had sent 200 cold emails by hand and followed each one up with a cold phone call. Email kinda worked, but was limited by the tools and approach. But cold calling did not. Her findings were illustrative: most of the time she reached the wrong person, not a decision maker. The decision makers she did reach (owners of SMB businesses) were angry at her for the interruption and told her as much. She got no meetings out of it, and (obviously) no customers. So does cold calling not work for anyone? Why do many founders feel guilty for not cold calling?

tl;dr: tactically, it might work in certain scenarios for certain companies. But strategically, it’s a terrible channel. Don’t feel guilty. Here’s why.

I’m stoked to announce that we have a beta for Skyp.ai ready to show you. If you’re doing founder-led sales, have a sales team of 1-3, or are reaching out to anyone (VCs? LPs?)–grab a time and I’ll show you personally or get on the list here 👇️ 

The key with sales

Being great at sales is a combination of hard work, good strategies and tactics, and mindset. Hard work is doing things like sending hundreds of emails, calling, getting rejected, etc. There’s no way to succeed in sales if you spend most of your day watching TikTok–even if you are an influencer. You’ve got to put in the work.

But you can work hard and experience no success because your strategy or tactics are poor. I remember at a consulting firm where I worked early in my career, one principal loved replying to RFPs that were clearly ghost written by our competitor. We were never going to win them, and had in fact never won one. If you weren’t actively on a paid engagement, he’d suck you into working on yet another doomed RFP. It was demoralizing. We could have put 10,000 hours into those RFPs and had $0 in revenue to show for it. Poor strategy. Losing tactic.