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The Sales Evangelist

David Sill, Donald Kelly, Cold Calling, Growth Stratergy Do you know why cold calling still works?

That’s because not everyone can do it and you doing it gives you that competitive advantage. All the more reason you should do it because high growth companies has cold calling as their number one growth strategy.

Today’s guest is David Sill, the SVP of Sales for DiscoverOrg.com and he’s going to share with us some tactics and strategies on cold calling.

Here are the highlights of my conversation with David:

Why sellers say cold calling is dead:

  • People can’t do it because it’s hard.
  • People are unwilling to do it.

The Power of Outbound Calls:

  • Big companies have to make outbound calls.
  • Make sure you have the infrastructure, resources, and leadership to go forth and fire on that engine as needed.
  • Develop that outbound muscle as a really smart strategy for high growth.
  • Their study suggests that 40% of the action comes from outbound generated leads.
  • Ultimately, you want to have that healthy balance between inbound and outbound leads.

Best practices to compile a group of ideal customers for your outbound funnel:

1. Need for high quality data

Data is what fuels the system. And it needs to live where your team lives (i.e. Marketo, Hubspot, Salesforce, and sales acceleration technologies) because that’s where they’re spending their time.

Data needs to be refreshed but also it should be integrated and used to live where the team lives.

2. At DiscoverOrg, data is human-curated.

The company has a growing research analyst team with about 300 full-time employees. Their job is to sit down and do a variety of techniques, phone interviews, and reach out to verify and re-verify data. Hence, they guarantee reliability and accuracy you can’t find from other third-party data sources.

What makes an effective outbound approach:

1. Commit to the right resources.

There has to be a clear delineation of roles on the team with the right tools and technology. There needs to be the right data. There has to be the right training on the front end as well as coaching throughout.

2. Be constantly testing.

At DiscoverOrg, they use a dialing tool called FrontSpin and an email campaign tool called Outreach. And they use Salesforce.com for their CRM. And they’re constantly A/B testing.

Breaking the Stereotype of Cold Calling:

Only in live conversation does the collaboration take place.

As opposed to other outreach like email campaigns and voiccemails, they’re part of the strategy. A lot of people rely on them too heavily. But with one-way outreach, there’s a time lag. Not to mention, you’re a pre-conceived bot.

David’s Major Takeaway:

Do the hard thing. Companies that grow are doing things that others are unwilling to do. Everybody could do them but lots of folks aren’t doing them. Therefore, if you want competitive advantage, you have to execute in areas where others can’t or won’t. And cold calling is one of those areas.

Episode Resources:

Learn more about David and their company on DiscoverOrg.com or shoot him an email at david.sill@discoverorg.com.

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About the Author The Sales Evangelist

Donald is the host of the popular sales podcast,"The Sales Evangelist". He is the founder of The Sales Evangelist Consulting Firm where he helps small companies develop killer sales process to scale their business and increase growth.

Donald is also an award-winning speaker, sales trainer, and coach. He's a big fan of traveling, South Florida staycations and high-quality family time. Donald has a belief that “anyone” can sell if they have the desire and receives the proper training.

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