Who is Farhan Lalji? Rotating Header Image

The end of the cold call is nigh

Jun 24th, 2009
by Farhan.

I hate telemarketers, and I’m not sure why they exist. With Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and other social web services getting more and more popular, the sale of goods and services is massively changing.

It’s easier to know who’s dissatisfied with the products or services they’re currently using and leads can be a lot stronger today, with simple searches and leveraging of contacts, then ever before. Following and engaging with decision makers helps make linking business to business services simpler. If I’m selling web analytics I can follow web masters and know who’s having trouble with their analytics packages. This can work for almost any corporate sales service or good. Just know who your potential costumers are, what jobs they’re likely to hold, and start engaging with them. Not in a cold stalkerish way, but in a maybe I can help you make more out of your business way.

This isn’t just for B2B sales, but for consumer goods and services sales as well. Let’s take an example of mobile phone operators, let’s say I’m a competitor mobile operator, it’s a lot easier to do a couple of searches and find out who’s likely to switch. Doing some searches on Twitter would show you who’s having mobile service issues. Looking up facebook groups about mobile operators gives you a list of potential new acquisition costumers.

This isn’t a unique example, you could use this for utilities, consumer electronics and any other good and service where you have some serious competition available. I think a lot of companies are using social media to do customer service it will be interesting to see which companies use social media appropriately to do acquisition marketing in the future.

Share

Posted in: business, communication, social network, technology.

←
→
  • Shafqat

    Fantastic post – we do B2B sales and have not made one single cold call. We’ll send cold e-mails, but only after spending a lot of time on the lead generation and “knowing your lead” stage. But our primary sales channel is definately social media – twitter has been amazing, as well as tapping into our social graph via facebook and linkedIn. More than anything, sales for us is all about creativity and genuinely trying to help, rather than a numbers game.

  • karimkanji

    Interesting post. by the way, it’s good to have you blogging again. i feel smarter just reading your stuff. Anyways, in sales, despite technology, the human touch still rules. People still want the option to buy from people.

  • Farhan Lalji

    I think you can make social media feel like person to person as well though. That’s why I think it’s a good substitution for cold calling.

  • Riaz Kanani

    Maybe, but today I tend to think that a human touch is needed to fill out the blanks and get an understanding of a prospect’s needs and timing. I am not convinced that will change in the near future. That sort of information is difficult to obtain online, if only because the prospect doesn’t want everyone hounding them when that time approaches!

    But with the information available online, there is little excuse for a completely cold call and with that info you can usually make the call a friendly engaged one rather than an irritating one.

  • Riaz Kanani

    Also unfortunately not everyone is using twitter or linkedin today. It definitely varies in usage by sector and neither is everyone as comfortable communicating in a major way online. Continued Twitter usage is low right now, though it will be interesting to see if Twitter can overcome this. Along with this conversations in Facebook are mostly private and unsearchable. Facebook people search is also hopeless right now so using it for acquisition purposes is difficult.

  • Farhan Lalji

    It might not be through facebook or twitter or linkedin, it may be through a network, an introduction, a conversation a recommendation, an informed warm call rather then the wasted time of calling someone with absolutely no idea about their likelihood to purchase, that’s the practice I’d like to see end.