I was cold called yesterday. It was, it must be said, a brilliant effort from a charity fundraiser from World Wide Fund For Nature – polite, well researched and perfect in pitch & tone. It was almost a shame when I delivered the inevitable to-the-point rebuttal that she was not getting what she wanted out of the call.
What does it mean if the perfectly executed cold call, delivered at a good time and to the ideal audience (I contribute annually to the World Wide Fund For Nature, and signed up recently to a campaign of theirs) fails so badly? It wasn’t the failure itself, bad enough a return to investment this was for the cold caller, it was the fact that it was never going to work.
The telephone has been a staple of the sales business for as long as there have been white collars at work. I believe that it has been on a long, slow and now accelerating decline as a sales medium. Indeed, as we all become more comfortable with alternative communication platforms now available to us, I would argue that the phone call is already dead as a first contact medium. Here are a three reasons why:
1. It’s An Interrupt
We have a finite capacity to process information and we are rapidly reaching the upper limits of it. Since the advent of the social web the signal-to-noise ratio has become increasingly difficult to manage, with corresponding damage to productivity, erosion to attention span and near eradication of any ‘down time’ where no message is being sent or received. An unsolicited phone call pitched into the middle of this media maelstrom? You’d be lucky if it’s even noticed, much less picked up and answered.
2. It’s An Open Ended Resource Risk
There’s always been an inherent resource risk in picking up the phone. A connected call demands an immediate, open ended commitment on the part of the receiver. It’s not an email which can be scheduled for action later in the day, or a chat or text message which can be discreetly ignored. When the phone was our primary conduit to the outside world, it was mandatory to pick up in order to connect with the people we needed to. Nowadays, with a multitude of channels available to us, there is no longer any need to take the risk of an open ended commitment that comes with picking up the phone on an unsolicited call.
3. It’s Might Actually Work
The phone is declining as a sales tool precisely it can and does work. A paradoxical statement? Not when you look from the perspective of the business that’s being sold to. There is a high risk that decisions are made based on a sales pitch rather than the due diligence widely and economically available through other means. Quite simply, there has always been a tension between the agenda of the caller and receiver, but now the receiver has cheaper and lower risk options of discovering the services they need.
What Does This Mean For Recruitment & The Job Search?
This has profound implications for everyone in the recruitment industry or in the process of looking for a job. Recruiters and job seekers have always been united by a common challenge - getting hiring managers interested in what they can do. If the phone call is no longer the sales medium it once was, then a recalibration of where resources need to be spent is essential if recruitment or job search objectives are going to be met.
Agents are going to have to find new ways of approaching prospective clients, or new ways to drawing them in. Job seekers can no longer expect any mileage from making speculative calls into companies, attempting to speak to this HR manager or that decision maker. New strategies and non phone based approaches need to take central place in what is becoming a nascent sales paradigm based on attraction marketing, online reputation management and personal branding.
The Phone Call Is Not Dead
The phone call isn’t dead, but the cold call certainly is. It’s no longer feasible to think you are going to be successful by interrupting people in their overloaded working lives, and forcing them into the choice of being rude or getting on with their day. Phone calls will continue, but as a second contact medium, to deepen relationships with contacts already made through other means.
Are you a salesperson, a recruiter or a job seeker? What do you think?
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