Cold Outreach Can Be A Great Research Tool

When you plot every possible new business tactic on a ladder of lead generation, you might put a book or a TED talk at the top, and an intern wearing a sandwich board sign at the bottom.

Traditional View of Outbound

Where do outbound phone calls rate on that ladder? (Closely related to those calls would probably be casual conversations at industry gatherings, too.) Here’s where I put them: near the bottom. My theory has always been that experts don’t beg for work. Instead, they rely on right-fit clients to come knocking, and the new business dance is almost reversed: “do I think that I want to take you on as a client? I only have so many spots, and this has to be a good match.”

A More Enlightened View

Ignore the arrogance that so easily slips into that perspective, for a minute, and just consider one thing: outbound phone calls (and conversations) are the best way to learn about your marketplace, and then adjust on the fly.

Your website is like a one-way presentation; embracing Q/A after that presentation is where the courage lies, and it’s where you learn, too, because there’s no rehearsing what someone might ask.

Advantages of Outbound

You’re smart, so I’ll just list the advantages of weaving some outbound into your mix of tactics. The first one is by far the most significant.

1. Outbound allows you to learn from those times when people say “no” and not only when they say “yes” to you. If you’ll just let a prospective client talk, too, instead of filling that silence with babble, you might learn a lot about the “why” behind their response. Most every other new business tactic—if it doesn’t spark a response—is just DOA. There’s no feedback loop and no way to improve your next approach.
2. Do you have a good funnel? In other words, when someone starts paying attention to you, do you have ways of a) predicting where they are in the funnel and then b) gently nudging them to drop down to the next level? The longer someone is in the funnel, the easier sales are, because they already know a lot about you and it’s merely a matter of assessing fit. So one other advantage of cold outbound is that it places that prospect way up high in the funnel, where they will have the opportunity to experience your insight. It’s an early introduction to what you can offer without the prospect putting up defensive walls.
3. You are in complete control. You decide who to target, and you can handpick the very best options. Contrast that with relying on referrals and word of mouth. Not only do you have no control over who comes to you in that context, you have no control over what they have been told about you, too.
4. No one can take outbound away from you. Social media can change the algorithms, paid ads cost a lot of money and can be hit or miss, and getting press coverage is nice when it happens, but seldom happens as often as you want.

Finally

When I’m working with someone to craft their positioning, we’ll often settle on a “perfectible” (not “perfect”) positioning. (I learned that concept from my podcast cohost.) How do you evaluate it? You talk about it and see how people react. It slowly gets tighter and tighter until it resonates exactly like you imagined it might.

Think of cold outreach as a raw research methodology. How to do it is another question, and I’m not much help there, but do consider weaving some of it into your marketing and sales strategy.