So cold calling is dead.

Cold calling, we are led to believe, is dead. While its life as a communication strategy to bring new ideas to people, ergo the last 2020 years, was short-lived, the new way is inbound. But nonetheless, it is dead, and you are going to replace 166750 cold calls a year per salesperson with inbound.

But then you are going to screw it up because…

Inbound is harder work than cold calling, because it relies on footfall to see your content.

What we forget when we move to inbound is that cold calling worked primarily because of the volume of calls made in a given period, followed by stalking-level resilience to cold-call the potential client a week, month, a quarter later.

Cold calling was hard work, volume-orientated, and when I show the number of posts needed to get inbound off of the ground, most people balk at the workload. Now I am not saying you can just send out 166750 LinkedIn posts, Tweets, etc., because the quality and message has to be right, and like some of the cringe-worthy cold calls you made that went especially wrong, normally at the point your boss was walking past your desk, so will some – maybe even a lot – of your posts go wrong.

If you had the time to make 60-70 cold calls in an 8-hour working day, then you need to replace that with more than one post you hope will go viral on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. per day.

Recruitment marketing service providers have a shopping list of products/services, like four posts to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc., per day. Or 8, or 12 and so on. The better ones then do decent research to work out what to share rather than just share for you. Other firms will pitch you a service to grow your LinkedIn following and invite 20/40/60/80 new people to connect with you today and have a 6-point follow-up plan. These plans work, and so if you are going to move to inbound you need to mirror these plans with your own efforts, and/or buy these plans.

So there you have it: inbound is harder work than cold calling, so be prepared to roll your sleeves up a bit, and if you kill off cold calling and the 166750 attempts made a year to introduce people to your product or service, then six blogs a year and one post which says ‘fuck’ to get likes on LinkedIn are not going to cut it.