A rose is a rose. And a sales call is either cold or hot. No exceptions. Hot calls yield a fantastic rate of return, but unless salespeople actually know their prospects, their sales strategy is ice cold.

That is, unless reps receive referrals—the secret to never making another cold call.

Let's set the record straight. There’s no such thing as a warm email, a warm phone call, or even a warm knock on the door. (Yes, that still happens.) Without referral introductions from people their prospects know and trust, salespeople are just annoying strangers.

ICE COLD!

Digital Cold Calling

Thanks to the Internet and social media, there’s a new version of what I call the “warm call fantasy.” It goes like this: Sales reps research prospects on social media, identify trigger events, and gather information from social intelligence. Maybe they even have mutual connections with prospects on LinkedIn. So they send emails making the business case for why these prospects should talk to them. They really believe they’re not cold calling, because they know all about their prospects and even have a few “friends” in common. They’re sending “warm” emails, right?

Wrong! Unless they’ve secured referral introductions from their mutual connections, the leads are freezing cold. And that’s a doomed sales strategy.

Consider how many cold emails you get every day. I bet you do the same thing I do—hit delete. No wonder many sales managers say it takes eight to 12 touches before their reps actually speak to a prospect. Is that how you want your sales team spending their time?

Attempting to connect with cold prospects on social media is just as pointless. Social sites provide a great way to identify mutual contacts who could provide referrals. But before sales reps start name dropping, it’s important to reach out to potential referral sources, make sure they actually have relationships with the prospects, explain why they want to meet these prospects, and ask for referral introductions.

(Hint: Don’t use LinkedIn’s automated introduction request. They’re easy to ignore, and reps lose out on the chance to check in with referral sources and nurture those valuable relationships.)

Is a Referral Program Unconventional?

Sales managers and seasoned sales pros report that when they implement a referral program and learn how to get referrals, they:

• Score meetings with decision-makers in one call

• Reduce their prospecting time by at least 30 percent

• Ace out the competition

• Convert prospects into clients at least 50 percent of the time (usually more than 70 percent)

Referral selling is simple, but it’s not easy. If it were, every sales manager and sales rep would have a proactive, disciplined, measurable referral program in place right now. Referral selling is your primary outbound sales strategy, an actual step-by-step process you can implement immediately. Get in early and uncover problems, and your competition won’t know what hit them.

When reps receive referral introductions from people their prospects know and trust, their leads goes from ice cold to HOT, HOT, HOT. So, start thinking about how your sales team spends their time and the type of payoff you want. Do you really want your sales team cold calling?