- The Robots are not taking over. Despite the increasing use of AI in business and our personal lives the tech is simply not there yet to start delivering on prospecting sales conversations for complex SaaS offerings. For example, think Siri. Poor Siri struggles with putting a timer on and is not anytime soon going to start delivering outbound sales calls. However, there is emerging technology called Conversational Discovery AI, which is one to watch. It uses voice based conversational AI to interact with B2C brands customers at scale and it’s becoming increasingly sophisticated. Having said that, in the complex B2B sales setting, people will buy from people – for now!
- The ability to self-generate your own leads and close these allows you to “write your own ticket” to B2B sales success. Despite all the fanfare online about cold call prospecting being dead, social selling being more effective or senior executives not taking unsolicited phone calls, if you can master using the phone, it will give you the opportunity to earn substantially more than your sales professional peers. This allows you to become independent and not at the mercy of the marketing department’s lead generation budget. Also, once you master using the phone, all the other prospecting activities are easy in comparison. For instance, actioning a marketing generated online lead will be like “shooting a fish in a barrel”.
- You can never stop learning. If you have mastered how to outbound prospect and think you do not need to learn anymore you are sadly mistaken. For instance, there are new technologies coming to the market all the time, which help you improve your cold outbound prospecting. Seamless (www.seamless.ai), is just one of these. You can access (via a paid subscription) the direct mobile phone numbers of senior executives. Sure, it does not provide mobile phone numbers for every executive and is not 100% correct but when you obtain the mobile phone number of that senior executive that you have been chasing down for the past month, the world gets just a little smaller.