Inbound Marketing: The New Cold Call

The internet is quickly taking over as the go to medium for every aspect of the sales process. From product research to finalizing your buying decision more and more people are turning to the internet for guidance. Whether they use a search engine or Social Media for their product research you better believe that most buyers are jumping online to see what you’re all about before forking over any of their hard earned cash. 

I won’t say the days of cold calling are over but they are quickly moving towards extinction. No one wants to be bothered with an interruption at any point during the day let alone during work or even worse, on their cell phone while sharing some family time at home. Every phone out there has caller ID allowing people to screen their calls and only pick up when they recognize the number and door to door sales are just as annoying to the businesses that get interrupted with unsolicited sales calls.

Just because people still cold call doesn’t mean it’s not a broken system

So how come so many companies are still making cold calls? Because they haven’t yet learned the potential of using inbound marketing to generate and convert sales leads. They either know they are getting terrible returns on their cold calling efforts and chose to continue with them because they always have and always will or aren’t interested in taking the time to learn something new even if it can help their business increase sales and build market share organically. So while a new generation of marketers and sales monsters are being born the soldiers of status quo look the other way pretending that they still know whats best.

The problem with sticking to the status quo while trying to grow your small business is that people just don’t care anymore. They are sick and tired of being bombarded with spam email and sponsored stories. They are skipping TV commercials, dumping direct mail and ignoring all of those unsolicited interruption style advertisements. So by continually banging your message drum, trying to make more noise than the other guy you really just continue to make it ever more difficult for anyone’s message to stand out. By following the status quo you actually make it more difficult for your business to be found by desensitizing your audience.

Try something new

What if instead of pounding your drum louder than the next guy you went out and got a whole new noise maker. An instrument capable of making music so sweet that no matter how loud the noise gets it still attracts new traffic and leads to your business? This powerful instrument already exists and is helping thousands of companies get to their goals all while conserving their marketing dollars and maximizing their manpower. By tying together their online presence in one unified front, these companies take the best part of Search Engine Optimization, Social Media and Blogging efforts to generate inbound marketing leads that are qualified and convert them in to buyers by answering their questions about their products, educating the buyer and engaging them with creative content that is relevant as well as informational.

This is the new age of cold calling. I bet if you ask anyone in sales they will tell you that sales is a numbers game, and they might even be able to tell you about the sales metrics they need to hit in order to achieve their goals. the problem is that there are only so many hours in a day and no matter how good or efficient you are at cold calling you just cant get to as many people in person as you can with an effective online presence and inbound marketing strategy. Not to mention that there is no cheating when it comes to analyzing your web stats. In sales you can claim to have visited or called on 60 new businesses a day but it’s all on your word. With analytics tools you can know everything about everyone you interacted with online as well as track your future interactions with them. If cold calling is about numbers then inbound marketing really is the new cold call because inbound marketing eliminates the need for vanity statistics and only deals in cold hard facts. Inbound marketing is the new cold call precisely because it is a numbers game. That part the status quo still has right.