If you shake your head at the thought of getting any business from cold calling, maybe you’re just not doing it right. In fact, there’s probably a lot you don’t know about cold calling that you should in this day and age of digital marketing.

With a lot of years of cold-calling experience under her belt, and as the CEO and founder of Managed Sales Pros, Carrie Simpson can teach you a thing or two about cold calling today. During her presentation titled, “Cold Calling for Fun and Profit,” Sept. 11, part of the marketing and technology track sponsored by Nextiva at Channel Partners Evolution in Washington, D.C., she’s going to share the art and science of successful cold calling techniques.

Managed Sales Pros’ Carrie Simpson

In a Q&A with Channel Partners, Simpson talks about what cold calling looks like today, why MSPs in particular should seriously consider cold calling and how it can reap them new business.

Channel Partners: Bring us up to date on cold calling and why it’s an important tool in the sales and marketing toolbox.

Carrie Simpson: The point of cold calling isn’t necessarily to make sales anymore because it’s about a trust-based, relationship-based sell. No business owner who is reasonable and rational is going to make a decision to change IT providers based on one phone call they got one time from one unknown person. Reasonable business owners make a decision to change IT providers at a time that’s minimally invasive to their business and when their contracts are up for renewal.

So the goal of cold calling is to identify first — who is already buying managed services? Who in your market are they buying them from? Why do they like that provider? And, when is their contract going to expire?

Instead of thinking of cold calling as a selling tool, they should be thinking about it as marketing tool.

CP: How does cold calling work as a marketing tool?

CS: Your goal here is to start dividing all the prospects in your market into buckets. So, any company already buying managed services from one of your competitors is your perfect prospect. You don’t have to educate them in any shape or form about what managed services already is because they’re already buying it, they already see value in it and they already have a budget for it. They’re already completely qualified to be a prospect for you.

Now you have to figure out, how did that company get their business? And how do you take it?

The point of prospecting isn’t closing new business. It’s how you’re going to win the business that you didn’t win the first time.

CP: Why cold calling when we have artificial intelligence and advanced marketing tools?

CS: If you think of data, everyone is trying to push everything towards this automated – we want to do more with less, pay people less, we want higher profit margins – but the AI that they’re using isn’t perfect yet.

I’m doing another session at Channel Partners Evolution on AI, so I don’t want to go too deep into it here, but I think AI is damaging …

… things. People are taking personalization out of the sales process and then they wonder why they aren’t closing any business.

You can’t send the same email that seven of your competitors are sending to your prospects and expect that they’ll see you as different, special or better. And no one is looking for the No. 2 provider in their market, so how are you building your brand in your market?

Are you the guy that spams everyone in your market or are you someone that’s created a relationship with everyone that you want to do business with? Or, more importantly, how did you figure out that you wanted to do business with them?

You don’t need to spend 20 minutes on LinkedIn. A five-minute phone call will tell you everything you need to know about a prospect you want to win, and you don’t even need to speak to the C-suite. You can qualify at the gatekeeper level or the office manager level.

CP: Tell us three things attendees are going to hear about in your upcoming session at Channel Partners Evolution.

CS: I’ll take them through a decision tree on how to qualify or disqualify a prospect on the first call. We’ll talk about the different points of entry for MSP prospecting and how everyone is a decision-maker. And we’ll talk about three-funnel forecasting — the marketing, the selling and the closing.