Dude, Where’s My Call?

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Communications Management   CRM   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Stakeholder Management   Talent Management  

I don’t know who you are.
I don’t know your company.
I don’t know your company’s product.
I don’t know what your company stands for.
I don’t know your company’s customers.
I don’t know your company’s record.
I don’t know your company’s reputation.
Now…what was it you wanted to sell me?

-- McGraw-Hill’s famous “man in the chair” ad from 1958

People have been wondering for some time when the last days of cold calling will come. Let’s face facts: With caller ID and all other sorts of protective layers of technological and human intervention, it’s become much more difficult to wend our way through personnel mazes and make “first contact.” Everyone is busier and trying to stay focused, so it’s understandable that we don’t want to take a call from total strangers. Why else would there be a National Do Not Call Registry?

While these advances and changes may not immediately spell the end of cold calling, its time seems to be coming in the near future. New tactics might be necessary in order to keep this communication method alive (for example, to-the-point conversations, direct honesty, etc.), but with so much history behind the technique, breaking through to company prospects via cold calling is not the best use of time or the most…

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