If your business success is largely dependent upon a telephone cold call to find new customers, you're facing a growing list of problems you may not be aware of.

I'm noticing an obvious problem these days. It has to do with the small percentage of time that business prospects actually answer their phone when the salesperson calls. I'm finding it to be only around 4% of the time that a prospect will pick up their phone. Instead, for the most part, it is a voice mail greeting, or a secretary screen that intercepts the cold call. In other words, 96% of all cold calls fail to achieve their objective. No wonder salespeople hate cold calling and don't make enough of them. Who could possibly feel motivated to keep going after flunking 96 times out of a hundred?

Another growing problem has to do with how hard it's become to get a hold of someone's attention over the phone these days. People, and business prospects in particular, all have a world of issues that they are preoccupied with, and this leaves them very little time to pay attention to another elevator pitch on the telephone. No wonder they hang up.

The elevator pitch seems dead on arrival. Need proof? Read the first chapter of  'The Attention Economy' by Thomas Davenport and John Beck (Harvard Press).

One more problem with cold calling is the rising cost of sales. When you consider the fact that most salespeople would rather jump out a window than make a cold call to a sales prospect, it has become very expensive to hire people that do not want to do what they are being paid to do, like make cold calls. Based upon current compensation estimates, a salesperson making only 25 cold calls a day can cost your business anywhere from $25- $45.00 each time they dial the phone, regardless of the outcome. And you thought gas was expensive?

So, in the end, if we consider the telephone cold call as a sales & marketing tool for cutting deals, would it be unfair of us to consider that it's best days are long over? Perhaps in some way, shape, or form. But as is the case with any tool having some rust, and a dulled blade, a few turns of a screwdriver can make a difference.  Like turning a cold call into a gold call.