As a traditional sales person, if we wanted to find new customers, one of the most cost effective methods was to do targeted cold calls. It is easy to put together a list of broadcasters in every country, but is it appropriate just to pick up the phone, call the switchboard, try to be put through to a relevant person and then try to pitch to a complete stranger? Well it used to be, but times have changed.

Identifying contacts to cold call is time consuming. You may think the targeted job title is  “head of technology”. Maybe you can use LinkedIn to identify him or her, but then actually trying to contact them is extremely frustrating and sometimes near-on impossible.  Then there is a strong probability that they are not actually responsible for that decision or technology. Most broadcasters have hundreds of technology specialists.  Multiply this by the number of broadcasters in the world and quickly it becomes very demotivating.

Cold calling is normally just about being at the right place at the right time, and can take on average a 100 calls to get a decent lead.

Is there a better way? Of course there is! Work smarter, not harder.

It’s down to effective marketing, basically ensuring potential customers contact you when they are interested in buying technology of the type you are offering.

Over 85% of consumers who wish to buy something will research it first on the internet. This is mostly utilising Google, but also social media platforms can have an effect.

We recently helped an Asian encoding company who were going global but had little experience of business development outside of Europe.  They had appointed some distributors but this was not an effective approach on its own – they needed to also appeal directly to their end user base.

To do this they had to be found – we wrote some interesting and educational blogs about their market and the challenges their customers faced. We wrote PR on the success they were having. We wrote case studies about the customers they had and what the problems their technology had solved.

Google liked this new content, so they started to appear more in organics searches based on the technology and their chosen keywords, not their company name which you have to assume is unknown. They promoted this content on social media. This started to have the effect that they were being approached by end users through their website. And in turn they could pass these new leads through to their reseller channel which motivated their resellers and enabled a positive sales experience with all concerned.

Combine this with some targeted Google AdWords. And no more cold calling.

Of course you still have to nurture leads  and take them through the sales process, but that’s another story. You now have warm leads to follow up which is much more effective in building up a sales pipeline.