Can Social Media Replace Cold Calling part 1

As a Sales Manager you probably have a few salespeople that are trying to use social media for all of their leads rather than making cold calls. As a salesperson you might be hoping that sites like LinkedIn and Facebook will be your way out of having to pick up the phone.

In my experience all the different social media sites are tools to help make cold calls more effective, but for now you still have to pick up the phone and call. That might change but it probably won't be until the people that are in their late teens and 20's now, are the ones running companies in the future. Social media is how people of this age communicate and it is what they grew up with. That is not the case for older adults in the workforce.
Lets say you are calling on presidents of companies.
Right now companies are still being run by people who were born in the 1940's-1970's. These folks are used to the phone and is what they know (anyone remember party lines?). I know several presidents of big companies that don't check or write their own email let alone use social media.

Now that more executives were born in the 1980's, email is also becoming standard to reach these people, however they have grown up in an age where the internet was brand new. While it is a part of their lives they are usually not immersed in it like their kids. They grew up using the phone (party lines were still around in the 1980's). Email might work sometimes, but you still have to call them on the phone, provided you can reach them on one of the several numbers they might have.

So if you are looking for a way to avoid picking up the phone and making cold calls, lets flash forward 20 years and have this conversation again. Only then social media will have been replaced by some new technology and we'll be asking if that will be the new tool to avoid the future version of the phone.

Everet