Lies You Want to Believe

Every day I watch the social media advertisements roll by on Facebook and LinkedIn. They are all designed to capture your attention with a hyperbolic headline aimed at reminding you of something that makes you unhappy (remember dissatisfaction?).

Today I saw no less than three advertisements on LinkedIn, all of which began with the headline: “Cold Calling Is Dead.” If you have learned to hate cold calling, this advertisement is aimed directly at you. I clicked on all three because I suspected that they were placed by three different companies. I was correct. Three different companies all using the same headline.

All of these marketers know what an easy mark you are when it comes to cold calling (unless, of course, you are here reading this blog, or Mike Weinberg’s, or Jeb Blount’s, or Tibor Shanto’s). Any of us can teach you how to cold call, and each of us laughs when we read these ads because we all have clients running up their numbers strictly by using the phone.

I saw another ad that proclaimed: The Death of Outside Salespeople. This one wasn’t aimed at salespeople. Instead, this advertisement preys on sales managers and sales leaders who don’t know how to produce the results they want from their sales force and who wish there was a cheaper sales force they could employ. This ad speaks to their dissatisfaction like the cold calling ad speaks to salespeople.

Outside salespeople aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, at least not those who know how to create value. Inside salespeople can also create value, but it’s more difficult to create and capture some larger, more complex opportunities without the relationships that are more easily developed face-to-face.

If you want to produce better results, you are better off facing the thing that you fear or struggle with than avoiding it. If you don’t like the phone, learning to be effective making your calls is a better plan than trying to find a way not to have to make your calls. If you don’t like a big, expensive sales force, learn to lead it and teach it to succeed and it will be the cheapest sales force money can buy.

Stop believing the lies that you want to believe. Avoidance isn’t a growth strategy.