If you’re in sales or have ever been in sales, you know that we as sales professionals love trading war stories. Sometimes the only thing better than winning is telling others all the details.

Telling stories from the trenches is especially popular among the ladies and gentlemen who have been in sales for a while. Often times, these tales include a tidbit or two about cold calling.

“Can you believe what that prospect said?”

“You’ll never guess how I finally got past that gate keeper!”

“The phones have been treating me well today!”

We’d all agree that cold calling is, and has been, often times similar to a journey into the unknown. No matter how skilled of a cold caller you are, there are two things you’ll have to agree with me on.

1.      You can never predict the exact conversation you’ll have when you call a prospect for the first time

2.      You will encounter a lot more uninterested prospects and rejections then you will potential opportunities

But sales professionals across all industries have been using cold calls to fill their pipelines for a long time. And no matter how much heat cold calling has gotten recently as ineffective, or in better terms, “dead”, there’s no denying one thing:

It works.

At least when you put massive quantity and consistency behind it.

If you make hundreds of calls a day, have a decent pitch, and sound positive, you’ll get a least a few people interested in learning more about your product or service, and making an initial cold call properly requires a limited range of skills for a sales professional to possess.

Between doing nothing and cold calling, cold calling wins 100% of the time.

But most professionals, in and out of sales, would agree that cold calling often comes across as rude, annoying, generic, and intrusive.

As sales professionals, we also want to be as efficient as we can.

That way, we have more time to focus on closing deals, which, as you and I are well aware, is the primary and often only way we get paid.

In fact, I’ve never met a sales professional who enjoyed cold calling. He or she may have enjoyed finding a new prospect and having a new war story to share, but I can guarantee that sales professional did not enjoy spending hours blasting calls and leaving voice messages.

Fundamentally, cold calling is nothing more than a means to generating more opportunities. Ask yourself this question:

If you had a better means to generating as many if not more opportunities, would you and your team still cold call?

The new way of generating outbound opportunities I’m alluding to is profitable social networking across LinkedIn and even Facebook. All trends point to these two platforms continuing to grow with more and more of your prospects using them as their primary communication hubs.

LinkedIn especially offers a flurry of untapped potential for sales professionals, in both B2B and B2C, if they implement the right strategies. In fact, the prospecting process has never been easier or more efficient than it can be today.

If you’re ready for you or your team to start exceeding quotas, filling sales pipelines, and self-generating more outbound opportunities, let’s talk about how we can help you get where you want to be.

Visit meetme.so/psnetworking to setup a complimentary LinkedIn Sales Strategy Optimization Session.

Yakov Savitskiy is an Internationally Recognized LinkedIn Expert and Author of Disrupting LinkedIn: The Definitive Guide to Generating Leads, Receiving Referrals, and Attracting High-End Clients Through Marketing On LinkedIn. As the Chief Executive Officer of Linked Linked Enterprises, numerous CEOs, Key Influencers, Best-Selling Authors And Leaders Of Seven-To-Nine Figure Sales Organizations regard Yakov as a trusted advisor and their Go-To Authority when it comes to all things LinkedIn Marketing and Lead Generation.

Ready to discover a proven four step system for using your LinkedIn profile to generate new leads, receive entire streams of referrals and attract more high-end clients than you ever thought possible? Click here to register for free and attend one of our upcoming online trainings.