I have read several blogs recently where various people have stated “cold calling is dead and in order to play in the web 2.0 game it’s all about e-marketing and lead scoring”. I won’t take anything away from those folks where e-marketing and lead scoring is working, but what happens when it is not – do you just fold up shop and close your doors? What do you do if you’re not getting 100 inbound whitepaper downloads and web-form registrations a day – let half your staff go? What do you do when you send out an email update to 10,000 people and nobody clicks thru – fire your creative marketing person?

Right now in my inbox I have 7500 unopened emails – the proliferation of un-solicited email has made it hard to get messages through with all the noise. Suppose you were one of the 125 plus internet security software vendors who was funded by Venture Capital in the past 5 years, is it possible to differentiate yourself solely on your email content, website and white papers? I don’t think so.

What if you have a brand new product that is revolutionizing a functional area, but have not raised $ 10 Million from Kleiner Perkins or Benchmark Capital yet, can you get all the white papers you need created and analysts following you? Probably not.

As I have stated in earlier posts, when I was the VP of Sales for Aprimo in the early days, there were no analysts covering what became the EMM, EMA, MRM space, the space didn’t exist. Marketers weren’t waking up and saying “gee, I have to solve this Enterprise Marketing problem I have”, had we relied solely on the e-marketing play and nurturing prospects we would have been out of business a long time ago. Instead, through all of the e-channel strategies as well as dedicated cold-calling efforts, we were able to secure 75 new name accounts within the biggest companies in America, as well as secure clients on two other continents! All but two of those clients came from dedicated prospecting efforts by not only our direct sales team, but our inside sales team as well. I venture to say, none of those 73 new name clients would have been clients in the first 5 years had Aprimo waited for the leads to score high enough or them to place an inbound inquiry.

For Jesubi’s own purposes, we use every channel we can, but of the 490 plus demonstrations we have done, 14 have come from email, 476 have come because our sales team picked up the phone and called someone. We have a 15% response rate from the leads we’ve talked to in securing a demonstration. Is it expensive, to have a team making those calls, yes!! Would the cost of not having all the customers we’ve secured by doing those initial demos be more expensive absolutely yes, we’d be out of business.

In the B2C game, the web and the e-channel are powerful drivers, in the B2B game, every channel must be used and used effectively and efficiently to drive customer wins. Cold-calling isn’t going away soon unless American Entrepreneurialism dies a sudden death or the need to drive increased revenues dies as well.