Cold calling is an exercise in futility and the least efficient way to find potential customers.

• Doesn’t work 90.9% of the time (Harvard Business Review)
• Costs at least 60% more per lead (HubSpot, The State of Inbound Marketing)
• Has a rate of less than 2% of phone calls resulting in a meeting (Leap Job)

Start making investments that will help create demand for your sales team and your company.

Here are several practical ways to enable your the salesforce to create demand and eliminate the need to cold call:

1. Eliminate the lowest performers on your sales team and repurpose those resources at the early stages of the sales process to create demand for your company.
2. Invest in inbound marketing software, such as HubSpot, and build remarkable content that attracts buyers to your website.
3. Develop a strategic TED-like conference for your industry and feature your best and brightest staff and salespeople in a non-informercial way.
4. Invest in tools like Visible Gains to build educational video marketing apps that are not like infomercials.
5. Invest in making your top salespeople sought after speakers regarding industry issues. Investments might include enrolling them in the national speakers association training courses, or hiring someone to market your top salespeople as speakers.
6. Write a series of must-have industry guides your top salespeople can give away.
7. Invest in crowd-sourced lists with detailed meta-data to target your marketing efforts on the phone and the web. One of my favorite list companies is NetProspex.