This blog post originally appeared on Mike Weinberg’s Insider Insights on May 1, 2017. Mike was a past IES speaker. IES executive director Fred Diamond called it the Jerry Maguire treatise for professional selling.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury…
For six years I’ve been prosecuting the case against what several of my friends and I have come to call the #SocialSelling-Only, the Inbound-Only Prospecting is Dead Charlatans. On many platforms, and in front of many audiences, online and in-person, my friends and I have made the case that salespeople should use ALL MEANS NECESSARY to get the attention of, and to get in front of, strategically selected target prospects. Sellers have an entire arsenal of weapons at their disposal – from email, to trade shows, fromTwitter to Facebook to LinkedIn, from referrals to text messaging, from snail mail to white papers, and from blogging to telephone prospecting, and many more. And much to the dismay of these charlatans who preach the dangerous lie that traditional prospecting is stupid, archaic, and ineffective, we have continued to remind salespeople and sales leaders that the telephone remains a laser-precise and highly effective way to deliver your message and to secure a discovery meeting with strategic target accounts.
