Episode 281: Cold Calling is Better Than Social Selling (and AI is on the downturn)

Intro

0:00:00 – Bob Woods: Should it? Absolutely. Should I mean, we have got to move where the market’s moving, baby, and where it’s moving is analog?

Brynne Tillman: All right, so do it with me, Bob.

Bob Woods: Yeah.

Brynne Tillman: One, two, 3.

0:00:22 – Bob Woods: Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, Stan Robinson, Jr, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. Enjoy the show.

0:00:49 – Brynne Tillman: Well, hello. We are live, and we’re excited to have you guys here, and let’s just get going. Welcome to Making Sales Social. Today is April 1, 2024. I’m Brynne Tillman, and I’m here today with Bob Woods. Hello, Bob.

0:01:08 – Bob Woods: Brynne, how you doing?

0:01:10 – Brynne Tillman: I am good. We are typically known as LinkedIn and social selling trainers, right? And we’re at the forefront of digital sales strategies and, I believe, cutting edge in leveraging technology and AI for sales success. But today, we’re taking a sharp turn, an unexpected turn. Yes, you heard me correctly. We’re going to old-school cold calling, as we believe. Yeah, we believe now eclipsed LinkedIn and social selling, and why we think artificial intelligence is sunsetting.

0:01:45 – Bob Woods: It’s too early.

0:01:46 – Brynne Tillman: Yeah.

0:01:46 – Bob Woods: Anyhow, let’s keep going. Let’s keep it. Let’s do this.

0:01:49 – Brynne Tillman: All right. So, hands down, we are seeing today a significant shift from social selling into now what we believe is going old school, going cold calling. So why is cold calling better than social selling? Well, first, I think we’re on personal touch overload, right? With LinkedIn and social selling, we have personalized connections so much that I think people are tired of it. So I think cold calling really creates this rush of adrenaline interaction that LinkedIn messaging just can’t match anymore.

0:02:33 – Brynne Tillman: Nothing says I care like interrupting someone’s day.

0:02:37 – Bob Woods: Oh, God. I know. I know. I love it when that happens. And, you know, I’m so glad that we’re making this shift because LinkedIn is just social selling. It’s so 20. I don’t even know when to put it anymore in terms of years. But cold calling, man, this is it. This is us.

0:02:56 – Brynne Tillman: Because you know what? When we talk about interruption marketing, if we can interrupt someone in the middle of their busy day, in the middle of their busy schedule, they’re going to be thrilled to talk to us. It’s just the way it is.

0:03:09 – Bob Woods: Interruption is hot, man. What can I say?

0:03:11 – Brynne Tillman: It is hot interruption is the new personalization. How about that?

0:03:15 – Bob Woods: Oh, really, really liking that, man. Really like that.

0:03:20 – Brynne Tillman: So there’s another thing I think, right, the mystery caller advantage, unlike LinkedIn, where you can see someone’s entire professional profile, who they’re connected to, who they follow, the content that they share, what they’re engaging with, what matters to them. Cold calling adds an element of mystery. And who doesn’t like a good surprise?

0:03:41 – Bob Woods: You know something, you know, with all of these podcasts that are out there now with, you know, mysteries and, you know, all the serial killers, stuff like that, and all the mystery that builds up and like that, I like it. To take that over to your sales efforts. Mystery sells, baby. And that’s what this is all about.

0:04:00 – Brynne Tillman: Dateline is in, right? Watching all those things, why would absolutely complete mystery, you know that, you know the ending, but you don’t know who did it. Well, on cold calling, you kind of know the ending too. They’re probably going to hang up on you.

0:04:17 – Bob Woods: But that’s, that’s okay. That’s just great because it gives you another chance to be more mysterious on that next call.

0:04:26 – Brynne Tillman: Absolutely. How about the thrill of the chase? The uncertainty of not knowing whether you’ll be welcomed with open arms, open ears, or immediate hang up. You know, the exhilaration and the element of suspense and adventure really add to the day. So the thrill of the chase, I think, is, you know, it’s in dating. Why wouldn’t it be in sales?

0:04:49 – Bob Woods: Yeah. You know, I mean, hearing that little double tone that you get when people hang up because you don’t get the dial tone anymore if you’re on mobile or. Yeah, that’s right. If you’re on mobile, you don’t get the dial tone anymore, but you do get that boop-boop. That just, that just really gives me an, is so exhilarating. So exhilarating.

0:05:09 – Brynne Tillman: Yeah. So awesome. Okay, spam filters. So, you know, you can’t stop emails and LinkedIn messages and emails from going into spam.

0:05:20 – Bob Woods: Yeah.

0:05:20 – Brynne Tillman: But guess what? There’s no spam when it comes to the gold. Good old-fashioned telephone call.

0:05:29 – Bob Woods: Especially if you’re calling on a landline. There, there might be a little bit on, on mobile, but still, you know, there’s that rush there that, you know, you gotta do it.

0:05:42 – Brynne Tillman: You know, it’s interesting because we do get a lot of, you know, it’s a spam call, right, coming in on our mobile. So we have to make sure that the cold callings we’re doing, even though we’re interrupting someone’s day and probably annoying them but they’re not blocking us so that we don’t become that spam. We gotta think about that one.

0:06:04 – Bob Woods: Yeah.

0:06:04 – Brynne Tillman: All right. How about nostalgia cells?

0:06:07 – Bob Woods: That’s what this has all been about, is nostalgia getting, getting back to the way things used to be like in the good old days.

0:06:14 – Brynne Tillman: Yeah. You know, I think people are really over newfangled gadgets and gizmos. I do.

0:06:22 – Bob Woods: I do too.

0:06:23 – Brynne Tillman: I think they want someone who gives them the flashback to do good old days of smile and dial.

0:06:29 – Bob Woods: Smile, dial. And just letting it rip. And getting to those 100 and 125 dials a day, there is nothing like it. You feel accomplished when you get to that number of dials that you, sorry.

0:06:43 – Brynne Tillman: I got rid of the little sticky mirror that was on my monitor in 1992.

0:06:49 – Bob Woods: I remember, though.

0:06:51 – Brynne Tillman: Yeah, because, and literally it said smile and dial. And so people could hear you smiling on the other end. Really important.

0:06:58 – Bob Woods: Smile and dial, baby. That’s what it’s all about. Smile and dial.

0:07:02 – Brynne Tillman: So, and let’s just talk about for a moment why I think AI, or what we think AI has peaked and the trend is now older. Good sales take grit. We know from Gary Vandercuk that it’s hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle.

0:07:18 – Bob Woods: Yes.

0:07:18 – Brynne Tillman: And when you’re using AI and chat GPT, it’s so simple. It saves us so much time. It enhances productivity and it can really help us create trust-based conversations. But the grit and the hustle are no longer part of the day. That hard work is no longer part of the day. So is it really sales?

0:07:45 – Bob Woods: You know, it’s, you gotta have, you gotta have that grit going. You gotta have that finger-snapping kind of thing in mind whenever you are doing anything in sales because it is about the hustle, hustle, hustle. And Gary V. Man, he knows what he’s talking about when it comes.

0:08:02 – Brynne Tillman: Yeah. And when you’re using chatgpt, you’re not hustling. It’s so much easier. And so I think we’re betrayed, Gary.

0:08:08 – Bob Woods: Yeah, we can’t. You can’t betray the ger. You can’t betray the ger, you just can’t do that. Not at all.

0:08:15 – Brynne Tillman: Gary V. All right, how about, and this is huge, the return of analog. My son-in-law, who is 34, has a record player and he’s buying vinyl records. And my niece, who’s eleven, for Christmas, my son got her a Polaroid camera. So, hey, there is this return to analog. So why shouldn’t sales fall? Suit?

0:08:42 – Bob Woods: Should it? Absolutely. Should I mean, we have got to move where the market’s moving, baby, and where it’s moving is analog?

0:08:50 – Brynne Tillman: All right, so do it with me, Bob.

0:08:54 – Bob Woods: Yeah.

0:08:55 – Brynne Tillman: One, two, 3.

0:08:59 – Bob Woods: April fool. I’m sorry about staring at babies so much during that thing, but I wanted to get into character and be, like, all finger snaps, happy and everything else, which, if anybody truly knows me, I am so not like that. But, yeah, everything. Everything that we just said is obviously not what we believe. And we just decided to get into the April fool spirit a little bit more than we normally do. But that’s cool because it seems like more and more companies are actually getting back to the April Fools thing now after. After not being involved in it for the past couple of years, after the pandemic and everything.

0:09:36 – Brynne Tillman: I’m loving April Fools, actually, Governor and I did something like this last year.

0:09:39 – Bob Woods: Last year? Yeah. You guys did it last year. And that went well, too. Absolutely.

0:09:44 – Brynne Tillman: So let’s just talk quickly about why social selling is important, and we do this every week, but I’m just going to quickly run through the list. We don’t have to discuss it too much but enhance sales, intelligence, social proximity, and selling to targeted outreach. So, LinkedIn, your target, you know who you’re talking to. You could see if they’re there. You can see who is there at the company building, rapport and relationships.

You get to really slow down the outreach. They get to know you, increase visibility, and reach the ability to nurture your targeted connections because of the little green circle, the green light, or the green light with the white dot, you know, when they’re online, social selling reduces intrusive. Intrusive. Intrusiveness. Intrusiveness. Thank you.

0:10:37 – Bob Woods: Intrusiveness. Yes.

0:10:38 – Brynne Tillman: I love the English language. It’s just a little difficult, even for the speaker something. Time and resources. And by the way, this is what we can talk about a little bit. And I’ll throw this too. AI is in its infancy. If you aren’t leveraging it for the following, you will fall behind. So talk about personalized outreach messages. Messages. Okay, I’m going to start that one over. Talking about personalized outreach messages on platforms like LinkedIn.

0:11:09 – Bob Woods: So, personalized messaging goes way beyond using the person’s first name. Let’s just say that right now. I mean, you really need to have a good base of not only who the person is, but the concerns that they have, the types of things that they’re looking to solve, and the emotions behind it as well. AI can help you discover all of that because it does. It can do a much better job of researching not only the person in particular but the type of job that person has based on their, based on their title and things like that, essentially. So you can get all of that. You can get it done very quickly so that when you do reach out to them, you are much better informed about what you’re pretty sure, almost positive about what they are looking for and why they may be looking for you and especially the emotions behind it. And AI can surface all of that much, much faster than you. Going through LinkedIn, doing a Google search, going through the Google search, yada, yada, yada, all that stuff.

AI is definitely the much better way to do that.

0:12:14 – Brynne Tillman: Awesome. Generating engaging social media content to attract potential buyers.

0:12:18 – Bob Woods: Go. Yeah, so I mean, with a couple of prompts, focusing on who you are, who you’re looking for, and you can even bring in Personas of like, other people if you want to, like pick up some, some things from X and some people and some things from Y. We made fun of Gary V earlier, but he does have a lot of good points when it comes to certain aspects of what we do. You can bring in that stuff too. You can, you can have all that together to really create some engaging social media content that people are going to care about because you are talking to them about them and you’re out there genuinely helping them so that you can attract them and get that, uh, get that important sales conversation started without very much unlike what we were doing up at the top, without being salesy.

0:13:11 – Brynne Tillman: Love that. Identify trending topics.

0:13:14 – Bob Woods: That’s that, that gets more into research. And, again, chat GPT and, the other generative AIs out there are pretty good when it comes to research. You have to make sure that what they’re bringing in actually exists because sometimes it does hallucinate. So you have to ask it to cite sources and then you have to check on the sources to make sure that, that they’re real. But overall, speaking overall though, it’s a great research tool, especially when it comes to trending topics, because they can go out and search the Internet for those things as well. As long as you’re using chat, GPT four, or a paid product that will search active Internet content.

0:13:53 – Brynne Tillman: Awesome. Automating email campaigns for lead nurturing and conversion.

0:13:58 – Bob Woods: Yeah. So that right there is an amazing reason because it can create, especially if you are the type of person I am. You’re sitting at the computer and you’re going, oh my God, how am I going to split this into five or six different emails? That’s where generative AI can come in and actually help you delineate all of those ideas into separate emails. And then you just load them up into your email campaign. Sometimes depending on what, what you’re using for email campaigns. Campaigns, there may be an AI in that, or it may interface with chat DBT. There are all different permutations.

God, I can’t say that word, permutations out there, but it can all be done much, much easier and much more efficiently so that you can actually focus on sales.

0:14:46 – Brynne Tillman: So one of the things I love about automating email campaigns, and we just, have a five for our library members. We have a five-day campaign going out. We kind of have a big announcement this week. And so there’s some things that are coming out. And so, we had a goal, right? And our team went out to chat GPT, and here’s the goal. We want a five marketing campaign and we’re editing it some. It wasn’t perfect, but we have a five-day campaign and the hours that it saves are unbelievable. And you really want to tell it, like, here’s my end goal.

I want to make sure that we’re giving Valley free value at, you know, all these things right, and that it ultimately will give you the five days with the subject line and all the other stuff. So Stan says chat GPT Plus is one of the best investments you can make. Could not agree more.

0:15:42 – Bob Woods: Could not agree more. Actually, before we go on with some of the other social science stuff, we do have a comment from when we were in April Fool’s mode, but it is something that I do think is important. So Andy says this all works from what we were talking about before, with cold calling and things like that. This all works as long as you have a generic product that may not have anything to do with their needs.

So with that, I just want to pick up on the generic product part, because even generic products can serve purposes. I mean, if someone’s looking for it, you can still attract them with content. And through everything that we do with social selling, you know, with, whether it’s benefits or whether it’s the emotion behind why somebody may be looking for it, generic products and using LinkedIn and social selling for that can actually still work and work well. So don’t necessarily think that because you have whatever a generic product may even be, but if you think that you have one, um, you can still use this stuff and it can still be very effective.

0:16:50 – Brynne Tillman: Yeah. Andy, let us know if we got you yeah, exactly.

0:16:54 – Bob Woods: Yeah. I have a feeling that he might have been bought in at that point already, but I did want to bring that up just in case he’s tongue.

0:17:04 – Brynne Tillman: In cheek as well. It’s great.

0:17:05 – Bob Woods: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he is, too.

0:17:07 – Brynne Tillman: We’re not going to talk deeply about this, but AI can also help you create dynamic product descriptions and copy for your websites and chatbots. So, Bob doesn’t know this yet, but I’m exploring where we can upload all of our training into a chatbot that can now be part of our membership, where people can come in and ask us the questions in the chat button. Oh, yeah. He said, yeah, we got him.

0:17:37 – Bob Woods: We got him. Okay.

0:17:39 – Brynne Tillman: Yay. April fool.

0:17:41 – Bob Woods: Are we.

0:17:42 – Brynne Tillman: Huh?

0:17:42 – Bob Woods: Are we sorry for getting him? I’m not really sure how to feel about it.

0:17:45 – Brynne Tillman: He’s not upset with us, right?

0:17:47 – Bob Woods: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just don’t be mad at us, Andy. It’s the only thing that we asked. This is all in fun. So the chatbot, I think, is. Is really, really interesting, because one of the things. And I’m. And I’m learning this in. In like, an advanced AI class that I’m taking not only do we help people, but we can also learn from the questions that are coming in what is important to people out there, and then we can actually generate content and.

And do additional. Do additional training or whatever we think is appropriate based on the data coming in.

0:18:27 – Brynne Tillman: Yeah. So one of the things that I’m hoping, as we do this, and this is just all in exploratory mode.

0:18:34 – Bob Woods: Right.

0:18:34 – Brynne Tillman: One of the things that I’m hoping is it will ask, did this answer your question? And if it’s no, we get an email so that we can answer the question, and then it goes into the database of its brain.

0:18:47 – Bob Woods: Oh, okay. So Andy said, I thought you were asking if I got the joke, which he did. So when he said, yeah, you got me, it meant that we understood what he was saying by that, not that we pranked him on the joke. Glad to hear that.

0:19:00 – Brynne Tillman: I want to prank people.

0:19:02 – Bob Woods: Yeah, I know. I said, glad to hear that. But at the same time, I was just, like, a little bit like, oh.

0:19:08 – Brynne Tillman: Darn, I’m not even a prankster, but April Fools, you gotta do it. Everyone, let’s round this up. The bottom line is, if you want a cold call, God bless you. Really, if that. If you love it. And there are people who will say cold call all day long, but here’s what I would say, at least use LinkedIn to warm it up a little bit.

0:19:28 – Bob Woods: Yep.

0:19:28 – Brynne Tillman: At least use research and social selling to warm it up so that you’re not just buying a list or looking up Zoom info information and just calling down the line. Yeah, it’s just in, in my opinion, a complete waste of time. Do your research. Know who you’re talking to. And if you are going to cold call, at least cold call with a purpose and with context.

0:19:54 – Bob Woods: Exactly. Because sometimes you aren’t going to be able to reach someone, you know, through the things that we’re talking about and you are going to need to pick up the phone. It’s just, that it’s going, I guarantee you that at some point it’s going to happen. But if you have everything that we have given you in terms of social slang and everything that we’ve talked about after the April fool’s part joke, of course, you will go in just like Brent said, so much more informed so that it doesn’t sound like a cold call. Because how many times have we gotten actual real cold calls where it’s obvious that they’re, you know, that they’re dialing and praying, essentially, at least stand out from that person by using what you have, because you’ve gone through the social selling part when you do eventually have to give them a n. And I would even put a cold call in quotes at that point because even though it is the interruption and everything else if you can prove right away that you’ve at least researched them, research their needs, research why they may want to, want to deal with you, the chances of it being more effective do go up.

0:21:05 – Brynne Tillman: Awesome. All right, Bob, let’s take this in for a landing.

0:21:08 – Bob Woods: Yeah. So, you know, I normally have my script pulled for all this stuff at the end. I’m going to see if I can do this by memory.

0:21:16 – Brynne Tillman: It’s April Fool’s Day.

0:21:17 – Bob Woods: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. I wasn’t really thinking about that. So, you know, if you’re joining us live via any of our channels, we do this every week. So watch out for new subjects, which will be real subjects after this at this point. And we’re normally on at this time as well. If you’re joining us via our podcast, it means that you’re listening to the recorded version of this. So you’re probably scratching your head right now thinking it’s not April Fool’s Day, it’s a couple of weeks later. Well, we did this live on April Fool’s Day, so.

But, but if you’re like that, go ahead and like and subscribe to the podcast. And if you want more information, and this is for everyone on our podcast, you can find it @socialsaleslink.com. Podcasts we do the live show every week. We also do interviews. Brynne and I and Stan do them all separately, where we talk with leaders and move movers and shakers in sales, business, marketing, and all other types of areas.

0:22:15 – Brynne Tillman: I like the movers and shakers, movers and shakers.

0:22:17 – Bob Woods: I’m I may have to add that to the script. I kind of like that, too. So with that, just remember, that there are no April Fools in this statement. If when you are out and about this week, be sure to make your sales social. Thanks, everybody. Have a great day. Bye bye. And April Fools. Happy April. Don’t miss an episode. Visit socialsaleslink.com podcast. Leave a review down below. Tell us what you think, what you learned, and what you want to hear from us next.

0:22:51 – Bob Woods: Register for free resources@linkedinlibrary.com. You can also listen to us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Visit our website socialsaleslink.com for more information.