Riding The Gravy Train
Early in my career (I might still be early), I worked doing cold calls for a VC-backed mobile forms company in Ottawa. They had launched a new partnership with Rogers and needed to quickly create pipeline. Enter the Cold Calling Machine. Being snarky, I called myself that name and took a fearless and calculated approach to cold calling.
There is so much fear and stigma associated with cold calling that there are two extremes. The first extreme is the most common — we outsource the unpleasant work to the lowest bidder and create the buffer of many time zones and oceans away so that the cold caller can be detached and make hundreds of dials.
However, there is another extreme.
That extreme is the well-compensated rainmaker who treats the cold calling as a craft. That’s how I positioned myself. Being a fresh graduate, I had no clue where I got the chutzpah to negotiate a generous contract for setting up appointments. My friend Matt was leaving the position and offered me a lifeline from the grudging, low paying sales rep role I was in at that time. When the HR rep called me, knowing what Matt was being paid, I asked for double. “You weren’t able to retain Matt with that compensation and I hope to stay longer” was my argument. To my great surprise, they accepted my counter offer.
Off to work I went, generating a list of contacts for reps, writing out a script and rehearsing it a number of times, and then in a place where no one could hear me if I screwed up or stuttered, I started to dial.
“Hello, this is Leor calling on behalf of Rogers. May I please speak with Ray?”
Many times, Ray wasn’t in. Often he was gate-kept, he might ask to call back at a better time and for 98.6% of calls, there was no appointment set. However, that 1 of 75 calls was enough to net me an appointment and get compensated. I dialled 200–300 times a day, manually, making on average $2 per dial. Knowing that number was enough to keep me going when the calls didn’t go well.
After some time, they had a large enough pipeline and were running out of money at an alarming rate that the company collapsed into itself and relaunched as a tiny version of itself. I had switched roles before that collapse into partner management, which was where the leads were getting stuck. The HR manager had mentioned my work was a “gravy train”. I think she was a bit jealous of the compensation.
Generating pipeline is a skill that everyone, regardless of role, should understand how to do. You can create the most amazing product with the most compelling features but people still need to learn about these. This is where the rainmaker, whether it’s a person or a system, can make a big difference.
