Hotline Bling: You Used to Call Me on My Work Phone

🎶 I used to call you on my work phone

Midday when I need a lead

Call you on your work phone

Midday when I need a lead

And I know when that landline rings

That can only mean one thing

I know when that landline rings

That can only mean one thing

Ever since I left a message, you

Took a bunch of meetings for your team now

Evaluating them and I feel left out

Mam, you got me down, you got me stressed out

‘Cause ever since I left a message, you

Started using social to connect more

Ignoring all my email and then what’s more

You’re hangin’ with a few of our competitors 🎶

It’s always been a hot debate: is it better to contact a prospect over the phone, or through email? And now, even more channels have entered the fray.

Different companies and clients see varying results in the response rate for different channels. There is no single right answer, they each have their own pros and cons.

Emails tend to leave out some of the more important aspects of sales like live conversations and building relationships, something the phone excels at. But when it comes to building rapport and brand awareness over time, social channels like LinkedIn have quickly become a frontrunner.

When deciding which channel is best for your outreach, it’s important to keep your process and strategies in mind.

Email vs. Phone

While some people have taken to creating more targeted emails for individual prospects, a large majority of sales teams send out general and mass emails — relying more on the quantity of contacts rather than the quality of discussions and connections. Going through email means that more people can be reached, and therefore it’s more likely to elicit a response.

In general, emails allow you to assess a prospect’s interest level in a less invasive way. It also gives your prospect ample time to research you and your company before formulating a response. Giving them this time should prompt them to respond with a more thoughtful and planned out answer. In addition, it allows you to more effectively relay value and product information and gives you ample time to research the account and prospect. However, it’s far harder to address any misunderstandings of a product over email.

For example, a prospect might just respond to you that they are “not interested” — a common email response. On the phone, it’s much easier to push the prospect to explain why they aren’t interested and elaborate on the value of your product. Getting any extra qualitative information is always valuable and is much easier to grab over the phone. With the prospect who responds “not interested” it’s much harder to get them to open up in an email, especially one that sends such a curt response in the first place! In this case, the opportunity of gaining more qualitative information is lost because the medium of communication is email rather than phone.

Sales relationships are built from actively listening to a prospect and offering a solution to address their pains and needs. Understanding the tone that accompanies what they are saying is just as important as what they are actually saying, something that can be easily misconstrued in an email. Furthermore, prospects buy from people that they like and trust. This relationship is created over the phone, when the prospect is able to assess the likability of the caller (again, typically based on the tone). The trend here is that building a relationship starts with a live conversation, and that requires you to pick up the phone and dial away.

Emails allow for more control over the conversation, and empowers members of a sales team to fully think through their response before reaching back out — especially if you don’t have a technical understanding of what you are actually selling. Phone calls cannot be planned out as well as emails, but allow for quick and more natural responses. By picking up the phone, you stand out. Your personality and tone allow for your message to command more attention, rather than just relying on a subject line in your email to get noticed.

Traditional vs Social

Phone and email used to be the be all and end all of sales development outreach, but in the last 5-10 years new channels have started to crop up, like texting, chatbots, and social media. While texts and chatbots have established their own respective niches, social media outreach has exploded in the last couple of years, thanks in large part to LinkedIn.

For B2B sellers who adopted social selling early, it has been a godsend. In many ways, social selling’s strengths make up for the weaknesses phone and email bring to the table. Have you ever sent a prospecting email wishing you could put more of your personality into your message but can’t due to restrictions like word count and lack of personal details (most prospects don’t get to the signature by the time they decide whether or not to respond, anyway). In this sense, you can think of LinkedIn as your signature on steroids, with the added bonus that it’s standard practice for new LinkedIn connections to take a quick look at each others profiles upon connecting. This means that when you send them a message, they can more readily put a personality behind your message, provided your profile page is up to snuff.

When it comes to balancing out the phone, LinkedIn does a much better job at two things: getting a prospect to notice, and nurturing them as they sit in your SDR pipeline.

As for the former, it’s no secret that the majority of phone outreach goes unanswered, and at that point it’s easy to find yourself in a lose-lose situation. If you leave a voicemail it can be easily ignored/dismissed, but if you don’t the prospect doesn’t know who you are or why you called. In a role where having a live conversation with a prospect is a major goal, the majority of phone calls aren’t successful.

LinkedIn messages, on the other hand, act as a happy medium between the text based info-driven email thread and the real-time live qualification phone call. It’s a text based chat, but it functions much more like a Slack or Facebook Messenger in terms of instant messaging.

As for the latter advantage, there is nothing in the market that can replace what LinkedIn does for nurtured accounts, as long as you’re willing to put the work in. As long as you make relevant posts on a consistent basis, any prospect you’re connected with won’t be able to avoid your updates, and the relevancy of your messages will pique their interest. The ability to passively prospect like this is impossible over phone and email and gives stellar social sellers a unique advantage over their competition.

Conclusion

Like I said at the beginning, there is no single right answer, because any successful SDR has to learn how to leverage all 3 channels, if not more depending on their specific strategy. Use the phone to attempt a live conversation, even if they’re unlikely to pick up. Use email to send relevant information, even if you don’t think they’ll respond. Use LinkedIn to build rapport, even if they aren’t interacting with your posts. As an SDR your goal is to get yourself and your message in front of the right people, and then making the most of their follow up.

Want to learn more about how we build out omni-channel sales development programs for our clients? Hit the button below to get in touch with our sales team!