Forget Cold Calling: 5 Lead Gen Tactics That Don’t Require Cold Calls

The once-powerful cold call has slowly faded over the years. Today, it's not uncommon to find sales team’s generating leads without ever having to make a single cold call.

Companies generate leads without cold calling by implementing a variety of modern lead generation tactics including cold email, blogging, social posting, social selling, and event attendance and networking. The result is a less abrasive sales cycle and a happier sales force. 

So how do you approach these sales tactics effectively? That’s what we’ll be covering below.‍

5 Tactics That Don’t Require Cold Calling

Cold Email‍

Cold emailing is the outreach to a prospect through an email without a previous introduction. You might be thinking “How can this possibly work?” But cold emailing is the leading lead generation channel for our team here at LeadLoft. 

Here’s a response I got the other day:

It’s important to understand that cold emailing is an art. Don’t expect to begin booking 200 calls a month with no experience, testing, or game plan. It’s best to work with a team that knows the ins and outs of cold email and can hand off a proven process to you. 

If you need help building out a successful cold email funnel, we (LeadLoft) can help. We even have a couple of customers booking upwards of 130 calls with qualified leads per month. You can take a look at their results here. ‍

Social Selling‍

With the rise of LinkedIn, social selling has become more prevalent. This entails a process as simple as connecting on LinkedIn and sending them a message.

So what is social selling? According to HootSuite:

Social selling is is the art of using social media to find, connect with, understand, and nurture sales prospects.

You can even find sales teams taking it a step further and sending messages on Twitter or even Instagram. This can be seen as intrusive, but with the right copy, you can change their perception and convert them into an interested lead.

Here’s an example of a LinkedIn message I received just the other day:

This is a great example of social selling. They found me on LinkedIn, connected, and sent me a message with some slight personalization relating to my job title. ‍

Blogging‍

Out of all of the lead generation tactics and techniques in this list, blogging is my favorite. Yes, I enjoy it but that's not why it's my favorite.

Blogging is incredible because you can write 10 blogs over the course of 10 days and see results for the next 5+ years. 

Publishing articles is a long term game. In fact, results from blogging are generally delayed by weeks or even months. This is because it takes time for articles to rank on Google. 

The wait is well worth it though. A single article can generate thousands of monthly clicks,  exposing your brand and voice to tens of thousands of users who are prime prospects for retargeting.

Blogging is not easy though, it may be the most demanding and technical tactic on this list. Writing blogs that are interesting, engaging, and satisfies the searcher’s intent is not an easy task. It requires time to write and even more time to learn how to write blogs that rank on google.‍

Events & Conferences‍

As much fun as it is to reach out to prospects from the safety of your own desk, sometimes you have to get your hands a little dirty.

Attending meetups and conferences is a great way to get in touch with high-value prospects and build valuable personal relationships that can lead to sales. 

As you can imagine, a personal relationship goes a long way when closing a deal, especially when compared to cold calling somebody out of the blue. 

Dave Rynne from HubSpot wrote a great guest article on how to sell at conferences. If you’re thinking about approaching conferences to sell, I highly recommend taking a look.

Digital Ads

90% of the time I speak to new founders, they're usually talking about raising capital from investors so they can invest in digital ads and increase revenue. As someone who has spent millions on digital ads, I cannot disagree more with this tactic.

Spending money on digital ads is probably the quickest way to spend through any capital that you’ve raised. 

There's certainly a place for digital ads, but ensure you have a qualified team member in charge. This is especially important for B2B lead generation as tracking becomes more difficult due to longer sales cycles and cross-app reporting.

If you can, avoid hiring a marketing agency to run digital adds as they often over-promise and under-deliver, especially when it comes to digital ads. A qualified in-house digital ads manager will be able to tell you whether or not your campaigns are profitable and can even help to ensure landing pages, creatives, and copy are optimized for conversions. 

No Cold Calling Requires a Cross Channel Approach

Cold calling is a blunt force approach. Without it, you'll need to generate interest by finessing prospects with great email copy and multiple engagements across a variety of channels.

So what does this look like? A multi-channel approach means you're engaging with your prospects on a series of channels. This means targeting prospects with cold email, social messaging, digital ads, and mixing in blogs and in-person meetings when possible. 

Multi-channel touch points are extremely important for establishing brand legitimacy and keeping your brand in the mind of your prospects. With the right approach, your prospects will be engaged by ads, LinkedIn connection, emails to their inbox, and even by an introduction from one of your team members.

With a diligent and well thought out approach, there’s no reason why your team should need cold calls to generate valuable leads.