A Blog On Cold Calling

Onboarding is overwhelming.

Years ago, it wasn’t overwhelming. A company would hire me, hand me a laptop, order me some business cards, have me sign up for benefits and insurance, and then send me on my way with my quarterly or annual quota. The larger companies might dispatch me for a week to their headquarters for some PowerPoint Presentations From Hell, but those were early in my quota time and more or less harmless.

Back then, I’d spend some time on our website but mostly I’d track down sales engineers, product managers and sales peers and my manager and ask questions. What do we sell? Why do we sell it? Why do people like us? What are successful people here doing? I only focused on learning what I needed to learn, and put all unnecessary fluff in a tickler file to think about later, after I was at quota (if at all). Whether it was a 10 person company or a 10,000 person company, this process was the same for me.

Then I’d start making calls and setting up appointments.

This was the most important part — the actually getting out there and trying to generate new business.

Time and again, it worked. For the first 10+ years of my sales career, it absolutely worked.

Anymore, this has changed. A lot.

Now companies spend hours on Zoom detailing their in-depth history. They have me call this internal person. Call that internal person. Meet with this internal person. Meet with that internal person. And, best of all (!!), they have me sit on 10 or 20 hours or more of web trainings wherein a computer animation talks and talks and talks intermixed with silly actor-performed role plays. Meanwhile they’re handing me reams and reams and reams of information (“Oh, read this. Oh, read this. Oh, you might find something useful in here”) and spend a few hours overviewing on the myriad of sales performance tools that are at my disposal.

It’s nuts!

Years ago, in my first days of sales, I had a grizzled sales veteran pull me aside. “Look,” he said. “When you start a new job in sales you’re going to have a lot of your peers wanting to read all the material. They’ll want to know everything about the product and then know everything about their prospects, and the next thing you know six months has passed and they haven’t done anything. They’ll best thing you can do is to start calling. Just learn what you need to learn quickly then start calling and getting meetings.”

Today, I feel like the peers he talked about have taken over the sales organizations. As those precious first weeks pass by and I need to get out there to generate new business, they’re having me read about the product, and learn about the prospects, and talk to all these internal people, and meanwhile my quota — a quota that they’ll hold my feet to the fire over 60 days later — is tick tick ticking away.

It’s a new world. A world where we have a generation of middle age CEOs and CROs who were raised in the era of barfing up copious amounts of random non-essential information and basically overwhelming new hires. When really all we need is to be given a laptop, some basic essential information, our quota and then turned loose to make rain happen, which doesn’t happen in a month but rather by building something a step at a time starting early but then progressing over those first critical six months (just like Rome wasn’t built in a day, successful sales territories aren’t built in 60 days. And it certainly wasn’t built by having architects and builders spending hours upon hours in front of Computerized Web Trainings From Hell).

I’m grateful to be independent now. To sweep aside all the non-essential crud and to say “I don’t need to call this internal resource to introduce myself “just because” today — I’ll call them when I need them and meanwhile will just focus on building my business without some Micromanager From Hell watching over me. In essence, I can return to my roots, where I just focus on what I truly need to know and then get out there and start making calls to find new business that I can close.

At the end of the day, every day our quota is ticking. Unless we’re handed existing business to build that quota from, or get incredibly lucky with opportunities falling from the sky, it’s essential that we learn only what we need to learn and then to get out there.

Anyway, here is to the onboarding of old. And to those woke sales managers who encourage us to get out there earlier rather than later, and who don’t distract us with superfluous amounts of information and internal conversations while our quota is ticking away.

Here is wishing all new people a chance to get out there and make some calls today.

Exit soapbox and pontification 🙂