The Human Connection Factor

While all businesses are different, we can all agree on one thing:

Every business needs a sales engine. And that sales engine needs to be running at all times.

For most businesses, that sales engine is a combination of a number of different efforts. The top five are networking, referrals, cold calling, email marketing, and social media.  Beyond that there is direct mail, traditional media, SEO, landing pages, information marketing, video marketing, and more.

Of the top five sales engine components, three contain human to human connection: networking, referrals, and cold calling. While networking and referrals are wonderful, their downfall is that they will only get a business so far. If a business really wants to grow, it also needs to deploy cold calling, email marketing, social media and the rest. Of those, ONLY cold calling contains human connection.

We humans are hard-wired to connect to each other. It’s in our DNA. It’s how we have survived and thrived as a species for thousands and thousands of years. As such, the human connection factor becomes paramount to the success of any sales engine.

Social media, email marketing and all the other tools we’ve come up with in our sophistication have helped enormously to gather leads in a way that cold calling can’t do on its own. But, at some point, if you want to close sales, you need to engage in some human to human connection and conversation.

Recently, a group of us visited a full-service marketing agency that we are partnering with. This agency does it all – SEO, email, direct mail, social media, etc. etc.  But, as is the case with most marketing firms, they don’t do cold calls. Thus, the reason for the partnership.

There we sat in a large conference room of account managers who all were assessing how cold calling (or warm calling if you prefer that term) could be added to their respective clients’ campaigns, as an additional tool to fill the sales funnel. Cold calling could bring a personal to enhance the already strong marketing programs this firm has developed for their clients. That said a lot to us and affirmed what we’ve come to understand ourselves about the importance of cold calling to all sales engines.

You can’t undo thousands of years of evolution in a couple of decades. The need for human connection is here to stay, no matter how big social media gets. A business that does not engage in human to human conversation is a business that will not succeed. A business that does not capitalize on the human connection factor is a business that will not thrive.