Frankly, I am fed up with all the ads, blogs, and articles claiming cold calling is dead. The writers claim that you should network, use search engine optimization, and referrals instead. I say cold calling is not mutually exclusive of any of those things and encourage salespeople to do them all.

Cold calling is not dead. One of the main reasons it isn't dead is because of the forgotten benefit of doing it in the first place, disqualifying. When you cold call a prospect to disqualify him, you save money on travel and lodging. For example, if a salesperson in Cleveland knew of a great prospect in Dallas, it wouldn't make sense for her to hop on a plane to get there, stand in the lobby, and ask the receptionist to meet with the CFO. It ain't gonna happen.

When you cold call instead, you may discover the prospect is not a good fit for your company . They could be preparing for bankruptcy. The CFO's brother-in-law might be their company's current provider. They may not be taking on any new vendors this year due to a rough economy. Doesn't it make sense to discover these things on a phone call instead of paying money to travel?

Now let's say you have 50 prospects across the country to call per day that are just like the one in Dallas. Traveling to these prospects just doesn't make financial sense. It doesn't matter if it's to an event or to the prospect's workplace. So what are you going to do? Check your social media connections to see if someone knows your prospect and then send the prospect an e-mail? Chances are, your network isn't that large. And when you send him an e-mail, who knows if he'll receive it due to spam filters or even read it because he doesn't know you.

Now what? Build a website, pay someone to make sure your rankings come up high, and pray that your prospect happens to be searching for what you sell? Get real. While you're waiting around for that to happen, I guarantee you your competitor is already cold calling him if not meeting with him to sell.

What about networking? Sure it has it's place. But can networking allow you to gain a large amount of prospects in a short amount of time? Or are you meeting one or two prospects at an event? Meeting one or two prospects is great but when you subtract the cost of attending the event, will the two leads be enough to make your quota?

The next time someone tells you cold calling is dead, I want you to seriously look at his motivation. Is he selling an alternative solution such as inbound marketing solutions, seminars, or books? Is he bitter because he failed at cold calling because he lacked the skill to be successful? Did he simply not like cold calling because it was difficult and he was too lazy to get better at it? Or maybe he sold a product or service that had such a low value that cold calling didn't make sense in the first place because the return on investment was just not there.

Do I use social media, networking, event attendance, and search engine optimization to find prospects? Absolutely! Does it eliminate my need to cold call in order to disqualify prospects to save thousands of dollars per year on travel and lodging? Hell no!