November 1, 2021

November 1, 2021

3 min read

Welcome back to The Weekly Pitch! Our mission is to cover news, offer insights, and profile rising stars in the sales community.

A few months ago, we listed 12 tactics to cut through the noise to book more meetings. One strategy was missing.

In this week's Feature Story, we're talking cold FaceTiming. It's taking over the sales world by storm on LinkedIn! We'll give a rundown on what we know about it and share some surprising victories.

As a lead-in, let's first look at two charts.

HubSpot updated its monthly benchmarks across 103,000 companies and found sales outreach is just as noisy as ever.

Calls have increased 133% since January 2020. Emails are up 120%, yet response rates have plummeted 36%.

The struggle is real for sales pros to stand out, but is cold FaceTiming a desperate move or the future strategy to book our next meeting?

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Cold FaceTiming: Fad or Future?

There’s a lot of talk on LinkedIn lately about cold FaceTiming as an outbound strategy. Yes, you read that right, cold FaceTiming.

With some critics saying email is dead and the pandemic affecting cold calling-- is this the way to go?

Most people are having fun with the idea, but like you, we’re wondering:

• Is this a real strategy?
• What is it?
• Who is doing it?
• Does it actually work?

Let's dive in.

Is this a real strategy?

Believe it or not, it is.

What is cold FaceTiming a prospect?

While it’s not always receptive, salespeople are cold calling mobile numbers, and it's working. With the pandemic pushing a powerful embrace of remote work, we’re using our cell phones and leveraging data tools like ZoomInfo and LeadIQ to make this a standard practice.

Looping in the FaceTime technique is a chance for salespeople to be different. It’s as straightforward as that.

Who is doing it?

Cold FaceTiming as a strategy is still relatively new and not (yet) engrained in the sales playbooks of the world.

A sales development rep at Mosaic.tech shared their experimental success with the strategy. His team wanted to test out the craziness of the method, and upon their third try, they got a CEO of a cyber security company to answer.

The convo was simple: address the absurdity of the method and continue with their pitch. The response was positive.

Are you bought in?

Some will view this as too intrusive, while others will relish in the creativity and boldness of cold FaceTiming. But only time will tell if this strategy becomes tried and true. Either way, FaceTime or not, happy prospecting!

6 Alternatives to Cold FaceTiming

If we need time to warm up to cold FaceTiming, here are some other unique tactics to try. We took the liberty to rank Dooly's list by our target market.

If we sell bigger deals to higher-level execs in the enterprise, start at the top and work down. If we close high-volume deals with lower-level execs in the small business segment, reverse the list and experiment from the bottom up.

1. ​Video Prospecting (Vidyard)
2. Gifting (Postal.io)
3. Commenting (all social but LinkedIn is best)
4. Custom GIFs (example)
5. Custom Music Videos
6. Memes (addressing pain points you solve)

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