Which tool is better for lead generation: cold-calling or marketing?

In a previous post, I linked to an HBR article, and in the comments section there was much debate between those for cold-calling and those against. Those against felt cold-calling is an antiquated sales technique, with some arguing you’ll never get a C-level executive on the phone, these days. Those against it favoured social media and marketing, for example one comment read:

Marketing is what you do to get the phone to ring – sales it what you do once the phone rings. Get your marketing right and you get to allow people to buy from you – a big difference. Things need to be niched and targeted. The message needs to be benefit laden in such a way that it gets squarely onto the radar of the right people.

All businesses and their sales people should be running their days, weeks and months as a Multifaceted marketing machine, with regular repeat action – great things will happen.

You’ve got to mix it up a bit and strike a balance between marketing and sales, particularly for business to business sales. If you’ve got a great content marketing machine going, you can use cold calling to open doors and marketing to nurture prospects. Equally, content and social media marketing can be a great tool to draw in new leads.

But if you wait for the phone to ring, do so at your peril while your competitors pick up the phone and call your potential clients. If you want to attract bigger ticket revenues then nothing beats good old fashioned person-to-person contact to know your client and identify how you can immediately start adding value.

After all, people buy people.

What do you think?