I was listening to a podcast this morning with a 55 year old VP at a heavily sales-driven organisation who is rightly proud of the repeatable systems she has built over the years, the kind that simply work. When it comes to building her sales team she hires only fresh graduates, because in her experience seasoned salespeople struggle to adapt to her way of working. The downside she noted is that many Gen Z graduates are initially terrified of the phone, and she described some of them balking at the idea of ordering a pizza or booking a doctor’s appointment by calling. Her answer is to throw them in at the deep end during their first few days, supporting senior salespeople on cold calls, and she finds it removes the anxiety remarkably quickly.
This is a topic close to my own work, because I help clients hire business development professionals, and the profiles they ask for are typically hunters and door openers. Those people tend to be experienced, self-directed and comfortable finding their own way in, which is exactly the profile the VP found hard to fit into a system. When experienced hires struggle to adapt, it may be rigidity on their part, but it may equally be them telling you something about the system, and if every person on the team has never been in a position to compare it with anything else, you lose one of your best sources of ideas for improving it.
That said, I think she has a lot right. A repeatable system is a real asset, and graduates are easier to onboard into one because they arrive without competing habits. Phone anxiety is also mostly cured by volume, which makes the phone a skill worth having for any rep, whatever channel ends up carrying the first touch.
What gave me pause is whether cold calling still works the way it used to. Gen X grew up using the phone, even to call friends well before texting was a thing, so a call may still land well with buyers of that generation. For others, connect rates have fallen considerably over the years, and there are now more tools available that probably earn a better response while being a little less soul destroying for the person making the calls. The evidence I have seen leans towards multi-channel sequences, combining a call, an email, a LinkedIn touch and a warm referral, outperforming any single channel, so the real question is probably which mix suits your market rather than whether the phone is dead.
So my view is that the answer is both, in a particular order. Lead the training with the principles that transfer to any medium, such as discovery, handling objections, reading a buyer and tolerating rejection, and then treat the channels as variables to test. It can be hard to let go of old ways that have produced results, but it is worth asking what might be left on the table.
That is where proper A/B testing earns its place, provided it is done carefully:
- Split the same lead list randomly between approaches, so that lead quality does not skew the result.
- Rotate BD’s across the methods, because a naturally strong BD person will make any technique look good.
- Measure meetings booked or pipeline created rather than opens and replies, which can look encouraging without producing revenue.
- Run the test for several weeks rather than several days, so the sample means something.
You do not need to put the proven system at risk either. Keeping around 80% of activity on the method that works while directing a fifth towards experiments protects the results while still letting the system improve.
There is a nice side benefit too. Gen Z reps are often far more fluent in the digital channels, so the people who need coaching on the phone may end up coaching their managers on everything else! And that then turns training into a two-way exchange.
