Salesforce.com’s Cold Calling 2.0 Story In 2002, Saleforce.com had begun building a field sales organization dedicated to larger companies. To supplement the inbound leads they received (generated mostly through word-of-mouth), the field sales force was expected to prospect to bring in their own large deals. However, little was happening in the way of prospecting. Salesforce.com realized that in addition to the field people not making many calls because of their understandable dislike for cold calls, the ones who were trying to generate their own business were simply ineffective at it. The environment had changed, and the traditional prospecting techniques of the 1990’s weren’t working. Not only were cold calls ineffective, but also targeted marketing programs offering high value items (such as business books) produced disappointing results. Making the field salespeople do cold calls means having your highest-cost (per hour) sales resource perform the lowest-value (per hour) activity. Salesforce.com decided it needed a new approach to create its own controllable, predictable source of new pipeline. We began the Cold Calling 2.0 project in early 2003, and spent a year testing and perfecting the methodology and system to prove its ability to add incremental revenue at a high ROI, before heavily investing in building a team around it. Why We Refined And Tested The Process For A Year While it took me four months to generate my first highly successful month of new opportunities and qualified pipeline, management had two valid concerns to address before they invested heavily: Will the pipeline turn into revenue? In other words: Will the deals close? Can junior salespeople do this too, that is, can it scale? We promoted a junior salesperson to be a second member on my team. I trained him and he quickly began generating the same results as I had. Also, over the